An Almond for a Parrot: the gripping and decadent historical page turner. Wray Delaney

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СКАЧАТЬ was a four-poster bed. The chamber smelled of oranges and cloves just as it always had done. When I was little I would sit at the table with Cook, my fingers hurting as I pushed cloves into the orange flesh, releasing its puff of perfume. I felt cross at the idea of anyone else occupying this chamber, removing the veil of my mother’s ghost by their presence.

      I opened the shutters and sunlight showed up the shabbiness of all within. It was only in candlelight that the chamber had any pretence to grandeur. I took the cloths off the two cages, pleased to see that the canaries were alive, and put them in front of the window where the birds started to sing, their bright yellow in such contrast to the blue.

      Satisfied that all was as it should be, I resigned myself to the fact that I would no longer be able to come here. I took a last glance at the antechamber. The only piece of furniture there was my mother’s full-length looking glass.

      I decided then that this was perhaps the only opportunity I would have to take stock of my figure. I had read somewhere that an accomplished young lady should be able to play a musical instrument, speak French fluently and dance. I could do none of the above. The writer also said that a good figure and a pretty face could outshine all these achievements.

      My father, in his drunken wisdom, had decided not to waste his money on my education. He strongly believed that knowledge gave women the wrong ideas and made them a nuisance to their husbands. I cannot tell you how much I longed to be in charge of my own destiny. Never again did I want to be beholden to another soul. I had lived sixteen dull summers subjected to the tempestuous seas of my father’s ill-spent fortune and if I was ever allowed to have a life I did not want to be held prisoner by another man’s purse strings. In short, I was determined to earn my own way in this topsy world.

      If there was a time for an honest appraisal of my assets, surely it was now, there being no one else in the house apart from Cook. I undressed and for the first time stood as naked as Eve before the mirror and studied myself in the long glass. I had rounded ivory globes that sat well, but I thought were a little too large for such a trim waist, though they did have pleasing rose petal nipples. I had a flat stomach, and a dark, soft covering of downy fluff hid my Venus mound. As for my shoulders, they were not too bony, more soft as was the fashion of the day. Those at least I thought were passable. My legs I decided were shapely. I had fine ankles and slender wrists, all of which I put down to being in my favour. But my face was the greatest disappointment. I could tell I was not destined to be a beauty. It was long, as was my neck; my nose, alas, seemed snubbed. I had thick eyebrows that met in a bow in the middle and lips too full. My teeth I deemed to be my only asset worth a mention: they were neat and white. I felt the whole composition had been put together in a clumsy, ill-thought-out manner. The portrait was framed by thick, unruly hair of a mouse-coloured hue. The only striking quality about my looks, or so I thought, was the colour of my eyes. They were green and my skin alabaster, which was not due to any design but by the mere fact that I had hardly seen any sunlight since the day I was born.

      The front of me being thoroughly weighed and found wanting, I had turned my attentions to my bottom, when to my utter horror the door to the antechamber opened and there stood a gentleman in the finest clothes I had ever seen. Such was my embarrassment to be discovered this way that I daren’t look up and neither did I think to find my shift to cover my modesty. Instead, head bowed, I stared at his riding boots.

      ‘Madam, pardon me,’ he said, as calmly as if he had found me fully dressed. ‘I did not mean to intrude upon your toilette. I am looking for Captain Truegood.’

      ‘He has gone off to be married,’ I said. ‘No one is at home.’

      ‘And who do have I the honour of addressing?’

      ‘Tully Truegood, sir.’

      Daring myself to look up, I was struck dumb by his appearance, for he was not only most handsomely dressed but possessed a face which, unlike mine, seemed to have been put together with great thought, and a certain knowledge of how good features and a strong jawline and a straight nose could make a girl weak to the knees.

      I must have gone white, or whiter still, for he helped me to a chair then went in search of port wine. I found my shift and hurriedly, if unsteadily, put it over my head.

      He re-entered the chamber with a glass and, smiling, said, ‘Madam, I prefer you as you were for you have been blessed with a figure that is a delight to look upon.’

      He handed me the wine and I drank it down in one great gulp.

      ‘Thank you, sir.’

      ‘I will come back,’ he said, ‘when your father is at home.’ He bowed and went to leave.

      ‘Who shall I say called, sir?’

      He didn’t reply. And then to my amazement he came back into the room and lifted my face to his and kissed me. Having never been kissed before I was uncertain as to what I was supposed to do. He wasn’t, and before I knew what had happened my mouth was full of his tongue and a part of me that had never ached before felt as if it might die if something wasn’t done to soothe the yearning.

      He pulled away from me so suddenly that I felt bereft and without a thought to modesty I put my arms round his neck. Laughing, he untangled himself from me and undid the ribbons on my shift so that it fell once more to the floor. He stroked my face. His fingers were long and elegant, and slowly they went down my neck, over my breast, and circled my nipples, which had the effect of making them hard. His hand caressed my stomach and wherever his fingers went they seemed to waken the flesh of me that before had been fast asleep. He touched the inside of my thigh and then up into the soft purse of my Venus mound.

      I should have been outraged and I was not, just ablaze with longing – for what, I didn’t know. I felt certain that I was about to find out, but he took his hand away.

      ‘Don’t give that sweet, white rose of yours to any stranger,’ he said. ‘Wait for your husband to come and claim it, and more besides.’

      ‘I don’t think he ever will,’ I said.

      He smiled and kissed me once more. ‘Oh, he will. Believe me, he will.’

      And with that he was gone.

      I tried to compose myself but the ache in me was so terrible and all of it stemmed from between my legs. I wondered if I was ill with a fever but could not think of any remedy. How long I sat there in that bemused state I could not say. At length I was startled into action by the sound of a carriage pulling up outside our house and the noise of people arriving. Hurriedly, I dressed, my cheeks still on fire.

      I went down the stairs and stopped on the first floor landing from where I could see all the people in the hall without being seen.

      Quite a party had arrived and I could not fathom which of three elegantly dressed ladies was my stepmother for all were so beautifully turned out. But it was not the sight of the exotic plumage that unsettled me: it was the tall, thin man with a wooden leg coming in with my father. His face was bleached of colour as I remembered it and behind him came the little white dog. I held tight to the banister for there was a whooshing sound in my head and the taste of iron in my mouth. The little dog discovered my hiding place, ran up the stairs and jumped up, asking to be lifted from the ground.

      My father, upon entering the hall and seeing me, gave me a look and, if looks could be fired from pistols, that look would have killed me.

      ‘This way, madam,’ he said, and guided one of the ladies into the parlour where Cook had laid the wedding breakfast.

      It СКАЧАТЬ