Deceived and Enslaved Read Online Free Page A

illuminate the work.'
    'I'm sure you do, my dear, I'm sure you do.' Willingham paused before continuing. 'Well I think we understand each other,' Willingham added, reverting to his usual charm.
    'I think we do.' Lillian wasn't sure that she understood him at all. Why would he be so over-protective of his brother?
    'Anyway, my house is at your disposal,' Willingham said politely but his manner was less than inviting.
    'Thank you very much, Lord Willingham.' Lillian had no desire to call him by his Christian name.
    Lillian nodded and got up to leave.
    'I knew you're father,' Willingham said, lighting a slim cigar, as Lillian was at the door.
    'Really?' She feigned surprise, because it was hardly surprising. Her father had mixed in that artistic world of bohemian London, first as a young novelist and then as a respected critic. It was the world in which she had been raised. Her father's house had always been full of writers, academics and artists of one sort or another. She knew that he had had a passing acquaintance with Hyde-Lee before she was born, and that this had partly increased her interest in writing his biography.
    'A wonderful man.'
    'That's very kind of you...'
    'I remember you as a child, Lillian, a curious child, looking up to me with those big beautiful eyes, wondering who on earth I was. I knew then that you would grow up to be a beautiful woman. We all did.'
    'I'm sorry, I can't remember you.' Her voice was kindly, not vindictive.
    'I used to call at your house when you lived in Kensington. It seems like an age ago.' Willingham looked wistfully at the beautiful English woman. 'You know you have your father's eyes.'
    'I'm told that we have a lot in common.'
    'Oh, I hope so, I hope so!' he said chuckling to himself, a lewd sneer breaking through the laughter.
    She didn't know what he meant, what he was inferring, Lillian only knew that there was something terribly sinister in what he was implying.
    'What do you mean?'
    'Oh nothing,' he answered, smiling at her with a seeming cruelty that Lillian didn't understand. 'If you'll excuse me I have rather a lot of work to do.'

3: Lillian Meets James Hyde-Lee
    His face looked gravely pale, and he moved his hands and arms feebly, almost falteringly; his voice was moist and weak; it was only his eyes that betrayed the intelligent vitality for which his work was famous.
    She answered his questions about her travels and family with an assured confidence that was at odds with the sense of tense unease that Willingham had planted in her mind.
    Lillian was sitting in Hyde-Lee's private third-storey apartment, a magnificent affair of antique wood and renaissance paintings. He was sitting on a comfortable leather chair, a cashmere shawl covering his legs; she was perched on an ancient chaise longue.
    'I suppose, my dear, that you want to get down to business,' Hyde-Lee said, after dinner had been finished.
    'If you are well enough.'
    'You are never well enough at my age. Today, I'm not too bad. If I get too tired we might have to stop. Where do you want to begin? Nowhere, I hope, as boring as my childhood.'
    Hyde-Lee told her little that she didn't already know, although one or two anecdotes about his contemporaries and his own life at Oxford would nicely personalize some of the academic detail. She knew, for example, that Hyde-Lee had been part of the bohemian scene in Soho in the late fifties and early sixties; that he had first gone to live in South East Asia before settling on Italy. She knew that his wife had been a leading authority on renaissance art. She also knew that he had never had children and that he had apparently traveled to some of the most far-flung corners of the world, and that he was a keen yachtsman and angler.
    'Well, I'm afraid I'll have to stop there. It's all a bit exhausting this reliving of one's life. How did I do?' he said after ten minutes, seemingly growing bored with Lillian's questions.
    As he spoke, he pushed a button on an electronic gadget that