Enlightening Delilah by MC Beaton Read Free Book Online Page A

room was so cold and dark, she thought the waiter must have made a mistake. It felt like midnight. A little chambermaid scratched at the door and then scurried in and began to make up the fire.
    ‘Very cold, mum,’ she said over her shoulder. ‘Frost’s something bad.’
    ‘Frost?’ said Delilah sleepily. ‘But it was so beautiful yesterday.’
    ‘Well, that’s the English weather, mum,’ said the girl, as if instructing a foreigner. ‘No good will come of all this sunshine so late in the year. That’s what my father said. He do say his big toe had been aching something awful and that allus means a change in the weather.’
    When Delilah and her father climbed back into their carriage, the bleak aspect of the countryside bore witness to the infallibility of the chambermaid’s father’s big toe. Everything was chilly and white under a lowering sky. There was not even a breath of wind, and smoke from cottage chimneys rose straight up in long lines to the sky. The starlings piped with that dismal descending note they have on cold mornings and the carriage bumped and swayed over the frozen ruts in the road.
    They planned to arrive in London by early afternoon. Delilah had imagined a sunny London, a London of fluttering flags and pretty dresses and open carriages. But as they drove silently through the suburbs, the day became darker and darker.
    ‘Fog’s coming down,’ said the squire. ‘Look, Delilah. Over there! That’s St Paul’s Cathedral.’
    Delilah looked out of the window. A small red sun shone down on the cupola of St Paul’s. But, as she watched, great wreaths of yellow-greyish fog closed down over the famous cathedral. and blotted out the sun. Link boys darted here and there through the gloom of the street like fireflies. Fog penetrated the carriage. The squire lit the carriage lamps inside the coach and the fog lay in long bands in front of their faces.
    Now the streets were full of clamour and noise. Unseen beings called their wares, black shapes of carriages lurched through the fog like ships on a dreadful sea, and the cold became more intense.
    ‘I’ll need to get out and walk and lead the horses,’ said the squire. ‘Jack-Coachman’ll get lost in this.’
    So Delilah was left alone with her thoughts. She wrapped the bearskin rug more tightly about her knees. Behind her she had left a sunny, happy world. Why had she agreed to come to London? She hated it already. It would have been fun to stay and demonstrate to the haughty Sir Charles how little she cared for him, how little she had ever cared for him.
    Now, it was too late. By the time she returned, he would probably be engaged to someone like Bessie Bellamy. Delilah briefly thought of how Bessie would queen it over everyone else should such a thing happen, and then fell to wondering again about Miss Amy Tribble and whether her father could be thinking of marrying again.

3

    Of all the torments, all the cares,
With which our lives are cursed;
Of all the plagues a lover bears,
Sure, rivals are the worst!
By partners in each other kind,
Affections easier grow;
In love alone we hate to find
Companions of our woe.
    William Walsh
    Delilah was long to remember that last stage of the journey to Holles Street. The carriage inched forward through the suffocating gloom. Occasionally the fog would thin slightly to show the blurred yellow light of a shop window with black silhouettes of people standing in front of it.
    She began to feel apprehensive. As the squire’s daughter, she had been queen of the little community in Kent. Now she was just a provincial being slowly swallowed up into the vast gloom of London.
    She began to hope that her father had lost the way. They would put up at some hotel where she could persuade him to take her back home in the morning.
    Then, after a longer stop than usual, her father opened the carriage door and said, ‘We are arrived, Delilah.’
    She climbed down stiffly. Her father took her arm and led her up the