Angel Read Free

herself being laced into her stays by a maid.
    â€œWell, I hope you will keep it up,” Miss Dawson said dubiously. She dipped a pen into red ink and wrote ‘Very Fair’ at the end of the essay.
    â€œDo you read a great deal, Angelica?”
    â€œNo, I never read.”
    â€œBut why not?”
    â€œI don’t think it’s interesting.”
    â€œSuch a pity. Then what do you do in your spare time?”
    â€œI play the harp mostly.”
    She doesn’t believe that, either, thought Angel, seeing the suspicious look again tightening Miss Dawson’s face. She was as resentful at not being believed about the harp—which was indeed untrue—as about the essay which she had certainly written herself, and with the greatest of ease and speed, just because she had suddenly been in a mind to do so.
    When Miss Dawson dismissed her, she gave a little bobbing curtsy as she was expected to and ran downstairs to the cloak-room. The staircase was very dim. A light shone from an open door across the hall. The conservatory with its palms and eucalyptus trees was grey and ghostly. All of the girls had gone home.
    The cloakroom had once been a large scullery. It was fitted with pegs from which only shoe-bags hung now and, in one corner, Angel’s hooded cloak. Black-beetles often ran about the cracked stone floor and the walls were damp. There were bars across the window, and it was a frightening place at this time of day. The girls used the back door, where there were shoe-scrapers among the ferns, a row of dustbins, a heap of coke, and always a great many pale yellow slugs.
    The lawns and carriage-drive, lighted windows and the four cedars themselves could be glimpsed from the side path and the tradesmen’s entrance. Here, among the laurels, two girls, younger than Angel, were waiting. It was Angel’s task to see them safely to and from school. Their parents were customers at her mother’s grocery shop.
    The two little girls, Gwen and Polly, had been apprehensive, waiting there in the dusk. The lamp-lighter had gone by long ago and the sky was now a deep blue. There was a smell of evening in the air, smoky and disturbing.
    â€œI had to stay behind to hear my praises sung,” said Angel. She was pulling on her woollen gloves as she hastened along the pavement. Gwen and Polly trotted beside her. They descended the hill, past crescents and terraces of Georgian houses and dark gardens full of whispering dead leaves.
    â€œWhen you are at Paradise House,” Polly asked, “do you ever go into the garden by yourself in the dark?”
    â€œI take my dog with me—Trapper. We go all round the grounds. It’s rather ghostly by the stables—just the sound of the horses blowing and stamping.”
    â€œAre they your very own horses?”
    â€œThey will be when I inherit.”
    â€œBut who looks after them now?”
    â€œGrooms and stable-boys. It is all kept in order and so is the house. There are dust-sheets over the drawing-room and drugget over the carpets, but the housekeeper sees that everything is polished and shining ready for the day when I can go there myself to live.”
    â€œIt seems a pity,” Polly said, “that you have to wait. Why can’t you go there now?”
    â€œMy mother lost her inheritance because she married beneath her. She can never go back, so don’t ever mention anything to anybody about Paradise House for that reason.”
    â€œNo, of course not,” they whispered quickly, as they always did. “But why mustn’t we?” asked Gwen.
    â€œIt breaks my mother’s heart to hear of it. If you breathed a word of it at home and it came back to her, I couldn’t answer for the consequences.”
    â€œWe wouldn’t breathe a word,” said Polly. “Will you go on telling us about the white peacocks?”
    Every day they listened to the story of Paradise House. It was more vivid to them