Feral Park by Mark Dunn Read Free Book Online Page B

seldom seen even upon a baboon fundament.”
    What Anna wished that she could say if syllables could be successfully assembled upon her tongue was that she was all but certain now that she was not yet ready—no, not nearly ready at all—to become the wholly unblenching protégée of Mrs. Guinevere Taptoe. There was far too much that the gentlewoman took for granted in the carnal nature of the human animal which would require time for Anna to settle by, to accept with sang-froid, to inure herself to. She would be a willing pupil—this much she knew for fact— albeit a slow and cautious one.
    The remainder of the visit between the two women was expended in the discussion of Anna’s interest in the clerk Aubrey Waitwaithe and his far less demonstrable interest in her . “The dinner, however, is an excellent means by which to draw him out and discover if he may favour you in equal measure. Many a man of diffident character has been emboldened to speak the truth of his heart when under the influence of the helpful offices of wine and spirits!”
    Anna laughed. She was beginning to enjoy Mrs. Taptoe’s piquant observations, or at least the affability with which they were warmly delivered. It would take time for her not to colour at the woman’s excursive expatiations upon the human propensity for pleasure and mischief in its many forms and fashions, but she vowed at that moment to open herself up to whatever Mrs. Taptoe wished to convey, thereby coming to a better understanding of the general nature of those who lived and frolicked and wolf-howled and, if she were to believe her father, sinned most hurtfully and most grievously behind their masks, beneath their tables, and within the dark corners of their rusticated, provincial lives. Through Mrs. Taptoe, Anna had met the bright and happy face of human nature. At present, the conduits to man’s darker proclivities remained to be discovered.

Chapter Four
     
    The next morning Anna woke to discover that her father was nowhere to be found within the Feral Park mansion-house. None of the servants knew of his whereabouts, and a brief turn about the park did not ferret him out. Recollecting the time that young Delilah Botham fell into the old well upon the grounds of the ruins of Northmount Abbey adjacent to the park, Anna asked Mrs. Dorchester, the cook, to prepare for her a breakfast basket of fruit and boiled eggs, and she set off to learn if her father had, himself, met with harm upon the abbey grounds. Should her search take her through the whole of the morning, the fruit and eggs would offer the necessary sustenance required for her to make her return.
    During her walk to the abbey, Anna recalled, also, the occasion of Elwood Epping’s young ward Lucy Squab’s falling accidentally into the very same well. The word fell here is perhaps generously employed. The young woman was more accurately wedged into the aperture, and tightly so, as the well was narrow in diameter and Lucy was…not. The result was entrapment of the sort in which one’s head projects over the stone brim of the sweepless well and draws the attentive cruelty of neighbouring gipsy children such as the ones who discovered and then taunted Miss Squab. This particular entrapment drew, in addition, the attentive vexations of Lucy’s guardian, Mr. Epping, who succeeded in freeing his young ward only through the diligent application of tallow, and the laying of hands upon parts of Lucy’s person with such industry, purpose, and familiarity as to necessitate the publication of the couple’s banns within the parish church the succeeding Sunday.
    Anna did not expect to see her father similarly indisposed, but she did recollect from her youthful exploration of these ruins an abundance of hiding places, and should Mr. Peppercorn have desired to secrete himself somewhere therein, a thorough search of the premises would not prove an altogether unproductive endeavour. “I am glad, therefore,” thought Anna, “to