Molly Read Online Free

from last night’s dinner. It was downright upsetting to see the remains of one’s
moules rémoulade
keeping a bed of petunias at bay.
    Driven from the sitting room by the noise of carriage wheels outside and the impatient cluckings of his wife, he muttered and pottered his way upstairs.
    Lady Fanny adjusted her enormous white lace hat to precisely the right angle—one inch more to the left would be rakish and one more to the right would be common—and turned with a smile of welcome on her face.
    The Maguire sisters stood in the doorway, holding hands and looking at her “as if I had come out of the Ark” as she often said afterward.
    Lady Fanny’s opening words were typical. “Oh, dear, dear,
dear
. Those clothes. Horrid. What can your mama have been thinking of? And what’s that?”
    “Miss Simms. Our…er…companion,” said Molly weakly.
    “Then take it away. It won’t do,” said Lady Fanny, waving her gloved hand.
    Miss Simms pushed past the sisters into the room. “Are you talking about me?”
    “And you poor girls must be so exhausted after your journey,” said Lady Fanny, ignoring Miss Simms completely. She touched the bell. “Wembley,” she said to a stern individual in a striped waistcoat, “send for Miss Betts—the dressmaker, you know—and despatch this back to America.”
    Molly looked around the sitting room, over the tapestried chairs with their curled gilt arms; at her reflection in the old greenish mirror over the fireplace; at the bowls of flowers; but there was no sign of a package for America. Then she realized that Lady Fanny had been referring to Miss Simms.
    So did Miss Simms.
    “You can’t do this,” yelled that unfortunate lady. “You’re worse’n the Bowery gangs.”
    Lady Fanny deigned to notice Miss Simms. “What’s your name, woman?”
    “It’s Euphemia Simms.”
    “Well, Simms, from the smell of you and from your manner, you’d be far better back on the other side of the Atlantic. Good God! I do believe the woman is going to argue. Take her away, Wembley.”
    “Very good, my lady,” said the butler, easing the infuriated companion toward the door. “There is a boat from Southampton tomorrow morning.”
    Miss Simms let out a despairing squawk. “Say something, Molly,” she shrilled. But Molly remembered the isolation of Brooklyn Heights and the insolence of the boat and turned away. So Miss Simms departed from the room and their lives, leaving behind a faint odor of gin and peppermints.
    The girls stood awkwardly while Lady Fanny walked around them, tugging at a crease here and a fold there. Both girls were wearing depressing felt hats: the kind, called by English schoolchildren, “pudding basin.” With one large white muscular hand, Lady Fanny twitched the offending headgear first from Molly’s head and then Mary’s. The springy, black, glossy curls came tumbling in a cascade down the girls’ backs and Lady Fanny caught her breath. Why, the girls were beautiful! Molly had perhaps too much determination in her square chin, but Mary’s little heart-shaped face was perfection itself.
    Molly found her courage and her voice. “If you please,” she said firmly, “we are both very tired and would like to wash and change.”
    “Of course, of course,” said Lady Fanny briskly. Another touch of the bell and the efficient Wembley was sent to fetch the housekeeper, Mrs. Barkins. Mrs. Barkins led the girls up a wide sunny staircase to the bedrooms. The house was quite modern, late Victorian, Molly judged. It was, she had gathered, the Holdens’ summer residence. Lady Fanny had described it to Mrs. Maguire as their “little summer cottage—very rustic.” The little cottage boasted at least thirty bedrooms. It was a vast, sprawling mansion, built like a small castle with mock battlements and even a few fake arrow slits let into the walls.
    But the architect had fortunately not carried his passion for medievalism as far as the windows, which were large and