Beautiful Lies Read Online Free Page B

It was only desperation that had prevented her, desperation and the recognition that Alice, alone among the trickle of dull-eyed, whey-faced candidates that she had seen that day, was a girl who might be trained. Alice was from Knaresborough. When Maribel had asked her why she had left Yorkshire she had only shrugged and said she never thought to stay.
    ‘The master has a late vote,’ Maribel said. ‘Again. Heaven knows what time he will be home. Leave something for him in case he is hungry when he gets in, would you? And you had better warm the bed in the dressing room. It gets so cold in there.’
    Maribel ate supper curled up on the sofa in front of the fire. They had been back from Sussex a week and she still had not told Edward about the letter. Somehow the time had never been quite right. The Home Secretary’s proposals to suppress public meetings had caused a furore among the Radical Liberals in the House and, along with impassioned speeches in the Commons, Edward had attended meetings of the Socialist League and the Socialist Democratic Federation, whose ideological differences Maribel was still unable quite to comprehend. Moreover, the Coal Mines Regulation Bill was at the Committee Stage and Edward was lobbying hard on behalf of the Scottish miners. He was scheduled to travel north to speak at working clubs and town halls across the Scottish mining districts the following week and, on the rare occasion that he had no dinner engagement, he worked late on his speeches, several nights not retiring to bed until two or three in the morning. Most days they had seen one another only briefly at breakfast. Breakfast was no time for awkwardness.
    She would tell him when he was back from Scotland. They would dine together alone and she would tell him. Until then the news would keep. It had taken her mother ten years to reply to her letter. Another week or so would hardly signify. And what would her mother do if she never replied at all? Surely she would not dare to send another. The possibility that the matter might simply go away on its own had not occurred to Maribel before and she felt her spirits lift a little. Perhaps Edward need never know at all.
    Alice had left the evening newspaper on the side table and she glanced idly at the front page. There were riots again in Ireland, strikes in Manchester. Mr Gladstone and his wife were to pay a visit to Buffalo Bill’s ‘Yankeeries’. A cartoon at the bottom of the page had the Grand Old Man in a feathered headdress above the caption ‘Strong Will, Chief of the Opper Sishun Hinderuns’.
    It was extraordinary, Maribel thought, how stirred up London was at the prospect of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West. The show had not yet opened and still the newspapers followed every detail of its preparation: the amphitheatre big enough to hold forty thousand people, the twenty thousand carloads of rock and earth required to raise the Rocky Mountains in West Kensington, the electric lights equal to half a million candles. It made
Faust
look like one of Arthur’s charades. Everywhere in London huge coloured posters bore portraits of Buffalo Bill Cody mounted upon a rearing white horse, the stars and stripes of the American flag unfurling behind him. The whole city was convulsed with cowboy fever. It was hardly possible to venture out without falling over little boys as they stamped and whooped, cardboard axes held aloft, their mothers’ shawls trailing from their shoulders. Charlotte’s boys were positively cowboy-mad.
    Tonight the evening paper took ghoulish pleasure in informing the London public that the scalp of the Indian who had slain Custer at Little Bighorn would be on display at the Wild West. The thought made Maribel shudder. In Texas, on their honeymoon, she and Edward had been shocked by the malice of the American settlers towards the Indians. In towns like Brownsville and Corpus Christi callowness and casual violence were commonplace, contempt a matter of pride. In Reynosa,