Silent Surrender Read Online Free Page B

wailing at their graveside should have been enough.
    Just the memory of her sadness was enough to bring tears to her eyes, and she swiped at them angrily. She would never understand why the illness that had taken both her parents, mere hours apart, hadn’t touched her. Ruminating over it wouldn’t return them to her, nor would it change the mess they had left behind. Her father had signed away her inheritance, thinking to save her from the world by shutting her up at the Institution Nationale des Sourds-Muets à Paris. If only he’d asked her if she’d needed saving.
    Honoria’s maid came through the door with wide eyes. Her lips clamped in firm resolve when she saw Honoria there, and no wonder. In the looking glass, Honoria saw no outward difference in her overall appearance, but her skin was flushed, her hair a wild tangle. She lifted her chin, daring Annie to speak. The woman already thought her employer a freak of nature, so let her believe her a moral abomination as well.
    As Annie helped her dress, Honoria was grateful for the maid’s silence. She always spoke too quickly to follow, and she hardly ever remembered to keep her face where it would be seen. Honoria moved automatically in response to the tugging and tying and buttoning, all the while miles from the room she stood in. She had made something of a hobby of retreating into her own head, and it had never served her so well as it had in these strange days without her parents. Sometimes she ruminated on what life would be like at the school in France. Other times she tried to see the sense in her father’s hiring of an American teacher for his daughter. She would be well-prepared for the French school, as the systems of signing were similar, one springing from another. Her teacher before Jude had been able to show her how to speak and be understood, but she had been unable to seek out other deaf people, to share her experiences with others who could understand them.
    Perhaps that was why her father had decided on the school. She would earn her meals and lodgings by overseeing the young girls living at the Institution, and every month Mr. Poole, her father’s solicitor and business partner, would send her a stipend carefully meted out from her inheritance.
    Just the thought of the gnome-like little man made her skin crawl. Mr. Poole had too often taken her inability to communicate as an invitation for lechery, and when that barrier had finally been removed, he’d taken to denouncing her as an idiot. After all, an idiot couldn’t be trusted if she were to tattle on a nasty old man with wandering fingers. She had misunderstood, he could say, or fabricated it all in her diseased mind. So she had never told what he’d done to her.
    Now Poole ran her father’s business and held all her father’s money. Honoria would be shipped off to France, whether she wanted to go or not, because any other choice would end with her penniless in the streets. Even this house would be gone, absorbed as an asset of the business the moment Honoria crossed the channel.
    Annie fixed Honoria’s hair, her jaw still tight with judgment as she jabbed pins in here and there to hold the thick coil of Honoria’s braid. She brushed out the spaniel curls that would frame Honoria’s face, scraping the brush carelessly against her cheek.
    “Is something wrong, Annie?” Honoria asked, knowing full well what was wrong. She had taken a man into her room and fucked him, and likely the whole house knew about it and gossiped now.
    “No, miss,” Annie said, her mouth moving clear enough for once. “You’re all set for dinner.”
    “Thank you, Annie.” Honoria pressed a hand to the heavy mass of her hair at the back of her head, to be assured that it was firmly anchored, and set off for supper.
    Jude waited in the dining room, at a table set for its usual two guests. Honoria stopped at the door. She looked over the settings one last time to be sure she hadn’t missed some obvious clue,