Dorchester Terrace by Anne Perry Read Free Book Online

urgency. “Why on earth do you ask? Have you lost all interest in politics? What’s happened to you?” It was almost an accusation. Serafina’s dark eyes were alive now with anger.
    Vespasia felt a flash of her own temper, and crushed it immediately. This was not about her vanity.
    “Not at all,” she replied. “But I cannot think of anything current that might be affected by most of my knowledge of the past.”
    “You never used to be a liar,” Serafina said softly, her mouth a little twisted with unhappiness. “Or at least if you were, you were good enough at it that I did not know.”
    Vespasia felt the heat burn up her face. The accusation was just. Of course some of the events she knew, the acutely personal ones, would still be dangerous, if she were to speak of them in the wrong places. She would never do so. But then she always knew exactly where she was, and to whom she was speaking.
    “Those sorts of secrets you would keep,” she told Serafina. “You would not mention them, even to the people involved. It would be such awfully bad taste.”
    Suddenly Serafina laughed, a rich, throaty sound, taking Vespasia back forty years in the time of a single heartbeat. Vespasia found herself smiling too. She saw them both on the terrace of a villa in Capri. The summer night was heavy with the scent of jasmine. Across the water Vesuvius lifted its double peaks against the skyline. The wine was sweet. Someone had made a joke and laughter was swift and easy.
    Then a log burned through and fell in the fireplace with a showerof sparks. Vespasia returned to the present: the warm bright room with its flowered curtains, and the old, frightened woman in the bed so close to her.
    “You had better ask Miss Freemarsh to be sure that certain people do not call on you,” Vespasia said with absolute seriousness. “There cannot be so many of them left now. Give her a list, tell her you do not wish to see them. You must have a lady’s maid who would help you?”
    “Oh, yes. I still have Tucker,” Serafina said with warmth. “God bless her. She’s almost as old as I am! But what reason shall I give?” She searched Vespasia’s eyes for help.
    “No reason at all,” Vespasia told her. “It is not her concern who you will see, or not see. Tell her so if she presses you. Invent something.”
    “I shall forget what I said!”
    “Then ask her. Say, ‘What did I tell you?’ If she replies by repeating it, then you have your answer. If she says she can’t recall, then you may start again too.”
    Serafina lay back on her pillows, smiling, the look in her eyes far away. “That is more like the Vespasia I remember. They were great days, weren’t they?”
    “Yes,” Vespasia answered her, firmly and honestly. “They were marvelous. More of life than most people ever see.”
    “But dangerous,” Serafina added.
    “Oh, yes. And we survived them. You’re here. I’m here.” She smiled at the old woman lying so still in the bed. “We lived, and we can share the memories with each other.”
    Serafina’s hand slowly clenched the sheets, and her face became bleak with anxiety again. “That’s what I’m afraid of,” she whispered. “What if I think it’s you, but it’s really someone else? What if my mind takes me back to the days in Vienna, Budapest, or Italy, and I say something dangerous, something from which secrets could be unraveled and understood at last?”
    Her frown deepened, her face now intensely troubled. “I know terrible things, Vespasia, things that would have brought down some of the greatest families. I dare not name them, even here in my ownbedroom. You see …” She bit her lip. “I know who you are now, but in thirty minutes I might forget. I might think it is the past, and you are someone else entirely, who doesn’t understand as you do. I might …” She swallowed. “I might think I am back in one of the old plots, an old fight with everything to win or lose … and tell you something