Read My Sweet Folly for Free Online

small room off the passage. It was empty and dark, the haunt of long-vanished butlers—one place without the torrid furnishings and carvings that consumed the rest of the house.
    He put his palm against the stone. It felt cold and blessedly smooth. He did not think he could bear one more phoenix or griffin or Chinese dragon, to see or to touch them. They worked their way into his demented dreams, and sometimes out of the corner of his eye he thought he caught them moving, but when he looked, they were only perfect decoration on perfect tracery, beautifully executed, carved by a master in wood. Feverish stuff: wyverns with necks that coiled like snakes; bodiless wings and claws; strange smiling faces and arabesques growing like rank foliage on every mantle and alcove and ceiling and staircase.
    Amid that madness, she had come. He felt a spinning relief, to be certain that she was real after all.
    He touched the miniature in his inner pocket. The painter had not caught the truth of her; she was less handsome and far more alive in reality. A face of glowing simplicity—not pretty, no, nothing like her extraordinary stepdaughter; in fact when she had turned and frowned at him, she was endearingly plain, with ordinary brown hair and features he had already forgotten, except for such expressive eyes that looked at him and right through him.
    She terrified him. It had seemed imperative that he bring her here, safe within his protection, and yet he was afraid she could see through him. He was afraid he could not protect her. He was afraid there was no danger at all, and yet he walked through each day in a state of spring-wired tension, primed to defend himself, as if hands might rise out of the floors or the walls and pull him down and strangle him.
    He must discipline himself to go outside again, because the sun would not kill him, the open space would not annihilate him.
    It would not. It would not.
    He closed his eyes and leaned his fists and his face against the cold stone wall.
     

     
    In her shock, Folie had noticed little of the interior of Solinger Abbey on her way up the stairs, but on the way down she could hardly disregard it. Though the house itself was old, it appeared to have been entirely refitted, with no regard to cost.
    The decoration was extraordinary. Everywhere were outlandish carvings painted in a delicate white. Some scaly beast even wound about the banister, so finely rendered that every shadow revealed an exquisite detail. No hands had marred the carving or worn off the paint—it was as immaculate as if it had been created only yesterday.
    “This is gorgeous,’’ Melinda said, and dropped her voice to a whisper. “It must have cost a fortune!”
    “Lord only knows how they dust it!” Folie said, daring to reach up and touch a delicate wooden bell that hung from a carved falcon’s jesses. The hunting bird had been caught in its moment of bounding upward from its perch; its curved beak was slightly open, as if it panted for the sky.
    “A nabob,” Melinda said wisely. “He can afford someone to go about blowing on them all day.”
    Folie made a face at the dusty black mark on her glove.
    “Well, they had better put their lungs to work. This is positively squalid.”
    Melinda poked her fan at Folie’s waist and whispered, “Do be civil to him, Mama! Only think what a debut I might have!”
    “Of course,” Folie said with a hurt look. “I should be civil to the devil himself for your debut. What sort of mother do you think I am?’’
    “And please don’t use warm language.”
    “Let us hope he is easier to please than you!”
    Melinda merely answered with her saucy grin. Folie thought it an expression that would win more male hearts than any number of lavish debut parties, but there would be no telling that to an eighteen-year-old. And there was still the problem of bringing her into the proximity of suitable male hearts, so all in all, Folie was determined to gird her loins and charm the