The Wheel of Fortune by Susan Howatch Read Free Book Online Page B

Ginevra, but you in your turn should now recognize that it’s fraternal.”
    “Oh no, it isn’t!”
    “I’m sorry. I know you’re jealous. I know you’ve been unhappy since she left Oxmoon. I know this is all a nightmare for you, but you must try to be grown up, try to be sensible, try to accept that this is something you can’t change.”
    This maddened me beyond endurance. “I’d like to kill him!” I shouted in a paroxysm of rage. “That would change things soon enough!”
    The next moment my father was slamming me face down across the writing table and the scene had dissolved with terrifying speed into violence.
    IX
    HE NEVER DID IT. He never beat me. I cried out in shock and the cry paralyzed him. For five seconds he held me in an iron grip but then with a short painful intake of breath he released my arm which he had doubled behind my back. As he walked away from me he said, “Never, never say such a thing again.” He spoke in Welsh but as it was a simple sentence I understood it. However a moment later, realizing he had used the wrong language, he repeated the order in English. The English was broken, a foreigner’s attempt at an unfamiliar tongue. He sounded like a stranger. I was terrified.
    “We don’t talk of murder at Oxmoon,” said my father.
    “Forgive me, I didn’t mean what I said—”
    “You ought to be ashamed of yourself, behaving like a spoiled child all over again—and to think you have the insolence to talk of marriage! It’ll be a long time before you’re fit for marriage, indeed it will—all you’re fit for at the moment is the nursery!”
    “I’m sorry but I’m just so damnably unhappy—”
    “ Unhappy! Don’t talk to me of unhappiness, you don’t even know what the word means! My God, when I was your age—”
    “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, please don’t be angry with me anymore, please—”
    “Then sit down at that table and stop whining like a pampered puppy! That’s better. Now take a sheet of notepaper and write as follows.” My father hesitated before continuing with appropriate pauses: “ ‘My dear Ginette, I must apologize for not writing earlier to send my best wishes to you on your engagement, but I’m very much looking forward to celebrating the news with you at your birthday ball at Oxmoon. After all, I’d be a poor sort of friend if I couldn’t share your happiness! I shall be writing separately to Timothy to congratulate him but meanwhile please do give him my warmest regards. I hope you will both be very happy. Yours affectionately’—or however you close your letters to her—‘Robert.’ ”
    I finished writing. My father read the letter over my shoulder and said, “Yes, that’ll do,” but on an impulse I scrawled beneath the signature: P.S. Make sure you save a waltz for me at the ball! I wanted a waltz not because it would give me the opportunity to hold her in my arms but because I knew she liked waltzes best and I wanted my dance with her to be a dance she would remember.
    “Well, I don’t care,” I said as I watched my father seal the letter. “Let her marry whom she likes. My friendship with her will outlast any marriage.”
    My father said tersely, “Even if you’d been older your mother and I could never have approved of you marrying her. She’s too alluring and you’re too jealous. She’d make you very miserable.”
    But I was miserable enough already and my misery had hardly begun.
    X
    THE BALL TO CELEBRATE both Ginette’s engagement and her eighteenth birthday was held on the twenty-third of April, 1898. That was when my life finally began. The previous fifteen years and ten months had been merely a rehearsal.
    All Gower came to Oxmoon for by that time my parents were famous for their lavish hospitality. It was their weakness. Everyone, after all, must occasionally have a holiday from hard work, self-help, drawing the line and doing the done thing, and my parents were in many ways a very ordinary Victorian young