Menfreya in the Morning by Victoria Holt Read Free Book Online Page A

rented it furnished from a family called Leveret, who had made a fortune from china clay which they quarried near St. Austell. The house was almost as large as Menfreya, but it lacked the character of the latter. It was an ugly house and, as I have said, always seemed cold and impersonal; but perhaps that was because my father had rented it, and it was his personality which had pervaded it; inhabited by a happy family, it might have been a happy house. The rooms were large and paneled, with big windows looking out on well-tended lawns; there was a large ballroom on the ground floor of fine proportions, at one end of which was a wide, oak staircase; everything that could have been done to give an air of antiquity to the place had been done. There was even a minstrels’ gallery, which I always thought looked incongruous in such a house; the conservatory was pleasant because it was full of colorful plants; but everything else was overornate and heavy; the baroque towers and battlements were false, and it was absurd to have called it Chough Towers, for I never saw a chough near the place. It was a showy imitation, pretending to be what it was not
    It was surrounded by a park, but the trees in the drive had obviously not been planted more than thirty years before; there were none of those tottery old yews one found at Menfreya. I was hi love with Menfreya, and perhaps I felt the difference more keenly than most Chough Towers was, I suppose, a beautiful house in a beautiful setting, but it had no echoes of the past, no secrets; it was just the outward sign of a self-made man’s desire to build himself a dwelling as grand as those enjoyed by people whom, a generation before, he would have been expected to bow to as the gentry. But a house is more than walls and windows—or even fine ballrooms and conservatories, a park and lawns.
    It suited my father because he only spent a certain time of the year in the vicinity; and he was not sure that he wanted to buy a house there. If he lost his seat in the House, he would certainly not wish to retain Chough Towers. As we entered the house I was aware of the hushed atmosphere. I suspected that the servants were talking of me;
    38 Menfreya in the Morning perhaps some of them were peeping at me. I had become an object of interest because my name had been in the papers. It would be again—for the discovery of my whereabouts would have to be known, since there had been such concern about my disappearance.
    “You will go straight to your room and remain there until you are given permission to leave it,” said my father. And how glad I was to escape.
    I was a prisoner. I was to have only bread and milk until further notice. None of the servants was to speak to me. I was in disgrace.
    I was defiant and pretended I didn’t care, but my feelings alternated between misery and elation.
    I would sometimes be able to shut out all memory of anything but Bevil, sitting there in the boat. I could see his strange eyes alight with tenderness—no, mockery really. “I might marry you myself …” He was joking; and yet perhaps not entirely. In any case in my present state it was pleasant to delude myself into believing that he might have meant it. It was a gay and happy dream.
    Then there was the other—dark, gloomy; the death chamber, the shriveled-faced baby; I had seen newborn babies and thought them ugly, and surely I would have been particularly so. I could picture the mad impulse of a normally restrained man. I could feel the revulsion, the longing to be rid of the unwanted creature whose coming had cost so dear.
    On the second day of my captivity my father came to my room. My spirits rose because I saw that he was dressed for departure.
    “You will remain in your room for a week,” he said, “and I hope that you will be considerably chastened at the end of that time. Has it occurred to you that your life might be cut short at any moment. I should like you to consider during the next days that