Today's Reading
He put out a hand. Ripley grabbed it and winced as he hauled himself upright.
"M'sister frightened you, that it?" Ripley said.
"Yes."
"Me, too, sometimes. Not sure how she does it, but mustn't let her catch on. Can't let her forget who's head of the family." He looked over at Ashmont. "What about him?"
"We'll throw him over a horse and take him to one of the inns at Guildford," Blackwood said. "The servants can follow. I want to be gone. Now."
Most of all, he wanted not to be ashamed.
But there were cures for that and for many other maladies.
The dukes wisely vacated the premises. Since out of sight did not equal out of mind, after breakfast Alice walked down to the fishing house. There she knew she'd find the solitude she needed. She brought a book with her.
The small stone building was a square one-room structure. It held a fireplace, an ancient marble table, and three chairs. When the dukes visited, the servants brought down camp beds, linens, and other furnishings as well as food. Not luxurious by any means, but luxury wasn't what one came here for.
The servants had tidied the place promptly after the dukes' departure.
All Alice had to do was rebuild the fire before she settled at the table to read. From time to time she looked up at one of the diamond leaded windows.
...man, from the remotest antiquity, found it convenient to exert his strength to subjugate his companion, and his invention to show that she ought to have her neck bent under the yoke; because she as well as the brute creation, was created to do his pleasure.
Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman was not precisely Alice's bible, but close enough.
"Forty years," she said. "Forty years since you wrote this, Mrs. Wollstonecraft, and nothing has changed."
She set down the book and rose. She walked to the door, opened it, and looked out at the river.
More than two years had passed since her Uncle Charles's funeral. A fog of grief blanketed those days. One incident, though, remained starkly clear.
After the will had been read and everybody else had apparently left the library, Alice had returned to search for the book about the Knights of the Round Table.
A number of fine ancient items lived in the room. There was a chest once belonging to King James I. One of King Charles II's writing desks had been another perquisite of some ancestor's position at Court. The curio cabinets held scores of treasures. But the Recueil des Romans des Chevaliers de la Table Ronde was most beautiful and precious to her, on more counts than one. It had captured her imagination shortly before her tenth birthday, after her own knights in shining armor, Uncle Charles and Aunt Julia, had rescued her from the Tollstone Academy for Girls.
This day she found her unpleasant cousin Lord Worbury lurking in the library. He was bent over the book, which lay on the royal writing desk.
He gave her an assessing look, up and down, his light brown eyes mocking.
She responded with a coolly polite smile. She'd humiliated him years ago. He'd got what he deserved, though he'd never see it that way.
"Congratulations," he said. "Ripley gets everything."
Uncle Charles's will hadn't mentioned Worbury because Uncle Charles knew he was a poisonous black mold on the Ancaster escutcheon.
"It was mainly Ripley's to start with," she said. "Camberley Place was our father's and his father's, and so on, as you know."
Uncle Charles had taken it over when she was a child, when her father had begun neglecting his properties. Economizing, Papa called it.
"And Ripley's heir will inherit everything," Worbury said. "Not you. Not Lady Charles. None of her daughters."
"How kind of you to be concerned on the ladies' account," she said. "But as you must have heard a short time ago, my uncle left his wife amply provided for. His daughters have married well. Certainly Ripley will make sure that no member of his family wants for anything."
"I daresay he will. Ripley's a generous fellow. And if—heaven forfend— he leaves us, John Ancaster will carry on in the same manner. All will be well."
...
