The Gorgons Gaze # 2 (Companions Quartet) by Julia Golding Read Free Book Online Page A

something else. Is Hugh still living with her?”
    Evelyn nodded. “But I fear that she rules the roost.”
    “I’d expect nothing less of her. But I have an idea how we might wrangle Connie out of the house. All we need is the right bait.”

    Aunt Godiva leafed through the pamphlet on the national curriculum she had picked up from the local education authority. “What have we come to?” she muttered. “Citizenship lessons—what on Earth is that?”
    Connie sat silently at the desk that had been allotted to her in the former nursery, her fingers playing with an old-fashioned ink pen. Godiva would not allow pencils in her class.
    “Well, we can forget about all that, can’t we?” Godiva announced, coming to a decision and throwing the leaflet aside. “This is about curing you of the Society. What a young mind like yours needs is a diet of grammar and arithmetic, leavened with a modicum of scientific fact. We’ll start with an hour of algebra, an hour of composition, and an hour of Latin.”
    “Latin!”
    “A very good subject for teaching intellectual rigor. In the afternoon, we’ll study science and domestic accomplishments.”
    “You are joking?” asked Connie hopefully, but her great-aunt’s face told another story.
    “I’ve never been more serious in my life. You are suffering from delusions, Connie, no doubt hearing voices and seeing things, all encouraged by those mad people in the Society. Hard application to these subjects will bring you back to yourself.”
    The pen spurted ink over Connie’s fingers. “I’m not deluded, Aunt Godiva.”
    “I beg to differ. If I took you to any medical expert, they would say the same. What you think you feel during those Society meetings of yours is not real—it’s a form of group hysteria. I didn’t realize it myself at first, but I now see that the Society is a particularly virulent cult that brainwashes its members—dragons and flying horses, I ask you! I’ve no doubt they use banned substances, too, these days to induce even wilder hallucinations.”
    “You were a member once, weren’t you?” Connie asked quietly. The mystery of her great-aunt’s behavior was beginning to fall into place.
    Godiva stalked to the window and looked out. Her silence seemed to confirm Connie’s guess.
    “What is your companion species?”
    Godiva swooped around in a fury. “I do not have a companion species—neither do you. The sooner you realize how you’ve been duped, Connie, the better. And my task is to make you see the truth—I’ll do it even if it killsme!” She was breathing heavily, her hair starting to escape from the tight bun she had pinned. Putting her hands to her head to repair the damage, she continued. “Open your book at page one—start solving the long division problems you find there until I say you can stop. I want you to think of numbers—nothing but numbers.”

    The morning was already dragging on when the gate bell rang.
    “I’ll go!” Connie said, abandoning her post at the desk, desperate for some fresh air.
    “No, you will not, young lady. I’ll go. You never know who it might be around here,” Godiva said.
    When she had gone, Connie went to the window. It was raining hard. She could see Hugh had beaten her aunt to the gate and was bringing two people into the house under the shelter of a big green umbrella: an elderly West Indian man with white grizzled hair and a young girl with tight braids. Connie tiptoed onto the landing to listen.
    “What do they want?” Godiva asked Hugh as he shook out the umbrella on the top step.
    “Hello there, Miss Lionheart,” came the rolling tones of a familiar voice. “I’m a friend of Connie’s. I understand she’s here for the summer and I wondered if she’d like to meet my granddaughter, Antonia?”
    Godiva opened the door wider, revealing Horace Little standing on the porch dripping with rain, a girl withbright brown eyes at his side. The companion to selkies and his granddaughter