A Man of Genius Read Online Free Page A

course not. They’re full of horrid adventure, lots of blood and corpses; my life is not. I’m too plain, too complicated.’ She laughed. The habit was catching. ‘Yet, if truth be told, I suppose, though they rarely know their fathers and I too . . .’ She stopped. How odd to feel this rush of emotion, ‘you know, Gilbert . . .’
    Sarah looked anxious. Her cheeks flushed bright red.
    Ann was puzzled. Her cousin must still find these Christian namestoo strange. She’d not expected her to be so sensitive. ‘Perhaps too, sometimes, Caroline, my mother – perhaps she has crept into the books as the Stepmother.’
    Sarah patted her hot face with the back of her cooler hand. She remained flushed.
    This introspection, this thinking aloud and about oneself and one’s childhood, was perhaps too much, thought Ann. Could she be irritating Sarah by running on – though her cousin was too polite or kind to show it? But no, she’d caught pity in her face, not irritation. Or – and the thought struck her suddenly – perhaps Sarah hadn’t wanted to be so long separated from her babies and was embarrassed to admit this to her childless cousin.
    Was this the alternative to Caroline? Was this kindly milky flushed being what a mother should be?
    Sure enough, Sarah soon excused herself and went to check on the nursery. A small child played with pieces of material in the corner, making hats and gloves for a rag doll. Charlotte? When she returned Sarah kissed her. Then the nursemaid came to take her upstairs. The child objected and cried out but was picked up and carried off still protesting.
    No, it struck Ann suddenly, Sarah hadn’t meant to ask about mothers and fathers at all. Her cousin was referring to imaginary lovers . Of course. How slow she was! After all, she created these tales for yearning women. What else were stories for?
    When Sarah was seated, she rushed on again. ‘Some people might have expected me to feel shame displaying myself, but my name is not on the page. In any case I don’t feel any – any shame I mean.’ She paused and looked at Sarah. ‘I know what you’re thinking. A man would see this as too independent, too encroaching on the masculine sphere. But I never claim there’s anything in my work that has merit beyond a moment’s read.’ She hesitated. ‘Besides, what does it matter what a man thinks?’
    She looked at her cousin enquiringly. Sarah caught her eye but remained silent. Her face had resumed its usual pallor. She picked upher basket of sewing and chose some little pantaloons to mend, her chubby fingers expert at feeling what tears could be repaired, what consigned a garment to the box of rags so useful in a house of infants.
    Ann waited. ‘All right then, so it might? In any case it gives me a regular income,’ she went on quickly as she saw Sarah searching for a way to respond. ‘It’s not so different from millinery or teaching in a school. No one thinks that not feminine.’
    Sarah still sat tranquilly sewing, saying not a word. So Ann rattled on. ‘I’m very fluent. All I have to do is vary elements. I never run out of plots.’
    Sarah bit the thread to break it and looked up encouragingly. She had absolutely nothing to say. Neither she nor Charles had ever read any of this sensational stuff.
    â€˜You make some surmountable trouble between delicate heroine and handsome hero, but only after the girl has been nearly frightened out of her wits by the villain in his gloomy castle.’
    Sarah looked up and gazed at her cousin. Strange indeed to have a head full of such things – on a body sitting familiarly in her back parlour. She would ask her novel-reading friend Jane Lymington to procure a volume from her circulating library; then she could glance into it and compliment her cousin when the right moment occurred. She smiled.
    â€˜Sometimes,’ Ann went