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“You would always be my daughter,” was the somewhat irrational reply.
“You cannot mean this, Mama. You are distraught.”
“Anyone would be!” she cried. “I am squeezed between my father and you. You are always on the edge of dagger drawing. At any moment, our arrangement may fall apart, and there is nothing I can do about it. It is driving me mad.”
Harriet almost believed this was literally true. Her mother’s eyes were red with weeping. Tufts of her hair stood on end.
“You have endured a trying lifetime because of my wrong choice, Harriet. And don’t try to tell me you liked it. The pity and the condescension and the shoddy gowns! You hated all that as much as I did. Except I also had to watch my daughter being slighted.” She wrung her hands.
Harriet was not sure she had hated it as much as that. Of course, there had been difficulties, but they had been simply part of her world. She hadn’t known anything else until her grandfather turned their lives upside down. Had she felt the sour bitterness she heard in her mother’s voice?
“That horrid girl who persecuted you? That wretched dancing master?” Mama bared her teeth. “How I wanted to scratch their eyes out!”
“Mama!”
“I did.” Her hands crooked into claws.
“We had happy times,” Harriet tried. “I made good friends.”
Her mother didn’t seem to hear. “All those years. Every minute was a desperate calculation—how to stretch far too little over too many demands. I faced down bailiffs, you know. And that dreadful doctor who refused…” She pressed her lips together and seemed to gather herself. “Youwillhave better. I insist!”
It was fortunate Mama knew nothing about Jack the Rogue, Harriet thought. She would break down completely over that adventure. Except—there was no Jack the Rogue, she remembered. He was a fiction, a liar, and she didn’t care about him anymore.
Her mother leaned down and grasped her shoulders. “You will have better,” she repeated, giving Harriet a little shake. “You’re the heiress I ought to have been. You willnotthrow that chance away.”
Looking up into her frantic face, Harriet couldn’t argue. Not while Mama’s unsettling, muted hysterics were so close to the surface. Perhaps when she had calmed down, they could discuss matters more rationally.
“Do you understand me?”
“I have heard you, Mama.” Harriet wished she hadn’t. Her picture of her parents’ perfect love was spoiled.
“So you will do as I say. Promise me!”
She was not going to do that. “I will take care of you, Mama. You must stop worrying.”
“I’ll stop when you’re safely settled. After that, I don’t care what happens.”
There was a soft knock at the bedroom door, and the dresser looked in. “Did you wish to change for dinner, madam?”
Harriet’s mother sprang up. “Is it time? Yes, of course.”
Harriet rose as well.
“Wear your jonquil crepe,” her mother added. “Your grandfather admired that gown. And be sure to agree with him.”
“About what?” Was there some other issue she hadn’t been told about?
“Everything, Harriet!”
“Yes, Mama.” She would say those words whenever she could to soothe her mother’s troubled spirit. But the time would clearly come when she could not utter them. And then what would she do? Harriet’s throat tightened with uneasiness.
***
The carriage pulled up in front of Ferrington Hall, and Jack jumped down before anyone could come out to assist him. “What’s your name?” he asked the groom who had driven him.
“Rafe, milord.”
Jack nodded. “Thank you, Rafe.” He turned to pull his bundle out of the vehicle.
