Fragile Mask Read Free Page B

sake Verena had
overcome her own disinclination for company—people were discouraged
from forming a habit of visiting.
    Several gentlemen had done so at first, but Verena had, she
flattered herself, so well succeeded in damping any hopes of her
interest that they now contented themselves with clustering about
her when she went down into the town.
    It was Betsey, whose fierce loyalty had frustrated the
landlady’s attempts to pry into the mysterious circumstances
surrounding her peculiar visitors, who let Verena into the
lodging-house. Mrs Quirk’s own apartments comprised the ground
floor of the house, and she provided such services as the ladies
required under the forbidding eye of the faithful Betsey. Although
she was able to report abroad that the ladies’ linen was of the
appropriate quality for the gentility, she could not satisfy
Wellsian curiosity as to why these ladies had come to the spa
town.
    ‘ They won’t believe as you’re here only for the mistress’s
health,’ as Betsey had informed the daughter herself, ‘but you
needn’t fear me, Miss Verena. That there Quirk won’t learn nothing
from my lips.’
    Verena had every trust in Betsey on that count. She was
much of an age with Mama and had maided Verena since her childhood.
She had come with them on her own insistence—‘As if I’d leave you
both to fend for yourselves, Miss Verena! If not me, who’s to look
to your needs, I’d like to know?’—cheerfully taking on the burden
of Jill-of-all-trades to them both. She was bustling and sharp, a
buxom dame with a hectoring manner, and more than a match—as she
pridefully boasted—for any number of Quirks.
    Verena accepted her loyalty without question, but could be
little comforted to hear of the gossip. The hard necessity of
defending her very small island from prying eyes only added to the
strains and stresses that beset her: the well-nigh impossible task
of keeping Mama’s spirits up, and the haunting dread that Nathaniel
might find them out.
    ‘ I was on the watch for you, Miss Verena,’ Betsey whispered
as she let her in, softly closing the door.
    ‘ Oh, dear. Is she up already, then?’
    ‘ If you can call it that,’ uttered the maid in a severe
undertone as she hustled the easier of her two charges towards the
staircase. ‘I tried to make her stay abed, indeed I did, Miss
Verena. But she would insist on dressing. Now she’s in a fair
collapse on the day-bed, like I knew she would be.’
    ‘ She had a bad night, then,’ Verena guessed, hurrying up the
stairs.
    ‘ Tossing and turning,’ confirmed Betsey, who always slept on
a truckle-bed in her mistress’s room. ‘Twice she woke up crying.
And I’m that sorry, Miss Verena, to have to add to your troubles,
but she must have been at the laudanum again, unbeknownst. For when
I woke and found her flat out, snoring, I looked at the bottle, and
the level is down.’
    ‘ Oh no, Betsey,’ Verena groaned, stopping on the landing to
turn and gaze at the maid in distress.
    The maid nodded, setting the frill of her large mobcap
dancing. ‘Oh yes, Miss Verena.’ She set her arms akimbo of the
unrelenting black bombazine gown, its strict severity relieved only
with a white apron. ‘If you ask me, we should up and throw that
bottle in the dust cart.’
    Verena sighed, untying the ribbons of her bonnet. ‘I would,
Betsey, except that there are any number of physicians in this town
only too ready to supply her with another.’
    ‘ Physicians!’ snorted Betsey, relieving Verena of the bonnet
as she removed it and brushing automatically at the flecks of snow
still adhering to the bronze velvet. ‘Much they know. It ain’t any
bodily ill that ails the mistress.’
    ‘ I know. Not now, in any event.’ In an absent-minded way,
Verena ran her fingers through her honey-coloured tresses to fluff
out the crushed curls. ‘I had better go in to her.’
    The accommodation that served for the ladies’ parlour was a
large chamber to the front of