AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Your stepmother?” Grace spluttered in surprise.
“Ophelia!” Gertrude bellowed Ophelia’s name.
Ophelia could have been a child again, running away from her stepmother to hide in her chamber beneath her bed.
I will not hide today.
“Wish me luck,” Ophelia whispered to her sister-in-law, then went to meet Gertrude.
Chapter 12
“If you are to shout down my new home, then let us at least go into a distant room.” Ophelia led the way for her stepmother, crossing the empty hallway and heading to a chamber on the far side of the house. As she passed, she offered an apologetic look to Mrs Mouser, who stood back from the door with a hand to her chest.
“What is the meaning of this, Ophelia?” Gertrude demanded, long before Ophelia had even reached the room she was heading for.
Ophelia didn’t say a word, even as Gertrude continued to rant and rave. Instead, she stayed silent until they reached the garden room on the far side of the house. Once there, Ophelia closed the door behind them.
“This is madness!” Gertrude declared at the top of her lungs, flinging her arms out so wildly that she nearly knocked over two potted palms.
“Careful, Gertrude, do you wish to destroy everything in my new home?” Ophelia knew she was poking a hornet’s nest with her words, but she couldn’t help it. Turning to face Gertrude completely, she hooked her hands behind her back and devoted her attention to her stepmother.
“I do not understand what is happening, Ophelia. You are wed? How is this possible? You were to marry George!” Her voice piqued when she uttered his name, squealing and betraying her anger.
“No, I was not.” Ophelia shook her head, just once. “You wished me to marry Lord Chester, but you may remember that I repeatedly refused to do so.”
“You went to buy a wedding trousseau,” Gertrude said, her voice shaking as she stepped forward. “You said as much.”
“I did not say the groom was to be Lord Chester.”
“Oh! Insolent child.” Gertrude flung herself into a rage and marched around the garden room, nearly knocking over a lemon tree as she passed a row of pots lining the vast windows that looked onto the garden. Finding some amusement coupled with pain in the moment, Ophelia wasn’t sure what to do with her face, she stood very still and watched her stepmother.
There was amusement in that she had managed to outsmart her stepmother, but there was pain, too, for this woman had been her stepmother for over a decade of her life. It was sad to think of what they were to each other now.
“I cannot believe you have done this.” Gertrude faced her, gripping the edges of her pelisse with such tight fingers that they turned white. “You would marry a penniless duke? What have you accomplished in that? Tell me at once, child, what has it served you?”
“Child?” Ophelia repeated, then stepped forward, matching her stepmother’s harsh tone, though she did not adopt the same loud volume. “Belittle me all you like for what I have done, but you could not accuse me of giving my fortune away when you were intending to make me do the same thing.”
“You did not understand what I was trying to do—”
“Can you really argue that?” Ophelia asked, her eyes wide. “From the moment the solicitor told us of how the money was to be divided, you did not look at me as a woman, nor as your stepdaughter. I was the person who had the money you thought should have been your own, was I not?”
Gertrude did not deny it, but turned her back on Ophelia, relentlessly pacing across the room.
“I have done no worse than you would have done. The money is spent, as you would have spent it yourself, and at least it has now gone to a more worthy cause than your own.”
“I am your stepmother. How can you speak to me so?” Gertrude asked with vigour.
“What would you have spent it on?” Ophelia asked. “Enlighten me.”
Gertrude wrung her hands together. “That hardly matters. It was my money. Mine to do with as I liked.”
“No, Gertrude, it was not.” Ophelia stepped forward, moving into her stepmother’s path. It abruptly stopped her pacing. “It was not your money at all, it was mine. This was the problem. You saw it as your own when it never was. Can you not see why I have done what I have done? I needed to escape the control you wished to exert over me.”
“Ungrateful—that’s what you are, Ophelia. So ungrateful.” Gertrude’s voice became quieter now. She blinked as if she was about to cry and reached into her reticule, fishing out a handkerchief. She pressed it to her cheeks. “After all I have done for you. After I have cared for you for so many years.”
The guilt made Ophelia’s spine crumple a little.
“You were as good as my daughter.”
