Читать «Crooked House / Скрюченный домишко. Книга для чтения на английском языке» онлайн - страница 101

It had been the perfect set-up—the impression she was aiming for! She was in danger, she ‘knew something’, she had been attacked!

I saw how she had deliberately drawn my attention to her presence in the cistern room. And she had completed the artistic disorder of her room before going out to the wash-house.

But when she had returned from hospital, when she had found Brenda and Laurence arrested, she must have become dissatisfied. The case was over—and she—Josephine, was out of the limelight.

So she stole the digitalin from Edith’s room and put it in her own cup of cocoa and left the cup untouched on the hall table.

Did she know that Nannie would drink it? Possibly. From her words that morning, she had resented Nannie’s criticisms of her. Did Nannie, perhaps, wise from a lifetime of experience with children, suspect? I think that Nannie knew, had always known, that Josephine was not normal. With her precocious mental development had gone a retarded moral sense. Perhaps, too, the various factors of heredity—what Sophia had called the ‘ruthlessness of the family’—had met together.

She had had an authoritarian ruthlessness of her grandmother’s family, and the ruthless egoism of Magda, seeing only her own point of view. She had also presumably suffered, sensitive like Philip, from the stigma of being the unattractive— the changeling child—of the family. Finally, in her very marrow had run the essential crooked strain of old Leonides. She had been Leonides’ grandchild, she had resembled him in brain and cunning—but where his love had gone outwards to family and friends, hers had turned inward to herself.

I thought that old Leonides had realized what none of the rest of the family had realized, that Josephine might be a source of danger to others and to herself. He had kept her from school life because he was afraid of what she might do. He had shielded her, and guarded her in the home, and I understood now his urgency to Sophia to look after Josephine.

Magda’s sudden decision to send Josephine abroad—had that, too, been due to a fear for the child? Not, perhaps, a conscious fear, but some vague maternal instinct.

And Edith de Haviland? Had she first suspected, then feared—and finally known?

I looked down at the letter in my hand.

Dear Charles. This is in confidence for you—and for Sophia if you so decide. It is imperative that someone should know the truth. I found the enclosed in the disused dog kennel outside the back door. She kept it there. It confirms what I already suspected. The action I am about to take may be right or wrong—I do not know. But my life, in any case, is close to its end, and I do not want the child to suffer as I believe she would suffer if called to earthly account for what she has done.

There is often one of the litter who is ‘not quite right’.

If I am wrong, God forgive me—but I did it out of love. God bless you both.

Edith de Haviland.