The Misbegotten by Katherine Webb Page B

neighbours, the sweeping curves of Bath’s smarter streets and crescents were visible, on the hills to the north. Rachel could make out the elegant march of Camden Crescent, high above the rest of the city; its tall façades uniform, pale, and immaculate. There, when she was fifteen, she’d spent three months one autumn and winter season with her parents and her little brother, Christopher. Her memories of it were a blur of tea invitations, card parties, outings and dances in the assembly rooms. Now Rachel wished she’d paid more attention, and cemented such happiness more firmly in her mind – as if she could have fashioned it into something she could keep for ever. But she remembered standing at one of the front windows in their apartment and looking down on the tangle of older, poorer streets around the abbey and wharves, and wondering about all the many lives that went on there, of which she would have no knowledge, and take no part. She smiled at the thought, with an odd mixture of wistful irony, and determination.
    ‘What is it? What makes you smile?’ Richard asked her, brushing a lock of her hair away from her face.
    ‘I am beginning to feel at home already,’ she said, deciding to make it true. She felt Richard’s arms encircle her, and in truth the sensation was already less peculiar, less alarming.
    There was no food in the house, so Richard fetched fresh bread, cheese and a slice of ham pie for their breakfast. Then he took her on a tour of the street, introducing her to the neighbours she needed to know – Mrs Digweed, who took in the laundry, a woman vastly fat and startlingly ugly, with hands like a man’s and a broad smile for the world; Thomas Snook, who owned the stables around the corner, on Amery Lane, and hired out his horse and cart to Richard for deliveries. The horse was a squat, piebald thing, with feathery feet and sleepy eyes; Rachel remembered it from the times Richard had delivered barrels to Hartford Hall. Richard rubbed the horse’s forehead cheerfully, and said: ‘This is Trooper, and never was a horse less aptly named. “Dawdler” would be more like it, but he’s a serviceable chap. In a year or so I hope to be able to buy a smarter cart than Tom’s, one with my sign painted along the side, rather than carried with me on a board. And for that cart I shall need a smarter animal, I fear, Trooper. Something with less hair, and more spirit.’ He patted the animal’s sturdy neck, and Trooper sighed, as only a bored horse can sigh.
    There was a small cobbled square called Abbey Green, just along from Abbeygate Street, and the lone plane tree growing there had crisp bronze edges to its leaves. The sky was overcast, and Rachel suddenly wished it was spring, not autumn. Spring would have made everything feel more promising, more like a new beginning. Later, once Richard had gone about his business, Rachel stood for a while in her new home, and wondered what to do. She knew Richard had a housekeeper, Mrs Linton, who visited on certain days, but the woman had yet to put in an appearance. She glanced around at the cobwebs high up in the stairwell, and the ground-in dirt on the floorboards, and thought that Richard had lived too long alone, and that Mrs Linton was either unfit, or had been left too much to her own devices, and grown idle. In the sudden quiet, Rachel took a steadying breath. She had never minded an empty room before, but suddenly the emptiness seemed to ring; it seemed to mirror and amplify the odd, empty feeling inside her. She shut her eyes, and tried to summon thoughts to fill it, to quell the strange and sudden panic she felt. Just then, she would even have wished Eliza Trevelyan back into her life, with all of her arrogance and scorn.
    Rachel went upstairs and set about making herself a dressing table of sorts, on top of the small chest of drawers where Richard’s clothes and sundries were kept. She opened each drawer in turn, hoping to find an empty one that she