The Loves of Leopold Singer Read Online Free

shoulders, shaking her head.
    “It is done, Pitman.” Elizabeth stood up. She didn’t give the room a last look.
    In the courtyard mama sobbed quietly as usual, the pathetic creature. Papa complained about the cost of the coach for two women and their belongings.
    “Papa, as Squire Carleson has borne the expense and it is nothing to you, I don’t know why you complain.”
    Papa glared. He seemed ready to strike her one last time. She smiled, ready to provoke him . She’d developed a perverse sense of satisfaction when he struck her. It meant he’d lost self-control. It meant she was the one with the power.
    Do it. I want you to.
    But Pitman stepped between them. The footman opened the carriage door and pulled down the steps. Pitman shoved Elizabeth inside, stumbling over both their skirts as she followed. The carriage pulled away, but Papa had to have the last word. He ran along beside the open window.
    “Hair grows.” Papa’s impotent snarl hung on the air.
    Elizabeth gasped. She hadn’t looked at him— really looked at him— in years. Gray coursed through his black hair. The lines on his face were deep and relentless. He was out of breath. Sometime soon, Papa would die. The world would go on, and he would not be in it.
    The thought provoked such sublime joy in Elizabeth’s heart that she burst out laughing. Papa stopped in his tracks with a confounded expression.
    The uneventful half-hour drive to the coach house was punctuated by distant thunder. “Let’s have a pot of chocolate while we wait,” Elizabeth said.
    She took a table near the window while Pitman put in their order. Outside, the Grayside carriage disappeared around a corner, and with a shock Elizabeth realized she might never see her home again.  
    “I wish I could have brought Huldah,” she told Pitman. “I will miss nothing else.”
    They traveled for three days, stopping to eat and change horses. Twice they had to get out and walk while the coach navigated steep or soggy patches in the road. Carleson Peak—oddly named—was in a lovely little valley. The coach left them at a public house called the Leopard and Grape where Squire Carleson waited.
    He was heavy and smelled of sweat and tobacco. There was no intelligence in his face, but Elizabeth saw no cruelty there either. He took her directly to the church, though her eyes were crossing with exhaustion.
    If Carleson was old, the rector was ancient. The cleric collected his book with plodding deliberation and began a slow march through the ceremony. His teeth did not fit; a bit of drool slid out the corner of his mouth. Elizabeth couldn’t hear the words. She was too occupied by the drool rolling down the rector’s chin.
    She didn’t realize she’d been bound by God to her lord and master until the church bells rang—a strangely beautiful sound in the nightmarish scene. They walked out of the church into the day’s fading light. It felt like a perversion of a fairy tale. Such a lovely world, and she was suddenly married to the goblin.
    A gaggle of children descended upon the happy couple, but the squire had nothing for them. “Bad luck,” he grumbled, genuinely embarrassed to have forgotten to put a few coins in his pocket.
    “Perhaps not.” Elizabeth was seized by the idea it truly would be bad luck to emerge from the ceremony empty-handed. “Pitman, my stocking purse.”
    Her maid removed a tubular bag made of knitted blue silk and decorated with tiny pearls from her blouse sleeve. She’d carried the purse during their journey, as the less likely object of pickpockets and scoundrels. Elizabeth handed over to her new husband the little fortune she’d saved for the last two years. She’d meant to keep it hidden, insurance against his miserliness, but something told her that would be the least of her worries.  
    “Good girl,” Squire Carleson muttered. He spoke kindly, and he tossed the coins to the children with real joy. But oh, he smelled bad.
    Laurelwood Church was on