A Hint of Witchcraft by Anna Gilbert

Author:Anna Gilbert
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781466873551
Publisher: St. Martin’s Press

CHAPTER XIV

Marian Grey enjoyed her visits to Bainrigg House. Her social life was limited. She could not go on accepting invitations from the few old friends in Elmdon who had kept in touch without returning their hospitality. To invite them to no 5 Gordon Street was simply impossible.

The seven years she had spent in those dreary rented rooms had been a test of endurance: a period of exile from the world she had once, too briefly, known. It was unreasonable perhaps (she was not a reasonable woman) to feel that Justin had let her down: not by being killed in battle, that was an eventuality he could not avoid and as an officer could be said to have sought, but in not having left her well provided for. The discomforts and limitations of Gordon Street were such as one never got used to: the musty furnishings, the smoking fires, the flaked enamel of the bath, the chipped handbasin, the view of a narrow street and the constant racket of carts and cars. In Gordon Street she was not herself.

The Marian Grey she felt herself to be emerged like Athene fully armed from the brow of Zeus when she stepped out of the Rilstons’ car at Bainrigg, Chapman holding open the door – and remained as actively alive as she was capable of being until he helped her out again on the return to no 5 – to the red and blue glass fanlight and the bird-cage in the window.

In the sitting-room at Bainrigg, long windows opened on smooth lawns. Beyond a cedar’s trailing boughs there were no more than glimpses of commonplace fields and mercifully distant wild country. When, as occasionally happened, conversation lapsed, one rediscovered the silence of the room, of the house, of the whole domain; a well-bred expensive silence scarcely broken by a soft-footed maid bringing coffee – or tea – or a glass of wine, until the two low-pitched voices resumed their unforceful and purposeless interchanges; purposeless, that is, on the part of Mrs Rilston.

The friendship, recently begun, had grown rapidly, encouraged by a number of ill-assorted circumstances. The most pressing included the alarming accumulation at no 5 of unpaid bills and the refusal of Wares, the principal store in Elmdon, to give further credit, and the death of a capricious relative who had been generous in passing on expensive clothes but had left everything to a nephew in Tasmania.

One morning in the week before Easter, gloom at the breakfast table was alleviated by the arrival of the weekly Elmdon Gazette. They had given up the luxury of a daily paper but it was necessary to keep abreast of local functions.

‘Mr Rilston has died.’ Two whole columns were devoted to the passing of one of the county’s most distinguished gentlemen. ‘How sad! We met him and Mrs Rilston, you remember, at the Humberts. Did you see him that time you called at Bainrigg with Miles?’

‘No. Only Mrs Rilston.’

‘Speaking of the Humberts, I suppose Alex will be home at Easter.

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