A Noble Cunning by Patricia Bernstein

Author:Patricia Bernstein
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: History Through Fiction
Published: 2022-08-16T21:08:37+00:00

I decided I would go to St. James’s Square alone the following morning, close-wrapped against the cold, and would not take a sedan chair since the walk was a short one and much of it passed through St. James’s Park, which Amelia said was lovely even in winter and less dangerous than in the greener seasons. The bare-branched trees provided little cover for unsavory assignations or the pickpockets who roamed throughout the city, and the broad lanes through the park were kept free of snow and other roadside muck. Amelia loaned me her wooden pattens to lift me off the ground and protect my shoes. I teetered a little at first, but soon found the proper balance.

I had made up my mind that I would send no note. I would give Aelwen no advance notice that I was coming so she would have no chance to prepare, whether to turn me away or leave me sitting alone in a deserted front parlor until I wearied of waiting for her to appear and left. To speak the truth, I was quite tumbled in my nerves about this visit. I had always been a little afraid of Aelwen’s capacity for spite and could not come to any settled idea in my mind as to how she might react when she saw me.

As I was planning this visit, I would tilt first one way and then the other in my mind. I would tell myself Aelwen would not want a close relation, a brother-in-law, to be publicly executed and the family so shamed.

But then again, I would think that her hatred of me might have festered to such a degree that it would give her some kind of dark pleasure to see me cast down by the death of my husband. At last I sternly told myself to banish these absurd conjectures. I would discover how she would react soon enough. I set off to walk to St. James’s Square through the pale gold light of the morning streets, empty of the usual bustle because it was Sunday.

The weather had warmed a little more, but snow still lay in heaps along the streets and across the sleeping grass of St. James’s Park, and ice glinted on the surface of the canal that ran through the park. I passed a little teahouse on an island in the canal. Amelia had told me the island was designed to attract picturesque waterfowl and harbor ducks for the king’s table. But I saw no birds about in the cold.

The park was an all too brief distraction. Soon enough I arrived at a large and imposing square, obviously intended to house the great of the nation who desired to live near the king at St. James’s Palace. I found Aelwen’s home tucked away in a corner—a three-story structure of brick and stone, all of an ivory color that put me in mind of Aelwen’s ivory locks. A finely wrought iron fence lined the front of the property on

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