Read My Cousin Rachel for Free Online Page A

unpleasant—I had pictured to myself a woman resembling Mrs. Pascoe, only more so. Large-featured and angular, with a hawk’s eyes for dust as Seecombe prophesied, and far too loud a laugh when there was company for dinner, so that one winced for Ambrose. Now she took on new proportions. One moment monstrous, like poor Molly Bate at the West Lodge, obliging one to avert the eyes from sheer delicacy, and the next pale and drawn, shawl-covered in a chair, with an invalidish petulance about her, while a nurse hovered in the background, mixing medicines with a spoon. One moment middle-aged and forceful, the next simpering and younger than Louise, my cousin Rachel had a dozen personalities or more and each one more hateful than the last. I saw her forcing Ambrose to his knees to play at bears, the children astride his back, and Ambrose consenting with a humble grace, having lost all dignity. Yet again, decked out in muslin, with a ribbon in her hair, I saw her pout and toss her curls, a curving mass of affection, while Ambrose sat back in his chair surveying her, the bland smile of an idiot on his face.
    When in mid-May the letter came, saying that after all they had decided to remain abroad throughout the summer, my relief was so intense that I could have shouted aloud. I felt more traitorous than ever, but I could not help it.
    “Your cousin Rachel is still so bothered by the tangle of business that must be settled before coming to England,” wrote Ambrose, “that we have decided, although with bitter disappointment, as you may imagine, to defer our return home for the present. I do the best I can, but Italian law is one thing and ours another, and it’s the deuce of a job to reconcile the two. I seem to be spending a mint of money, but it’s in a good cause and I don’t begrudge it. We talk of you often, dear boy, and I wish you could be with us.” And so onto inquiries about the work at home and the state of the gardens, with his usual fervor of interest, so that it seemed to me I must be mad to have thought for a moment he could change.
    Disappointment was of course intense throughout the neighborhood that they would not be home this summer.
    “Perhaps,” said Mrs. Pascoe, with a meaning smile, “Mrs. Ashley’s state of health forbids her traveling?”
    “As to that I cannot say,” I answered. “Ambrose mentioned in his letter that they had spent a week in Venice, and both of them came back with rheumatism.”
    Her face fell. “Rheumatism? His wife also?” she said. “How very unfortunate.” And then, reflectively: “She must be older than I thought.”
    Vacuous woman, her mind running upon one single train of thought. I had rheumatics in my knees at two years old. Growing pains, my elders told me. Sometimes, after rain, I have them still. For all that, there was some similarity between my mind and Mrs. Pascoe’s. My cousin Rachel aged some twenty years. She had gray hair once more, she even leaned upon a stick, and I saw her, when she wasn’t planting roses in that Italian garden which I could not picture, seated at a table, thumping with her stick on the floor, surrounded by some half-dozen lawyers all jabbering Italian, while my poor Ambrose sat patient at her side.
    Why did he not come home and leave her to it?
    My spirits rose, though, as the simpering bride gave place to the aging matron, racked with lumbago where it catches most. The nursery receded, and I saw the drawing room become a lady’s boudoir, hedged about with screens, huge fires burning even in midsummer, and someone calling to Seecombe in a testy voice to bring more coal, the draft was killing her. I took to singing once again when I went riding, urged the dogs after young rabbits, swam before breakfast, sailed Ambrose’s little boat about the estuary when the wind favored, and teased Louise about the London fashions when she went to spend the season there. At twenty-three it takes very little to make the spirits soar. My home was