Read Jane and the Prisoner of Wool House for Free Online

knot at her nape. Though her features were good, and I might trace the remnants of a vanished beauty, it was rather as one might conjure the memory of summer from the frame of a leafless tree. There was about her a palpable air of defeat mingled with defiance, as though she knew herself to have suffered a mortal wound, but was prepared to fade without ceding the slightest quarter to her enemies.
    I rose, and moved by an obscure sensation of pity, extended my hand.
    “Good day. I am Miss Austen. And you must be Mrs. Seagrave. How good of you to consent to walk with me in town!”
    The kindness is entirely yours, I am sure,” she returned abruptly. “Have you any particular errands you wish to complete? A direction you thought to pursue?”
    “None whatsoever,” I replied cheerfully. “As this is my first visit to Portsmouth, everything is of interest to me.”
    “Then you are more easily amused than I.” She could not disguise the bitterness in her words. “Portsmouth is a wretched hole, Miss Austen, with nothing to recommend it May I ask what place you call home?—Or are you as itinerant as every naval woman in my acquaintance?”
    “I am presently settled with my family in Southampton,” I replied.
    “Ah. Southampton. They have libraries there, I believe. All you will find in Portsmouth are essays on the calculation of longitude.” Her grey eyes glinted as she pulled on her gloves. They were doeskin, the color of mulled wine—and like much about Louisa Seagrave, of the highest quality and the shabbiest use.
    “Have you lived here long, Mrs. Seagrave?”
    “Three years. But I do not intend to endure it a fourth. I shall remove to Kent when my husband is again at sea.”
    She lifted her head as she said this, as though in defiance of courts-martial and all die Articles of War—or perhaps it was a courage flung at the husband who would attempt to rule her. “Shall we go, then?”
    “With pleasure,” I said drily, and followed the lady to the street.
    T HE RAIN BEGAN PERHAPS A HALF-HOUR AFTER WE HAD achieved the High. In the interval before the deluge, however, I had time enough to establish that my companion was the only daughter of a viscount; that her schooling had been accomplished at a fashionable establishment in Town; that she had become acquainted with Tom Seagrave at the age of seventeen, during a period at Brighton; and had married not long thereafter. The air of elopement hung over her terse explanation; the match had been accomplished without the sanction of her parents. It was clear to me, however, that if Louisa Seagrave did not exactly regret her headlong alliance with the dashing Captain, she had suffered greatly from social diminution. At the time of their union, Tom Seagrave had been only a lieutenant, with a lieutenant's meagre pay; success, and further steps in rank, had swiftly come—he was not called “Lucky” for nothing—but the early years had proved a period of deprivation. The connexions so swiftly thrown off, at seventeen, were reckoned a greater loss at three-and-thirty. Doors that should have swung open for the Honourable Miss Carteret were closed to Mrs. Sea grave; and she had only learned to value the rooms beyond, once they were locked against her. Her pride had suffered in the exchange, and not all the years of marriage, or the birth of three children, could heal the wound of a cut direct from a former intimate acquaintance.
    Now, with her husband being brought under a charge of murder, even her tenuous claim to the naval world must be threatened, her last foothold on safe ground, crumble beneath her. Louisa Seagrave had chosen to regard her fellow officers' wives with a coldness bordering on contempt—and given half a chance, they were sure to return the favour.
    “There is Mrs. Aubrey,” my companion observed, as we attempted to cross to the far paving, “with her hair newly-dressed on the strength of her husband's prizes! I do not think Sophie Aubrey has exchanged