Green Darkness by Anya Seton Read Free Book Online

patted the black tie, the starched white shirt. “Ther-re,” she said lovingly, and saw Celia standing in the door. “He’ll not be here, m’lady.” Her quick voice with its Scottish lilt could be cutting when it rebuked a lazy housemaid, it could even be disciplinary towards Richard at times, but for Celia, ever since she’d first curtsied to the bride in the entrance hall at Medfield, there had been a gentleness, an understanding; though Celia seldom saw Nanny, who kept to herself in the nursery wing, and emerged only for certain specified duties, such as checking the laundry and valeting Richard, a task she allowed nobody to share.
    “In the study, do you think?” asked Celia. “Or has he gone down to the farm already?”
    Nanny cocked her robin-head, her bright eyes considered. “I doot it, m’lady. Ye might try the library. ’Tis in this mood he at times consults that great ponderous book o’ the Marsdons.”
    “What book?” said Celia, sighing. “Oh, Nanny . . .” Her pleading eyes showed her trouble, and the old woman made a soft sound in her throat.
    “Aye, puir lady, there’s a deal he keeps to himself, always has—even as a wee bairn. I mind the day I came her-re to tend him. ’Tis a week after the first Lady Marsdon died and Maister Dick but two years old. I never nursed so solemn and quiet a weanling.”
    “Did he mind when his father married again?” About Sir Charles’s second marriage Celia knew very little. The old baronet had remarried when Richard was twelve. The second Lady Marsdon had been killed in an automobile crash while Richard was still at Eton. Richard had given Celia these facts, dryly, reluctantly, as one who had a right to hear them, though they were distasteful.
    “To be sur-re the young maister minded, when the old maister went so daft over that minx that he wed her. My puir lad shut himself up for days, and times I heard him weeping i’ the night, and then . . .” She checked herself abruptly, and added in a subdued voice, “Starved for love that lad was, and not a body to gi’e it to him but me.”
    “His stepmother . . .?” Celia asked softly, and Nanny snorted.
    “A flibberty-gibberty hussy, nae mor-re heart than a weasel. She properly diddled the old baronet, who should’ve blessed the day that lorry smashed into her. Though he took it har-rd, the shock and all.”
    Celia was not interested in Sir Charles, who had been a shrunken, mindless gnome the one time she had seen him in the nursing home just before his death.
    “I must find Richard,” she said, half to herself, then smiled uncertainly at Nanny and went downstairs.
    The library was very large and paneled in fumed oak, as the Victorian baronet had left it. Between the stacks light filtered through garish stained glass, supposed to represent episodes from Tennyson’s
Idylls of the King.
The room smelt musty, unaired.
    Celia found Richard standing in an alcove, by a lectern. The window above him showed Mordred leering evilly at Guinevere and Lancelot. Mordred’s pea-green robe cast a jaundiced light over the large open book on the lectern. Richard was frowning down at the book, and from the fixity of his gaze, seemed to be staring at only one word or sentence.
    “What
are
you reading, darling?” Celia asked softly. Her husband jumped. He slammed the book shut, and a puff of dust spurted towards the window.
    “I thought you’d gone,” he said, “with the others to Ightham Mote.” As he straightened, the murky blue of Lancelot’s helmet shone on Richard’s face giving it a sickly pallor, and a strange defenselessness.
    “Not yet,” she said. “And I won’t go if you don’t want me to, though I don’t see . . . Oh, my dearest, if you’d only explain.”
    “Nothing to explain. Do as you like. I’m off to the farm.”
    She stiffened, her heart began to give its erratic thumps. She glanced at the book. It was huge, bound in thick yellowed vellum; a cockatrice—the Marsdon