Abigail Read Online Free Page B

grand houses of her mother’s where men and women behaved like bulls and cows. It seemed absurd that anyone could have qualms about rescuing girls from such a destiny. She had wanted to say as much, but thought it would hurt their mother, and so had made her point another way.
    The light shower followed the rain down the hill to London. Patches of blue showed between the clouds, but of the sun there was no sign. In that cold, blue light everything seemed to be made of pewter or lead. Abigail looked around before lifting her skirts ever so slightly to step out over a patch of mud at the edge of the drive. But at that moment she became aware of someone else, also sheltering under a branch. The tree was a large, spreading cedar and the other person, a girl of about her own age, was at the farther end of its shade. She came smiling toward Abigail.
    “You could paint it all with chalk and soot,” the girl said. “But I wouldn’t advise it. Not here. Don’t let them catch you painting here!” She laughed and took Abigail’s arm, walking her toward the school. “You’re new, aren’t you? Well, of course, we all are. But you are very new. I am Celia Addison.”
    “I am Lady Winifred’s younger sister Abigail.”
    Celia dropped her arm at once.
    Abigail smiled. “But that doesn’t mean I’m her spy. I’d treasure anything scurrilous you may have to say about her. Have you an older sister, Celia?”
    “Yes.” Celia smiled too.
    “Then you’ll understand, I’m sure.”
    Celia laughed and took Abigail’s arm again. “Don’t say you’ve come here voluntarily! Was she always such a gorgon, at home I mean?”
    “Gorgon?”
    “Oh yes, everyone here goes in dread of her, you know. Aren’t you all terrified of her?”
    “Well, that’s interesting, but hardly scurrilous.”
    Celia shrugged. “I suppose that means she isn’t. It’s so hard to imagine her as anyone’s sister. Or daughter either. I’ve always thought of Lady Winifred as having come into the world already fully grown. Do you go to school? How old are you, Abigail?”
    “I was eighteen at Christmas.”
    “I’m going to be eighteen this summer.
    “We had a tutor. He was drunk most of the time, but he was also a very brilliant man. Winnie and he used to talk Latin and Greek—conversations, you know—when she was twelve.”
    “Winnie!” Celia dared only to whisper the name. Then she giggled. “It’s devastatingly unimaginable!”
    “He doesn’t teach me now. Only the younger children. I just read all the time. Read and read and read. I adore it, don’t you? I read anything. I want to read the whole of English Literature before I’m twenty. I do three books a week. In summer I can do five when there’s more light.”
    Still arm in arm they walked past the old house—once a private asylum—that formed the nucleus of the Girls’ College. The path stopped abruptly at a river of clay mud, the demarcation line between building workers and girls.
    “We’re allowed to come as far as this, but we have to turn back at once,” Celia said.
    Abigail appeared not to hear her. “These are our own workers building this, I suppose you know. My mother calls it my father’s ‘penance.’ He’s paying all the wages and costs.”
    Celia looked in agitation at the old house, at Lady Winifred’s window. “Why ‘penance?’” she asked, tugging Abigail’s arm.
    But Abigail did not move. “There, now I’ve told you something disreputable about her. You owe me that.”
    “Come on!” Celia said. And only when Abigail, at last, began to move back toward the house, did she relax herself sufficiently to add: “What’s disreputable? I don’t understand that at all.”
    “Our father wanted her to marry. A foul, detestable young man, too. And when she refused, he kidnapped her and sent…”
    “The awful young man?” Celia asked.
    “No! The Earl. Her father. He kidnapped her from my mother’s house—because the Countess took her part, of