Anonymous
A Stately English Mansion
CHAPTER ONE
Under the gaze of the crossing sweeper she fell. There were faces all about her like pale petals when she fell, struck by our own carriage, too. A dashed bad business, so I thought to bring her home', said Easton Sherwood, toying with his beard.
'Your carriage, dear, not mine. Kate, are you bruised, all shaken up?' his wife Letitia asked.
Awe in her eyes, Kate dumbly shook her head. After her fall in Regent Circus-when the side of Mr. Sherwood's carriage had grazed her but slightly-she had been transported to what seemed to her a palace, though it was no grander than the other large houses in Chester Square. Her hip was bruised, no more than that. Shamefully conscious of her poor attire, she endeavoured to draw the toes of her ill-fitting boots under the dusty and equally worn hem of her second-hand dress.
'You must bathe. A warm bath will do wonders for you. Heaven knows it always does for me', Letitia said, and rose to pull a bellcord to summon a maid.
'Oh no, I won't bother you. I'm all right to go now, I really am, and it were nice of you, sir, to bring me 'ere', said Kate in her Cockney twang.
'Won't bother? What bother? Of course you shall', intoned Easton. 'Ethel will find you a new dress in recompense for what occurred to you. Ethel, I trust, is here?' he asked his wife as if their daughter might be anywhere about the world or in the world, or fast upon its very edge.
'She is here', Letitia replied and waved her hand with great vagueness in apparent searching for some semblance of Ethel in the air, at which point the double doors to the large drawing room-or 'the salon' as Letitia preferred it to be called-opened to admit a maid. Being then told that 'Miss Kate' would take a bath, the young servant's face remained expressionless.
Kate, for her pan, was quite dazed as she rose from the incredibly comfortable sofa on which she had been perched, receiving an encouraging nod from Letitia in her passing, though she did not see the overt signal that Mary, the maid, received from Easton who observed the back view of the slender and comely seventeen-year-old Kate with considerable satisfaction. A mere waif, he thought, albeit an extremely attractive one. With the quiet closing of the doors, he got up in turn and walked over to his wife who was recumbent in a blue velvet-covered chair.
'Are you to see to Johnson now?' he asked, soothing one of her wrists with his palm as he spoke.
'You wish me to? Easton, dear, what are you at?' Letitia asked. Knowing how strong he was, she did not resist as he slipped both hands beneath her armpits and drew her to her feet. Letitia, though in her early forties, had not yet run to fat, though her breasts and her derriere were satisfyingly ample and firm. She had been, in Easton's eyes, a fine catch when she was nineteen, and still was so now. Passing one large palm around her nether cheeks, he felt their weight and glowing warmth.