Serial Monogamy Read Online Free Page A

puffing and panting and finally the man’s head and torso appeared at the floor of thedoorway. “Ladies,” he said, “we heard you might be needing a hand down.”
    —
    He helped Mrs. Ternan down first but their progress was slow. Clambering up to the ledge in her crinoline and getting her legs over without exposing her underthings was a tricky business and made the carriage shift alarmingly “Gently does it, gently…” their rescuer kept saying. He was evidently a rail engineer or perhaps a platelayer, since his blue overalls were tolerably clean. Mrs. Ternan finally succeeded in getting herself modestly seated on what was the bottom of the doorway into their compartment. Steeply angled upwards by the position in which the carriage had settled and without a station platform beneath it, it was elevated well above the ground and the man could hardly be expected to lift her by her waist like a girl. As Mrs. Ternan sat there, waiting to negotiate her descent—Nelly could not see how far a jump she had to take and it was only when her turn came that she realized the engineer had reached them by standing on several wooden crates that had been dragged into place—she looked back over her shoulder and called out to her daughter.
    “Nelly, my dressing case!”
    Nelly looked at the precious dressing case, still sandwiched up on the luggage rack.
    “I can’t safely reach it, Mother. You’ll have to wait.”
    “Don’t worry, miss. We will come back for all the baggage,” the engineer reassured her, but later, when she saw what awaited them outside, she came to doubt anyone would care much about the fate of a dressing case or hat box. Still, her mother’s concern brought her back to the practicalities of the moment, awakening her to something other than her throbbing hand and soaked bandage. She looked at her hat boxes lying on the floor and she looked up again at the rack where the dressing case was stuck. The bag on the outside of it was her own dressing case, smaller than her mother’s, a dainty ostrich-skin cube that Charles had given her for her birthday the winter before last, at a moment in their relationship when, if she were honest with herself, he had bestowed on her so many gold trinkets that the idea of yet another held little appeal. But it was the bag on the other side that was important: the largest of the three, it was wedged in against the far wall of the compartment. It was Charles’s battered old grip, a large rectangle of solid brown leather sitting upright on the luggage rack. And inside it, there was the manuscript, a good five dozen pages written in his flowing Italic hand that comprised the next two months’ instalments of the latest serial, the first due at the printer’s the following week. As her mother and the engineer began to discuss how it was the older woman would make her descent down to the ground, Nelly, carefully, gingerly, trying ever so hard not to move the carriage any farther, stood up and began to climb onto the seat that she and Charles had been sharing on the train.
    She got onto it and managed to stand, but as she began to reach toward the luggage rack she realized she only had one hand at her disposal to pull down the heavy bag. She looked back; her mother was still in sight but absorbed by the task of descending into the arms of her rescuer, offering loud encouragement from below. Looking above her head, Nelly stretched up and grasped the handles, which were almost out of reach. She managed to grip them firmly enough to tip the bag onto its side, pushing the two dressing cases out of its way, but she certainly did not have the power in one hand to bear its weight as she swung it down off the rack. Standing back, she took a breath, tensed the muscles beneath her corset and tugged. The bag budged a little. She tugged again and again, and finally edged it to the lip of the rack. She tugged one last time, it teetered and, as she stepped aside, it fell with a thud that