Now Sleeps the Crimson Petal and Other Stories Read Free Page A

if they didn’t have to and Ormsby-Hill had been deliberately sent there on a distasteful errand by a vicar too squeamish to stomach the sordid alleyway of privies, louts playing crown-and-anchor on the asphalt and the deaf-mute keeping guard for a stray policeman at the top of the yard.
    His surprise at seeing Bertha was very great. His surprise at hearing her voice for the first time was even greater.
    With Tom Pemberton it had become a shrill, empty, fun-at-any-price sort of voice; during her marriage to James William Sherwood it had been a decorous, sympathetic toned-down voice of charm and understanding.
    When Ormsby-Hill heard it for the first time it was a smooth, throaty voice, easy and rather casual: as if she had already decided what voice he would like her to have.
    â€˜I’ll slip upstairs and put on a dress if you don’t mindwaiting,’ she said. ‘I won’t be five minutes. I have to be at the dressmakers by seven anyway.’
    When she came down, about five minutes later, she was wearing a sleeveless yellow dress with a low neck and a very short skirt and with it white cotton gloves and white high-heeled shoes. She was very fond of white and yellow clothes and once or twice later I used to see her in this dress. It was tight and smooth across her thighs and so short that it showed her pretty rounded knees to great advantage. She hardly ever wore a hat in those days—she really didn’t need to because the fine close-trimmed blonde hair was shaped exactly like a hat itself—and the low-cut neck of the dress, in the fashion of the time, showed a deep curve of soft low breast, the skin clear, unblemished and wonderfully smooth.
    When Ormsby-Hill saw her come downstairs into the dingy little living room he forgot almost at once what he had come to say to her. She was already drawing on her gloves and she said:
    â€˜I’m awfully afraid I shall have to go. My dressmaker closes at half-past seven and I have to have this fitting. I don’t know which way you’re going back, but it’s only in the High Street, this shop, if you’d like to walk that way.’
    Walking down the yard, out of The Pit, he managed to repeat a few words of conventional condolence about Tom Pemberton, asking her at the same time how she herself was.
    â€˜It was very sad,’ she said, ‘but I don’t remember much about it.’
    â€˜I believe you also suffered another unfortunate bereavement,’ he said.
    â€˜Yes,’ she said. ‘Some time ago.’
    By the time they were out in the street she was talking easily,lightly and readily of something else, quite unperturbed and sometimes laughing. She had a laugh that had a kind of spring to it. It uncoiled suddenly and lightly, ending in a series of high shimmering notes, merrily, like repeated echoes.
    And as he walked with her that evening through a High Street still crowded with late shoppers Ormsby-Hill could hardly bring himself to believe that he was with a young woman who had lost a husband and a lover in so short a time. Nor was there the slightest sign of the wild, bad girl he had expected. He felt indeed that he had never met anyone quite so pleasant to talk to, to look at or to listen to. Above all he couldn’t believe—it was simply incomprehensible—that she had been born, bred and shaped in The Pit. It made his head rock with wonder that she had come, so golden and impeccable and pleasant, from that sordid rat-hole.
    He fell in love with her at once, with abandonment, quite blindly, and she let him fall in love for precisely the same reason as she had let James William Sherwood and Tom Pemberton fall in love: because it was natural, because it was pleasant and because she liked it.
    The scandal warmed and mounted quickly. It was one thing for a young curate to be seen in occasional conversation with a good-looking girl or even to dance with her at one of those decorous functions by which the