House of Masques Read Online Free

she’s an exception. In most cases I don’t require the length of service she’s given. Clarissa is someone very special.”
    â€œThen how long would I be in your debt? A month? A year?”
    â€œNo, all of my agreements are the same. Not for a year or two years, or even five. Forever.”
    â€œNo,” she gasped. “I couldn’t. I couldn’t possibly.”
    His chair slammed to the floor and he strode to the doorway and pulled a tasseled cord. “I’m sorry,” he said. “No exceptions are permitted. None. The agreement would be like all the rest. Good night. Let me know if you change your mind.”
    There was a tapping and he opened the door. “Here’s Clarissa. She’ll show you to your room. You’ll stay with us overnight.” He turned to the window and she saw his expressionless face reflected in the black windowpane. Heat lightning flickered in the distance and outlined the mountains beyond the river.
    Kathleen began to reply, surprised at the abruptness of her dismissal, but she felt anger rise in her and she bit her lip and did not speak. She rose to leave and noticed a book on the floor at her feet and stooped and placed it on the table. How did the book get on the floor? she wondered.
    She shook her head and followed Clarissa through the large room, along a corridor, up two flights of stairs, and down a short hallway. Her room was small and bare—a bed, chest of drawers, commode with basin and pitcher. Her carpetbag sat on the floor beside the bed.
    Clarissa now wore a dark green gown falling almost to the floor and she had brought her golden hair forward so it cascaded over her breasts. The darkness of the dress and the shadowed hall behind her made Clarissa’s face appear paler than before, and Kathleen felt a surge of sympathy and pity and instinctively reached to the older woman and clasped one of her hands.
    â€œIs there anything I can do?” Kathleen asked.
    Clarissa stared. “Do? You? For me?”
    â€œI thought…” Kathleen began. The words came in a jumble. “You live here, have to live here with him in this house, alone, no way out. I might, I thought, I might help.”
    For an instant Clarissa seemed about to laugh. Instead her mouth tightened. “You? Help me?” Now she smiled, without mirth, a bleak turning up of the corners of her mouth.
    â€œWhat do you know of me?” she asked. “Or of life? How can you judge me, or him, or anyone? Your world is two-dimensional, flat, and you clothe yourself in moral rectitude and sit looking down from your judgment seat.” Clarissa withdrew her hand.
    â€œThe world isn’t flat,” she said. “It’s round, and you can’t see more than one infinitesimal portion at a time. There are lands of light and lands of shadow and people you can’t conceive of and ideas beyond your ken. Only after you’ve lived long and known life and death and pain, dreamed through nights of hope and awakened to mornings of despair, only then can you even begin to judge.”
    Clarissa paused, her breathing short and quick. “Every day I’m lonely and unhappy and some days I wish I were dead. And yet…and yet if I had to go back and live again, come here as you have today, if I could by some miracle relive my life, I’d go to him, exactly as I did before.” She spun away and Kathleen heard her feet running along the hall.
    I don’t understand , she thought as she prepared for bed. Can Clarissa really feel the way she claims? Or was the voice the voice of Clarissa, while the words were the words of Josiah?
    Sleep wouldn’t come. The images of the long day whirled before her—the train and the cinders and the beautifully gowned women, the smoke billowing from the locomotive, the conductor waving to her from the steps, the stationmaster standing with hands on hips, the chimneys jutting into the red sky, the woman