The King's General Read Online Free

gay--and I saw Gartred. She murmured something to Kit, who laughed and coloured and held his arms to help her dismount, and in a flash of intuition I knew she had said something to him which was part of their life together and had nought to do with us, his family. Kit was not ours any more, but belonged to her.
    I hung back, reluctant to be introduced, and suddenly she was beside me, her cool hand under my chin.
    "So you are Honor?" she said.
    The inflection in her voice suggested that I was small for my age, or ill-looking, or disappointing in some special way, and she passed on through to the big parlour, taking precedence of my mother with a confident smile, while the remainder of the family followed like fascinated moths. Percy, being a boy and goggle-eyed at beauty, went to her at once, and she put a sweetmeat in his mouth. She has them ready, I thought, to bribe us children as one bribes strange dogs.
    "Would Honor like one too?" she said, and there was a note of mockery in her voice, as though she knew instinctively that this treating of me as a baby was what I hated most.
    I could not take my eyes from her face. She reminded me of something, and suddenly I knew .I was a tiny child again at Radford, my uncle's home, and he was walking me through the glasshouses in the gardens. There was one flower, an orchid, that grew alone; it was the colour of pale ivory, with one little vein of crimson running through the petals. The scent filled the house, honeyed and sickly sweet. It was the loveliest flower I had ever seen. I stretched out my hand to stroke the soft velvet sheen, and swiftly my uncle pulled me by the shoulder. "Don't touch it, child. The stem is poisonous." I drew back, frightened. Sure enough, I could see the myriad hairs bristling, sharp and sticky, like a thousand swords.
    Gartred was like that orchid. When she offered me the sweetmeat I turned away, shaking my head, and my father, who had never spoken to me harshly in his life, said sharply, "Honor, where are your manners?"
    Gartred laughed and shrugged her shoulders. Everyone present turned reproving eyes upon me; even Robin frowned. My mother bade me go upstairs to my room.
    That was how Gartred came to Lanrest....
    The marriage lasted for three years, and it is not my purpose now to write about it.
    So much has happened since to make the later life of Gartred the more vivid, and in the battles we have waged the early years loom dim now and unimportant. There was always war between us, that much is certain. She, young and confident and proud, and I a sullen child, peering at her from behind doors and screens, and both of us aware of a mutual hostility. They were more often at Radford and Stowe than at Lanrest, but when she came home I swear she cast a blight upon the place. I was still a child and I could not reason, but a child, like an animal, has an instinct that does not lie.
    There were no children of the marriage. That was the first blow, and I know that was a disappointment to my parents because I heard them talk of it. My sister Cecilia came to us regularly for her lying-in, but there was never a rumour of Gartred. She rode and went hawking as we did; she did not keep to her room or complain of fatigue, which we had come to expect from Cecilia. Once my mother had the hardihood to say, "When I was first wed, Gartred, I neither rode nor hunted, for fear I should miscarry," and Gartred, trimming her nails with a tiny pair of scissors made of mother-of-pearl, looked up at her and said, "I have nothing within me to lose, madam, and for that you had better blame your son." Her voice was low and full of venom, and my mother stared at her for a moment, bewildered, then rose and left the room in distress. It was the first time the poison had touched her. I did not understand the talk between them, but I sensed that Gartred was bitter against my brother, for soon afterwards Kit came in and, going to Gartred, said to her in a tone loaded with reproach, "Have