Trial of Passion Read Online Free Page B

Beauchamp again? I mean, no reflection upon you, you understand that. Can I talk to him? Where is he being hidden?
    The pillared courts of the Roman magistrates become an arena where the Emperor looks down upon my nakedness, and Annabelle is the queen beside him, crying shame. Guilty, I repeat. I am guilty. A loud rapping snaps me awake from this recurring eunuch’s dream, and I struggle to my feet and bump into a wall where there should be a door. And I realize I am not at home. Where am I? Are those birds I hear, and the lapping of waves? And this brilliant beam that pours through these dusty second-floor windows, could that be sunlight?
    I
am
at home.
    The rapping again, urgent, a shivaree of noise coming not from downstairs but from above. As I shamble to the window, I see the perpetrator, a flicker that takes flight from my shingled roof. The view outside makes me dizzy. Rosy-fingered Aurora has flung wide the gates of morn. Mists float above the pasture where three mule deer graze, like society matrons at a buffet table, daintily sampling a little of everything, grass and bush, and tree leaf. To better view this Turneresque scene, I throw apart the French windows, but in the fury of my rapture they bang against the wall, and the deer prick up their ears and look this way and that, then all three bound on springy legs into the forest.
    I breathe deeply the sweet-smelling air of the country, then turn to my bathroom for my morning ablutions. The fellow who greets me in the mirror has tousled silver hair of a fullness that belies his years. Hazel, heavy-lidded eyes, glazed with sleep — one of them occasionally chooses a slightly different route from its brother. A nose too straight, too patrician (let us not bandy words: a beak). Hiding in its shadow, and not hiding well, an unwanted corpulence of form. I will immediately begin a diet.
    Stoney does not show up this morning as promised, and I tire ofwaiting. A slave to habit, I cannot sit down for the first coffee of the day without a newspaper, so I walk the two miles to the general store, arriving there distressingly short of breath. The store is a dowdy establishment run by a laconic older gentleman with rheumy eyes: Abraham Makepeace, who informs me he is also the island postmaster.
    â€œMr. Beauchamp, eh? You’re the one bought the old Ashcroft place. Postcard here from your real estate lady thanking you for your business and hoping you’ll enjoy living here.”
    He reaches into a drawer and hands the card to me so that I may read it for myself.
    â€œDo you have this morning’s
Globe?”
    â€œWe don’t get that here”
    â€œI see. Do you have
any
newspapers?”
    â€œDidn’t come in today. This here’s the
Island Echo.
Comes out twice a month.”
    Tribulations must be borne on Garibaldi Island, but I shall survive them with equanimity. Back home in my club chair, instant coffee instantly at hand, I fold open the
Island Echo
and read about the recent lovely tea at the home of Mr. and Mrs. Vincent Rosekeeper of East Shore Road. Aha — cream puffs were served. And many compliments were “handed around” about the tasty mulled wine punch. An anomalous concluding sentence: “George Rimbold, returning from the function, skidded off the road, and is recuperating at home.”
    I note elsewhere the confusing news of another signal event: “Badly missed by all islanders will be the Ashcroft family. Having recently moved off the island, their farm has been bought by a prominent and well-known lawyer from Vancouver, Mr. A. Beauchamp.”
    Ah, yes, not merely prominent but well-known, this impotent pillar of the community: the right clubs, the right people, the right wing. How exhilarating was the social and political whirl. It will be unbearably taxing to adjust to life outside a crowded elevatorI spend my first week on Garibaldi learning such skills as were failed to be taught in the abysmal private