Awakening Read Free

through Beatrice’s veins. But now poor Anna is wasted. Perhaps because of my ill-wishing? The wonder is that such a stem can support the head at all. She wants Anna’s luscious, headstrong beauty back.
    Even if it does outshine her own mere handsomeness. For Beatrice will always enjoy the rank of elder sister, head of household. The suitors flock for her, not for Anna.
    Hands on Anna’s shoulders, Beatrice looks along Anna’s eyeline. Between the chestnut and the end of the tumbledown stable and paddock, the Pentecosts’ pet lambs adorably pass the Sabbath of their springtime. Do the creatures recognise they’re orphans? Do they take their human benefactors for their mothers? Have they an inkling that we fatten them for the kill? For even pets must be translated into mutton. That’s just how it is.
    Sarum House and its grounds are what remain of generations of Pentecosts. Father and three mamas: their own, then Jocelyn’s mother, sensible, devout Mary, and finally, surviving only long enough to present the family with a defective infant, the bride Father brought from his visit to Lübeck. Lore Ritter, two years Beatrice’s junior, was a shock. – Who is this pockmarked foreigner coming in my door claiming to be my new Mama?
    Anna adored her. Beatrice tried and failed to ignore the fact that Lore made their father silly in his uxoriousness and melted her sister’s heart. However did she do that? Beatrice disliked the tender way Papa and Lore climbed the stairs hand in hand at the end of the day. She recoiled from the likelihood that Sarum House would be taken over by a mob of children. And surely Papa would favour the males: without intending to, he would: only natural. Joss has somehow never quite counted. But Lore could well be breeding for twenty years. Instead she had time only to coach her stepdaughters in German – and Anna in the rudiments of Greek – and to sew ten lacy dresses and caps. Then she too was blown away like dandelion seed. Father and his three wives lie together in the turf of the chapel garden.
    The only way Beatrice and Anna will be evicted from Sarum House is feet-first. As long as they possess these intimate spaces, these two acres, the great old trees and pasture, the Pentecost sisters will be secure. Papa, who left two houses and the farm with its tenant to Joss, willed the home and half his capital to his elder daughter. Safe, I am safe, she reminds herself.
    The scullery’s thick with steam; the window runs. Beatrice, a sweating scullion, heaves the wringer handle and grey water gushes from the sheets. She transfers the load to the mangle, extracting a pinch of jaded pleasure from completing the chore. No genteel woman has muscles like Beatrice’s or hands roughened by labour: yet to her these signs are worthy of respect. An active and practical person, she’s unashamed to work alongside the household’s one servant. If only the servant worked half as hard as the mistress. But Beatrice was stung when Joss’s friend Arthur Munby, visiting for the first time, took her for the maid-of-all-work and seemed confused when she drew herself up to her full height and introduced herself as Miss Pentecost.
    Mr Munby is a gentleman and an enigma. What can Joss have in common with him? Just as bafflingly, how come Mr Munby condescends to know Joss? For he’s an Anglican and a university man – and not a saved person. His wife Hannah only intensified the conundrum. Statuesque in her black London silks, mightily gloved and hatted and entirely silent, she sat to attention while the charming and loquacious Mr Munby held forth on the condition of the female working classes. Even in their gloves, Mrs Munby’s hands were like shovels, Beatrice thought, still smarting. And her complexion! As if she’d been left out in wind and rain for a year. Mr Munby expatiated, with relish, on collier-lasses soot-black from head to foot; London