Beautiful Lies Read Online Free

Edward worried about her, living alone with only the servants for company, but it seemed to Maribel that she had everything sewn up very nicely.
    ‘My beautiful boy,’ Vivien murmured. Then, patting him like a child, she shooed him out towards the waiting hansom. ‘Till Friday.’
    ‘Till Friday.’
    As the driver snapped his reins Maribel lit a cigarette. Beside her Edward stretched out his long legs and yawned, sweeping away the smoke with the back of his tapered white fingers. His narrow face was drawn. She frowned at him.
    ‘Must you really go back to the House?’ she asked. ‘Surely this week they have had their pound of flesh.’
    ‘Please, Bo, not tonight.’
    ‘It is you I am concerned for. Your mother is right. You look exhausted.’
    ‘Not so exhausted I can’t put flies in the Home Secretary’s ointment. Honestly, Bo, something has to be done. If Matthews has his way it won’t be long before twelve people in a dining room constitutes an infringement of the law.’
    ‘Don’t exaggerate,’ Maribel said. ‘Even the Mr Podsnaps want England a free country.’
    ‘Free for a man to starve in – that is a privilege the government is eager to preserve – but not, apparently, if he would rather hold a public meeting. If he is poor and a Socialist, or worse still Irish, then God help him. For such men Mr Matthews espouses freedom in the Russian style.’
    Maribel tipped her head back, releasing a stream of smoke from her mouth. It clung to the darkness like hair.
    ‘You work too hard.’
    ‘And you smoke too much. We must bear our burdens bravely.’
    Maribel smiled. She might begrudge the incessant demands of Edward’s political life but she was not foolish enough to believe that anything she or anyone else could say would alter him one iota. Edward Campbell Lowe was a radical in his blood and in his bones – his father’s father had campaigned with Wilberforce for the freedom of slaves, while his maternal grandfather had famously made a bonfire with a valuable portrait of the Marquess of Bute because, he had declared, it was more than a man could stomach to encounter a Tory every morning before breakfast. Even Edward’s own father, whom no one liked to talk about, had espoused tyrannicide and knew the
Corn Law Rhymes
by heart. He had also gone mad. He had died in an asylum, bequeathing to Edward his Scottish titles and estates and debts totalling nearly one hundred thousand pounds.
    At Cadogan Gardens Maribel stepped down from the cab. Edward made to accompany her but she shook her head, standing on tiptoes to kiss him tenderly on the cheek. He smiled at her, his hair fiery in the gaslight. He had always been a beautiful man.
    ‘Goodnight, Red,’ she said softly.
    ‘Goodnight.’
    Edward leaned forward, knocking on the roof of the cab with his cane. The cabman slapped the reins and the horse coughed and moved off, its metalled hooves ringing against the cobbles. Fumbling her keys from her evening bag, Maribel hurried up the shallow stone steps of the mansion block and pushed open the heavy front door.
    She wished that Edward did not make it his business to provoke people so. As soon as he had taken possession of his seat he had taken up every unpopular cause he could conceive of, including the wholesale reform of the parliamentary system. In the afternoons he liked to caracole in Rotten Row. As a young man he had spent several years as a gaucho in Argentina and he rode with the gaucho’s swagger, his bridle arm held high in the Spanish-Moorish fashion, his horse’s harness jingling with silver. Neither his radicalism nor his riding ingratiated him with his fellow Members in the House.
    There was a narrow slice of light beneath the door at the foot of the stairs. Maribel closed the front door gently, taking care that it did not slam. Once or twice, when they had first come, Edward had failed in this duty and, like a child’s jack-inthe-box, Lady Wingate had leaped out from behind her front