Sublime

Mrs. Thorpe was a widow, and not a very rich one; she was a good-humoured, well-meaning woman, and a very indulgent mother. Her eldest daughter had great personal beauty, and the younger ones, by pretending to be as handsome as their sister, imitating her air, and dressing in the same style, did very well.

It was a risk to mention the Royal Shakespeare Company, and RADA, but the Discreet Mourners woman failed to link Astrid Miller, Audrey Hepburn’s Friend One, with the Astrid Fellowes who had been at the centre of a scandal in the 1970s and had gone mad on stage at the National, midway through a matinee of Macbeth.

Abruptly, and with unwelcome compassion for a woman he’d despised so cheerfully and for so long, he understood what loneliness had compelled Lorna to Bethesda’s door, and to all the church doors after it – recognised, in fact, her capacity to modify herself to please her company. Wasn’t he a different man to different men? It was among the least of

Mary wondered if the captain could hear it. The beauty they made of his prison.

An angular scrawl was all that was left of her beautiful curling signature, but it was soon recognized and loved all over Haarlem.