Angelmonster by Veronica Bennett Read Free Book Online Page B

expression became serious. He slapped the table with the palm of his hand. “Harriet!” he exclaimed. “Treacherous, infantile, gossiping wretch!”
    As he stood up, I slid off his lap onto his vacant chair. He snatched the letter angrily from Jane. “Fifteen hundred pounds!” he cried. “
Fifteen hundred pounds!
Can you bear to listen to this poison, Mary? I will never forgive her!”
    “Harriet seeks not forgiveness,” observed Jane calmly, “but revenge. And if anyone believes that our father could do such a thing then they are ignorant scandalmongers worthy only of contempt.”
    Shelley looked at her with interest. The flickering candle threw shadows on his face, and in his expression I read indignation but also mischief.
    “I am shocked, indeed,” he said gravely, turning to the letter once more. “But what truly aggrieves me is the amateur quality of Harriet’s gossiping. Does she not care to find out the true sum, before she spreads the rumour abroad?”
    Jane was staring at him. “What do you mean?”
    “I mean that Harriet knows nothing of her own husband’s talent for business,” he said. “I would be a scoundrel indeed if I took two daughters off an honest man for anything less than
ten thousand
pounds!”
    Jane gasped. Her small white hand flew to her small pink mouth. Above it her eyes bulged, full of delight and dread.
    Poor Jane. She was the perfect butt of everyone’s teasing, always taking the bait and never understanding the joke. I had lived with this characteristic too long to find it entertaining, but for Shelley it was a novelty.
    Suppressing an interruption from me, he leant towards her, highly amused. “Think, Jane!” he commanded. “Your papa, having extracted ten thousand pounds from his unhappy benefactor, may now pay his rent arrears fifty times over, and take new premises in a smarter district into the bargain!”
    “Shelley, stop!” I scolded.
    But he could not stop. Once a joke had suggested itself, he was unable to resist stretching it to its limits. He capered around the room like a drunkard, howling. My remonstrations merely added to the noise.
    “How much for an arm or a leg?” he bellowed. “How much for a heart? Or a nostril? Or the nail of a great toe, indeed!”
    In the midst of this madness sat Jane, pouting like a child. She was still not certain that Shelley was joking. I could guess what her gullible mind was imagining: Shelley and our father arguing about whether the daughter who shared Shelley’s bed was worth a larger proportion of the ten thousand pounds than the one who did not, then Papa slapping Shelley on the back, and shaking his hand, and signing a document.
    Anxiety, mingled with suspicion, showed so plainly in her face that I took pity on her. “Jane, you goose!” I chided. “Have no fear that Shelley is serious. Do you not know by now what a jester he is?”
    But suspicion, once aroused, is difficult to disperse. Warily she watched Shelley’s laughter ebb and disappear, and his face compose itself again.
    “Why do you use me thus, you wicked man?” she asked him sharply, like a governess interrogating her charge. Jane would make a good governess, I had often thought.
    Shelley bowed, then raised his eyes to her face without lifting his head. He looked like a wayward servant abasing himself before his mistress. “I do it because I
can
,” he admitted. “Because Mary is too astute to be taken in.”
    “And I am
not
astute, I suppose?” demanded Jane.
    “You are innocent, my dear.” As he said this he bowed lower, and kissed her hand. Into his eyes came a look I knew, loved, and dreaded. “And when we find innocence in this corrupt world, must we not cherish it?”
    Jane rose and smoothed her skirt. There was agitation in her eyes. “We have an early start in the morning,” she said. “I am going to bed now, and I suggest you do the same.”
    When she had left the room Shelley knelt beside my chair and put his head in my lap.