Barbara Metzger Read Online Free

to say I was the first?"
    Having seen the lieutenant pocket the money, then exchange winks with Clarice, Rosellen found it almost impossible to forgive the officer. She wrote that she would try, for the sake of her immortal soul and his. I am dying, she wrote, and I shall never have known a kiss from a man who loves me, thanks to your machinations. Surely there was a special place in Hell for sinners like him. She'd look into it, if Dawe didn't change his devil-may-care ways. Old Nick mightn't care how many innocent young women the lieutenant ruined, but Rosellen Lockharte definitely did. If not for him and that foul, fetid kiss, she'd never have ended up at Miss Merrihew's Select Academy for Young Females of Distinction. And extinction.
    Now there was a letter Rosellen was literally dying to write. Dear Miss Merrihew, I am dying, and I never held a child of my own. She'd held the younger girls when they were crying with homesickness, the older ones when they would have torn each other's hair out. But that was not the same. Perhaps Miss Merrihew wouldn't care about Rosellen's unfulfilled maternal instincts, since the old harpy seemed to have none herself. Rosellen crossed out the line rather than begin on a fresh sheet. She was running out of paper as well as time. Dear Miss Merrihew, I am dying and I never had a paid vacation.
    First she thanked the dried-up old stick for giving a young, untried instructor a position. For six months, on trial, without pay. Who knew what would have happened to Rosellen otherwise? She might have gone home to her father, married one of the local sheepherders, and lived another forty years. Then she thanked Miss Merrihew for not giving her leave to visit her ailing papa. Rosellen couldn't have afforded the coach fare anyway and might have been accosted on the highways. The gray uniform that came out of her salary, the mandatory poor-box donation, the coal for the teachers’ sitting room that was mined from their wages, Rosellen thanked her employer for them all and felt better about herself than she had in years. She even thanked the clutch-fisted crone for moving her to the attic room after Rosellen had tried to better her position. The room was freezing in winter, stifling in summer, and too low-ceilinged for her to stand in, though the single, ill-fitting round window did have a lovely view of the school's fenced-in rear yard.
    Her employment at the school had consisted of “Yes, Miss Merrihew” and “No, Miss Merrihew.” Rosellen was amazed she had a tongue left after biting down on it to keep the angry words from spewing forth. Well, no more. She had nothing to lose by telling Miss Mirabel Merrihew that she was a cheeseparing chowderhead who knew less about educating young women than Rosellen knew about electricity.
    For two pages Rosellen wrote, ignoring the commotion on the other side of the screen. She turned the sheets over and scrawled two more pages about how a proper school should be run, right down to the quality of meats served at table, the sanitary conditions of the kitchens, the books in the library, and the moral virtues that should be part of every young lady's education. Why, if the parents of Miss Merrihew's students ever found out how little their daughters were actually taught or how likely they were to suffer from food poisoning, they'd never send them. They would certainly never enroll their daughters, she concluded, if they knew Miss Merrihew's scurvy brother paid calls after dark, and not to say prayers either. That attic room did have a good view.
    I am dying, Mr. Merrihew, and I never got to see the prince. The other teachers got to lead class trips to Brighton or to chaperon students to their summer homes during the long vacation. Not Rosellen. The Reverend Mr. Merrihew had convinced his sister that Miss Lockharte was too immature, too irresponsible for such plums. Too unapproachable, more like. Rosellen's conditions at the academy had deteriorated from