Maggie Read Online Free

matrons. It was a haunting face, a wistful face; wide, lost, drowned eyes in a perfect oval of aface; jet-black curls peeping below a modest bonnet. He raised his hat in an involuntary salute, his carriage lurched forward again, and she was gone.
    “Ye shouldnae hae done that,” said his manservant, Roshie, severely.
    “Indeed?” said the earl somewhat haughtily. “And why not?”
    “Because thon was Maggie Macleod on her way tae the court,” said Roshie with a sort of grim satisfaction. “Her picture’s been in a’ the papers. The photo wasnae whit ye would ca’ a guid likeness, but close enough. Her husband was an inspector o’ police and she poisoned him wi’ arsenic.”
    “Oh,” said the earl dismally, sinking his chin into his beaver collar and feeling even more depressed.
    Maggie Macleod was weary of life with a soul sickness that ate into every fibre of her being. In a mad way, it did not seem strange to her that she should be on the way to the High Court to stand trial for the murder of her husband. Her marriage seemed to have been one long dreary desert lit by flares of cruelty, rather in the way the harsh gaslight cut through the yellow fog of the streets outside. She had been married only a year before the inspector’s death and yet it had seemed like eons.
    As the carriage lurched and stopped and lurched and stopped, Maggie remembered her arrival in Glasgow and how stunned she had been by the dirt and noise and endless streets of buildings. The inspector lived in a tall mansion in Park Terrace in the West End of the city. It never dawned on Maggie’s innocent mind that her husband lived in a very grand style for a mere police inspector. The house was expensively if tastelessly furnished. Apart from a grim housekeeper, Flora Meikle, there were two housemaids, a parlour maid, an odd job man, and a daily woman to do theheavy work. For one brief moment before her marriage, Maggie had hoped that Inspector Macleod would be kind to her. Her brutal introduction to the mysteries of the marriage bed soon dashed that hope.
    The inspector had been married before, that much Maggie had gathered from the housekeeper, Flora Meikle. But as to how or when the late Mrs. Macleod had died, Maggie could never find out. She was too shy to make friends, and, since she was rarely allowed out of the house, had little opportunity to do so.
    And then, only two months ago, her life had begun to take a slight turn for the better. Her husband had been closeted in his study, night after night, with the crime reporter of the
Morning Echo
, Murdo Knight, a big, boozy, hard-drinking Scot. The inspector would fall into his bed almost every evening drunk and dead to the world. Maggie was spared his onslaughts of brutal lust. Then Mr. Macleod had begun to give her pin money, suggesting that she take a walk along Sauchiehall Street and look at the shops.
    Maggie enjoyed these expeditions although she never dared venture into any of the shops where the assistants looked to her country eyes like dukes and duchesses.
    She kept the money her husband gave her, carefully hoarded in a corner of her old tin trunk. Somewhere in the back of her mind had been a hope that she could save enough for a passage to America or Australia. But it was only a faint little hope. Deep inside she knew she would never have the courage to escape.
    And then it looked as if her marriage might become tolerable as her husband became drunker and more jovial. Drink no longer made him as mean and malicious as her father. He would plant wet, affectionate kisses on her mouth and hint he was working on something which would surely make him superintendent.
    But one bitter cold morning he had been found dead inhis study. Flora Meikle, the housekeeper, had found him and had broken the news to Maggie, saying it looked as if Mr. Macleod had died of an apoplexy.
    Maggie could still remember that moment when she had stood alone in the bedroom after Flora had left and had realized