Page 5 of A Convenient Fiction

Aunt Charlotte crossed the room to give it to her.

“When did it come?” Laura asked as she opened it.

“Not half an hour ago. You were still in your bath.”

Laura’s gaze swept over the brief missive. “Mr. Wright has brought a friend with him. Henrietta can’t accompany the pair of them without a chaperone. She requests I come directly.”

Aunt Charlotte came to stand beside her. She was a woman of magnificent size, and despite a general air of shabby gentility, as regal in her own way as the queen. “I trust you won’t oblige her.”

“I have no reason not to.”

“No reason! My dear girl, you’ve been half in love with George Wright since you were children. Why must you subject yourself to being in his presence?”

“Calf love,” Laura said dismissively. She folded the letter, setting it down on her dressing table between her matching silver-plated hair brushes and the single unopened bottle of scent left over from Papa’s last batch of fragrance. “I feel nothing for him now except friendship.”

It was the truth, though not the whole of it.

What she felt for George wasn’t love—nor friendship, either. What she felt was disappointment. Deep disappointment, not only in him, but in herself for ever having believed him worthy of her affection.

She’d had blinders on when it came to George, ever since she was a girl. Two years ago, those blinders had been unceremoniously ripped off. To see him again now would be uncomfortable, possibly even embarrassing. More so for him than for her, she’d wager. It was he who had inflicted the breach in their friendship. He who had issued the insult.

As for her own conduct, she had nothing to reproach herself with. Nothing save an excess of girlish romanticism and naiveté.

“If he treated you as a friend, I could bear it,” Aunt Charlotte said. “But he discounts you. Merely because our family has lately fallen on hard times—”

“It’s been three years since Papa died.” Laura gave her aunt an affectionate glance. “And times weren’t much easier then, if you’ll recall.”

Aunt Charlotte’s lips compressed. “I won’t agree with that. You may not have had much money, but when my brother lived, you had standing in this community.”

Laura didn’t argue with her aunt. What was the point? Aunt Charlotte preferred to live in denial of their present circumstances. In the past, when Laura had tried to discuss the family finances with her, it had only caused her distress. Nowadays, Laura kept such harsh realities to herself. Even Teddy wasn’t aware of how bad things really were.

“I’m the head of the family, Laura,” he was often wont to say. “It’s my burden to bear.”

But Teddy couldn’t bear it. The fever that had taken Papa three years ago had left Edward Hayes confined to a wheeled chair, a thin wisp of an invalid who—but for the grace of God—would have already slipped away from them.

“I don’t suppose Miss Talbot has sent a carriage for me?” Laura asked. Henrietta was unreliable about such things. An heiress herself, it rarely occurred to her that others were not as fortunate as she was. “Or will I have to walk to Edgington Park?”

Aunt Charlotte huffed. “She’s sent a one-horse gig, driven by one of their tenants of all people. It’s meant as an insult, I know it. I came this close to sending him off with a flea in his ear.”

“Where is he now?”

“In the kitchen having a glass of lemonade. I knew you would insist on doing Miss Talbot’s bidding, if not for her, then to see Mr. Wright again.”

“Of course I’ll go,” Laura said. “Unless you or Teddy truly have need of me this afternoon?”

“Your brother is presently sketching a nest of birds which he’s spied from his window. Another day indoors, it seems. The poor boy has no color at all.”

At twenty, Teddy wasn’t a little boy any longer, though Aunt Charlotte was content to view him so. It didn’t help that Teddy had grown petulant of late, refusing to leave his room, and sometimes even refusing his meals.

“I’m henpecked to death here,” he would complain. “For the love of God, Laura. Just leave me alone.”

Laura was tired of it. Tired of managing her aunt and her brother and the remnants of their household. Tired of trying to stretch their meager income. There was never any progress—no spark of inspiration as there had been in the beginning. Now, one day was much like another. An endless repetition of stifling obligation. Of needs unmet, and wants which would never ever be fulfilled. Monotonous, that’s what it was.

Except for today.

The handsome gentleman at Talbot’s Pond had been something new. Something different.

But even that encounter had only lasted a moment. And now here she was again, trussed up by obligation and weighted down with needs, and wants, and monotony.