Monday, June 25, 2007

The Domino Effect, Chapter Six

Phyl’s sleep was a succession of jagged thoughts and dreams about her home, her family, the solicitous women who had installed her in a guest room with much sympathy and few questions. Despite her distress, she had resolved not to mention her former association with the premises. It was best to keep silent and enjoy this unexpected visit. Had the house not been lost under such baleful circumstances, she could have hoped that a new friendship would allow her many more opportunities to stay there. But such an alliance was impossible, considering the role of the current occupant, a most heinous, unlikely thief.

When the distant shouts of small children finally roused her from her mental wanderings, the sun was high and a note in the stranger’s hand lay on the side table:

”The family is eager to meet you. But if you prefer to remain in your room, please avail yourself of the bell chord, and we will accommodate you with breakfast and whatever else you may need.”

I’ll lay a wager the family is indeed eager, Phyl thought, casting the note aide.

She just as quickly snatched it up. Did he really write “family is eager”? Family are, she muttered, disgusted but hardly surprised, for it was typical of low-born criminals to confuse nouns and number.

Phyl deigned to go down to breakfast, mostly because she preferred not to have anybody come to her, but partly because she was curious.

A chorus of conversation about ordinary things drew her away from the route she was taking to the breakfast room and towards the dining room, which was crammed with card tables in addition to the long ebony table that had been her mother’s pride and joy. Every table, long and small, was filled with diners of every age imaginable.

Lud, it’s an inn! Phyl thought. He’s turned the place into an inn!

Indignation that her home should be consigned to so banal an existence at the hands of the masses nearly brought Phyl to tears. Her complexion went from white to red and back to white again in the brief time it took for every male guest, adult and child, to stop what he was doing and respectfully stand upon seeing her.

Her stranger stepped forward but stood aside, bowing to another man who had also come forward, beaming upon Phyl. The second man was a shorter, plumper, somewhat younger version of the first.

“If you don’t mind, miss, my brother asked me to make introductions. There are so many of us, he’d fear we’d be here all day if he had to write out the names!”

The accent, full of hard “r’s” and drawled vowels, struck Phyl as odd, and she believed she was enjoying an encounter with people to whom English had not come naturally. Imagine her surprise, then, when she realized that the man was advising her of the ladies’ names, and they all began with the rather English-sounding Mary: Mary Ann, Mary Alice, Mary Claire, Mary Katherine, Mary Rose, Mary Elizabeth, Mary Barbara. The eldest woman among them, a rotund, white-haired lady in a frilly day-cap, was just plain Mary by birth but Mrs. Cornelius Wallis Hartshorne the Third by marriage. Clearly, these were not inn-stayers, but a family. An incredibly large, noisy family.

Phyl, who had every assurance she would not remember everybody’s name, could hardly wait until the man had presented every single man, woman, child and infant before asking, in as restrained a tone as her agitation would allow, “You are, I understand by your accent, not from around here?”

Heartened by the good-natured laughter that filled the room, Phyl went further, “From the Netherlands, perhaps?”

“She’s an original, Wal!” a boy shouted as the crowd laughed ever louder.

The old lady summoned Phyl by raising her gnarled finger. “And what did my son say your name was? Phyllis Athlyte? Wallis!”

The crisp enunciation of the name elicited “Yes, Mother?” from no fewer than three of her male offspring. “Boys. They’re so attentive,” Mrs. Hartshorne the Third confided to Phylidda before scolding, “I said Wallis, not Wallis Frederick, Wallis Thomas or Wallis Paul.” Three Wallises went “Ho-ho-ho” as they otherwise shrugged and returned to their tables. Phyl’s rescuer alone remained, standing at his mother’s side like a puppy ready to indulge its mistress, and in so doing, indulge itself. “You haven’t found a governess for all my grands yet, have you?” the lady challenged.

The remaining Wallis mouthed, “No, ma’am,” for, apparently, his mother needed no notes to understand her eldest son.

The woman eyed Phyl with the shrewdness of someone accustomed to sizing up people. “Do you like children, Miss Athlyte?”

Phyl could not stand children, but for the sake of politeness said she did. “However, I should add that I have little—“

“You seem educated. Intelligent. Can you sing? Draw? Dance? Add figures? Speak French?”

Upon hearing Phyl apply the affirmative to each category, Mrs. Hartshorne turned to her son. “This is an accomplished girl, Wallis. You would be out of your mind to send her back to London, where she can get into Lord knows what trouble with those infamous friends of hers. You have a moral duty to hire her.”

Good heavens, she’ll next be telling him he has a moral duty to marry me! Phyl thought. She looked upon Wallis, half expecting him to reason with the woman. Don’t just stand there, say something, she willed him. Pleeeaaaassse say something.

Wallis held his little notebook so Phylidda could read as he wrote, “With pleasure, Mother.”

Though she smiled and pronounced Mr. Hartshorne “too kind,” Phyl could not deny the ice that gripped her fingers along with the fate that twisted her stomach. After a moment she excused herself with a modest curtsy, delicately made her way between the tables and took the stairs towards her room.

Two flights up, she feverishly paced the hall, assured that nobody could hear her through the happy din below. It was madness, utter madness: not merely being in her former home. Agreeing to work as a governess. For the very person who had assured her family’s poverty for the rest of their lives!

She had no business being there. She would walk home, this minute, though it take hours. She would tell her brothers what had happened to her… Her brothers! Ohdearlord, her brothers. Her mother! They all must be worried to death about her. They would never believe she stayed so long at a ball! She had to send a message to them without delay.

In the haste that obliterates all sense of matters that have nothing to do with the cause of that haste, Phylidda dashed from room to room, searching for paper and pen until she ran straight into Wallis. Feeling his coat on her cheek and his hands on her arms, she jumped back, fearing what he would ask her and not knowing what she would tell him. She tried to appear calm, but lacking confidence in her ability as an actress, she instead accidentally manipulated her features into a grimace of disdain that made her host shift his concern from her face to her hands and what possibly lay therein.

Phyl bridled. He thinks I've stolen something, the fool! “I’m not a thief,” she declared through her teeth.

Wincing, with a faraway look in his eyes, Wallis pulled the notepad and pencil from his tail pocket with such difficulty that the pencil dropped and rolled along the carpet. As he bent to retrieve the item, Phyl succumbed to the desire to humiliate him, the real thief who had usurped her home.

An expert dancer, quick upon her feet, she kicked the pencil so it scudded across the room. The act produced on Wallis’s face a look of dismay, hurt, and frustration that made him appear much younger than Phyl had assumed the night before, and not so expedient as she had presumed the moment before. He had, after all, saved her from a woman’s ultimate shame when there was no need for him to become involved. Ashamed of her lack of gratitude and abundance of selfishness, she retrieved the pencil and held it at arm’s length, her eyes lowered in contrition.

Rather than accept the pencil, Wallis took her hand in both of his and studied her fingers. She knew what he was thinking: She had told him she was a dressmaker, yet her fingers were too smooth for somebody who professed to wield needles for hours at a time. His study ended with a face wrought in sorrowful resignation. He leaned so low as to brush Phyl's ear with his breath. Slowly, barely formed words emerged in a craggy whisper: “It would hurt me, beyond measure, to know that you are anything other than the decent, unsullied young woman I meant to help.”

Phyl’s answer was polite but assertive. “I assure you, sir, that in the course of my situation here, you may encounter many witnesses who could attest to my character. Many witnesses,” she repeated, hoping the emphasis on “many” would infer the possibility that his neighbors would know precisely how he came in possession of the estate, and, feeling for Phyl and her family, press him to return it to the rightful owners.

But the hint went unnoticed. Wallis Hartshorne took his pencil and in writing advised Phyl that his mother would help her plan the children’s schedules and send for someone to make a dress more appropriate for her new station in life.

“I can make one myself,” Phyl protested.

Wallis wrote quickly: “I wouldn’t want to spend money on fabric to find out that you can’t.”

“Then we see through each other,” Phyl muttered after Wallis, with a sparkling eye, bowed out and left her to herself.

Sunday, June 24, 2007

The Domino Effect, Chapter Five

Though stunned by the fall, Phyl sensed the man kneeling beside her and fumbling with the clasp on her domino until he was yanked up and backwards. Booted feet and clods of earth flew past her head in a silent scuffle. The man in the domino went down on all fours, then kicked up more turf in a frantic scramble to escape.

A taller, somewhat older man whose figure was not concealed by mask or fancy dress took the miscreant’s place beside Phyl and helped her sit up. His grip was secure, but kind. A horseman’s hands, she thought.

Fireworks exploded, casting the grounds in a pulsing, reddish light that permitted Phyl to perceive that her rescuer, though he retained a head full of long, luxuriant chestnut hair, had enough creases about his eyes and mouth to suggest a mature man anywhere, in her inexperienced estimation, between thirty-four and forty. He reached into a pocket deep in his coattail and withdrew an artist’s pencil and a little booklet in which he wrote quickly. He extended the note in time for Phyl to read in the fading light: “Are you hurt?”

Little thinking of another reason why he would communicate in this fashion, Phyl considered her rescuer was deaf. “I think not,” she shouted, searching in the dark for his eyes, hoping he had light enough to read her lips.

Another burst, this time of green, revealed a fine mouth trembling in an attempt to smother a smile. He wrote quickly: “Please be assured that I can hear you perfectly. There is no need to distress yourself further by raising your voice.”

“So you’re only a mute,” Phyl said softly, still unable to accept the fact that the man could hear. Now breaking into one of the broadest, most good-natured grins that Phyl had ever seen, he issued yet another communique: “May I summon a member of your party?”

“That was a member of my party!”

“Your husband?”

“No! Oh, thank heaven, no.”

“Perhaps, then, it would be best to find your chaperon.”

“Alas, there is no chaperon. Let me explain-please!” Phyl’s despair was such that she placed her hand on the man’s arm to stop him from writing without hearing her out. “Please, listen to me. I have no family in town. I am here on my own, a dressmaker, earning a respectable living, among respectable folk.”

Still, the pencil flew. “Forgive me, madam, if I cannot help but notice this is not a place for respectable young women.”

“You disapprove of the ball? Then allow me to please ask what you yourself were doing here.”

“A stranger tends at times to stumble upon acquaintances that progress beyond what they at first seem. It would appear that the evening’s festivities have been a mistake for both of us.”

“So it would.”

Phyl gave the man her hand, and he steadied her as she stood. The grass beneath her feet felt soft, mushy, uncertain. The hedgy corridor seemed to slope down. Phyl staggered. The man, who, she perceived as tall as a wall, put one hand to her elbow and kept the other above her waist, waiting. Seeing she was stable, he wrote. “May I take you to your home, or to wherever you prefer to go?”

She should have asked to be taken to Penelope’s house, but it was so late, and Penelope would want to know so much, while the unfortunate Philip would want to say so much. Her only recourse was to leave the domino at Ma’am’s door and walk home.

“I can walk to my rooms myself, thank you. The worst is over. That individual would never entertain revisiting me.”

The man wrote that, although he disagreed with her decision, he would gladly walk her to the main road.

Crossing the lawn was an odd trial for Phyl. She could not dispel the feeling of walking downhill on turf packed in tight, uneven mounds, though she knew the lawn was flat and even. Panic twisted her stomach and dried her mouth. “It’s nothing," she told herself. “I’m tired. Shaken. Hungry. I’ll feel better once I reach Ma’am’s.”

Nature, however, had other plans, and within the moment she was praying that nobody from the ton could see her retching behind the tree.

Her escort lifted her as if she weighed no more than a leaf and carried her to one of the carriages that waited on Lady Wilfer’s gravel driveway. With help from the driver, he placed Phyl on the forward-facing seat, then took advantage of the car’s lamplight to scrawl anew: “You shouldn’t be alone. Where are you from?”

She weakly mentioned the borough slightly more than an hour’s drive south of town.

“If not family, do you have friends there?”

She nodded, envisioning the mayor, the vicar and his family, Ronald’s friend Bernard, and so many others, young and old, who had become the happy longings of daydreams.

The man passed a note to the driver and climbed onto the seat opposite Phyl. Feeling too physically miserable and emotionally foul to care what next befell her, she allowed her escort to ply her with brandy from a flask concealed in a box beneath the seat. Warmed and comforted by the drink—and having no doubt that “conversation” with the stranger was impossible, owing to the darkness and the rocking motion of the vehicle—Phyl nestled her head against the back of the plump, leather seat and dozed. She awoke to the familiar silhouette of sycamores lining a lane, and the equally familiar pattern of windows glowing orange in the distance.

Her benefactor had brought her to the estate that she and her mother and brothers had vacated six months ago: the estate which, she had learned only hours before, had been gambled away to a stranger.

Saturday, June 23, 2007

The Domino Effect, Chapter Four

The predictable, conventional, socially acceptable aspect of Lady Wilfer’s ball allowed men and women in masks and dominos or fanciful costumes to dine and dance to the strains of a small string orchestra on the terrace behind the main house, in the warm, crimson glow of high-flaming torches. What happened in the maze beyond the terrace was quite another matter.

The maze, the heart of Lady Wilfer’s gardens, was a nine-foot-high hedgerow sculpted into little rooms and alcoves. In fair weather, the maze was the delight of Her Ladyship’s ten children and the orphans from her favorite charity. At night, however, the place purportedly became a many-faceted hall for gamesters of less-innocent pursuits. Deeply cloaked persons were said to alight from carriages that rolled up to the house with curtains drawn and lamps extinguished. And a former Wilfer maid recalled seeing pale forms writhing in the moonlight as she discreetly searched for a child’s toy horse. “The noises they were making!” Phyl recalled her saying with a shudder. “I could never do something like that in the open. Sound carries, you know.”

It was quite a few days before Phyl realized that the girl’s shame lay not in fulfilling her desires anywhere other than in her bedroom, but in placing herself in a position where the sound from that position entertains a world where ordinary noise has stilled for the day.

Phyl was thankful that she had no interest in that sort of activity. In fact, she reflected, it all seemed rather repulsive. Cradling the warm champagne flute in her hands, discreetly roaming through the crowd, she imagined and re-imagined the white-blue blob of humanity rolling upon the lawn, gathering dirt and grass upon their smooth, gleaming buttocks and within the deep, damp creases of their glistening nether regions. “Disgusting,” she thought, entranced by the sensation of something poking apart her own crevices. Assured that she would never permit herself to be used for somebody’s sordid pleasure, she studied the masqueraders, divining who among them would cast off their clothes in the false privacy of a leafy wall.

A servant appeared at her side. She thought he was extending a tray of refreshments. She saw, instead, that he carried a sealed paper on a small silver plate. “Excuse me, ma’am. This fell from your cape.”

“My cape?” Phyl asked. How could the paper be hers? She carried nothing, not even a reticule.

The servant was most courteous and eager to unite the lady with her property. “Do forgive me, ma’am, if I am mistaken. But it was seen to drop.”

Baffled, Phyl took the letter, sidled closer to the light of a torch, broke the seal, and eyed the unfamiliar hand:

“Word is that a certain earl’s estate was not sold to satisfy his gambling debts. Word is that the estate had been lost to the earl and his family long before his death, the shameful prize of a wager gone awry. If you would like to hear more, dance the allemande with me. Have no fears about appearing in the line by yourself. I will find you.”

Phyl’s head burned, and her knee shook with such severity that she forced herself to walk lest the tremors show through her skirts. Her shock was twofold: First, there was the possibility that her mother had lied about the loss of the estate, and her father really had gambled it away. Second, there was the reality that the writer knew she was at the ball, though she wore a mask and domino, and she had not spoken to anybody other than the servant.

How, then, did the writer know who she was? Nobody except Ma’am and Penelope knew she was there. She had sent word to her mother that she would be delayed at Ma’am’s, finishing a gown needed the next morning for a ceremony related to the Parliament. What the ceremony was, neither she nor Pen had the smallest notion, as the event was the creation of Ma’am herself, who had provided Phyl with both the domino and the means of getting to Lady Wilfer’s.

No, something was horribly wrong. Phyl’s anonymity with Lady Athol-Hight’s Society Paper was the only thing that had saved and assured her position among the ton for the past six months. Discovery would expose her as the daughter of a wastrel. It was bad enough that she had her father’s name. She had no desire to endure the legacy of his reputation.

She hastened along the gravel path that led to the safety of the public road. The sound of quickening footsteps behind her revealed a masked man in a domino. Fearing she was being followed, she turned sharply between two waiting carriages and ran across the lawn to the maze, heedless of who and what she would find amid the prickly green labyrinth.

The place where she had entered brought her to a shrubby corridor. Running, she thought she heard laughter coming from the other side of the hedge. A young woman in a flimsy, white gauze gown darted out of the maze to her left, followed by a panting, sweaty young man who carried coat and breeches over his shoulder.

Knowing without thinking that that particular spot promised a hiding place, Phylidda turned left. She expected another corridor with a hedge-alcove nearby. But the turn proved to be the alcove itself. She bounced back into the corridor she had just abandoned. Her pursuer stood before her.

She started as though intending to run past him on her right. As she anticipated, he reached toward her right. At the same time, she darted left. She was quick, but not quick enough to miss the faint scent of cow he exuded as he moved.

The Gentleman Dairyman! He had arrived at the ball, after all, and it was he who wrote that letter about her father. Too curious not to wonder what he looked like or who he could be, Phylidda shot a glance over her shoulder. At the same time, her foot struck a hedge root, and she fell full-length on her face, her arms straight beside her. As the ground approached, she considered how stupid and vain she was. What was the importance of learning the identity of a dairyman who attended balls when compared to the possibility of being taken by a stranger who would stop at nothing to get what his body demanded? She would have screamed had she not been afraid of being caught in so humiliating a position. In an instant, terrified as she was, she also understood that people who had gone to the maze to enjoy that particular kind of exercise would find her fear laughable.

She had no sensation of landing upon the turf. She trusted that everything she feared would be over by the time she regained her senses.

Tuesday, June 12, 2007

The Domino Effect, Chapter Three

As soon as Phyl touched the bell pull, the door opened and a plump, curly-haired girl in a lacy fichu and day cap pulled her into a cool shady foyer and down a long hallway bordered by parlors where Ma’am and her dressmakers met with clients. At the moment the rooms were empty. Distant, muffled voices and giggles, as well as heavy footfall upon the creaking floorboards, gave little doubt that fittings were taking place upstairs.

“Thank goodness you’re here!” whispered the girl, whose name was Penelope. “We were afraid that something had happened to you. Really, Phyl, you must let us send you a hackney!”

“Am I so late?” Phylidda hissed, taken back by the urgency of the reception.

“No, but Philip has received an order for playbills that need to be delivered in time for a performance tonight.”

“Could they not have given somebody else the order?”

“It’s for a Drury Lane theatre. He’d have been mad not to take it!” Penelope’s whisper grew screechy, a blatant hint that Phylidda was mad to suppose any printer would refuse work from a theater located in the entertainment heart of the kingdom.

Leaving the house by way of the back door, the girls crossed a yard grown shaggy with tall grass and wildflowers. Their way appeared to be blocked by a wall of blooming lilac bushes, but Penelope pushed aside a few flowery boughs, and they stepped into a small flagstone yard in front of a crooked, half-timbered building that exuded the scent of damp wood.

The heavy oak door, which had disproportionately large, rugged, iron hinges, opened onto a large room occupied by two printing presses, sloping composition desks, writers' desks and long, plain wooden tables. It seemed to Phyl that every flat surface was covered by piles of papers of varying sizes, from broadsheet to letter to invitation. A merry-faced young man sat at one of the desks, marking a broadsheet, but, upon seeing the girls, he stood and bowed, thoroughly composed and unconscious of the ink that streaked across his nose and cheek.

Phyl pulled the tightly folded paper from her reticule. “I’m so sorry. I couldn’t possibly finish. We ran out of ink!”

The unsurprised host gestured to the chair he had just vacated. “Not to worry, my lady, we’ve got enough ink here to sink a ship.”

Penelope shrieked. “Philip! Think what you’re saying!”

Shrewd light streamed from Philip’s chestnut-colored eyes. “Think what I say? That’s odd. Is it not always best to say what one needs to say and communicate something that should be said, rather than merely think it and give rise to misunderstanding or ignorance?”

You are a misunderstanding!”

“Well, at the moment, what has come out of the mouths of both of you has led me to understand nothing!” Phyl said, so secure in what she had meant to write earlier that she had no need to arrange her thoughts as she settled down at the desk and took pen in hand. “I happen to think that what your brother said was rather witty. Goodness!” The disbelief that further spread Pen’s widened eyes and O-shaped mouth made Phylidda giggle. “You look as though you’re thinking that I’ve no idea what you’re talking about. As that is the case, may I recommend speaking out loud and enlightening me.”

Philip lowered his voice, lest the sound carry through walls or windows, or to wherever none of them wished it to go. “I think my sister is hinting at the fact that Uncle Bamford is at war, operating under a letter of marque as we speak—or think, as the case may be.—What!” he responded as Pen shrieked once more.

“You mustn’t say his name. Nobody is supposed to know what he’s doing!”

“Her ladyship is not nobody!”

Phyl’s heart went out to Philip. Though the eldest child and only brother, he was also the mental runt of the litter. Good-hearted, perhaps, but possessed of an honesty inclined to run afoul of common sense. His comments often made her wonder how he been admitted to—and survived—Eton.

Cut by the way Pen was treating her sibling, Phyl looked at Philip hoping for all the world that her expression conveyed both her concern for him and her disapproval of Pen’s behavior. “Philip! Please! How often have I asked you to simply call me by my given name? Really, we’ve all practically grown up together. We’ve known each other far too long for this ‘ladyship’ business.”

“But not to recognize your rank would be to dishonor you, and I could never dishonor you. Please accept my disobedience as the sign of the depth of my esteem for you.”

Another fellow would have blushed to admit such things in front of another person, as Philip admitted in front of his sister. Not this one. Phyl wondered if he had confided his feelings to the flustered Penelope, whose cheeks appeared to have been replaced by two very round, very red apples that grew larger and redder as she addressed her brother. “Really, Philip, your having had the unspeakable fortune of being friends with the Earl of Blystone at Eton hardly qualifies you to set amorous designs upon his sister now that you have no reason to affiliate with him.”

“Now then Pen, I have no doubt that Philip’s actions are as far from notions of courtship as we are from Bombay,” Phyl chided as she wrote.

“Precisely!” avowed Philip. Though his face had grown more scarlet than sunset, he never left Phylidda’s side, but waited patiently as she finished writing her column.

Instead of simply leaving the print shop by way of the front door, Phyl followed Pen back through the rear yard and garden to the modiste’s shop. ”Ma’am,” as everyone called the proprietor, awaited them upstairs, nested on a long chair in a room whose heavy jonquil drapes complimented—or clashed, depending upon one’s taste—with wallpaper that emulated pale pink roses climbing trellises along a background of green and lavender stripes. She was an elderly lady of extravagant proportions, and the layers of white muslin in which she chose to conceal her girths inspired Phyl to recall the picture of a pale baby elephant she had seen in a book about the Indies.

“I have news for you,” Ma’am’s deep, musical voice intoned as a maid poured tea into paper-thin china teacups. “I have it on the most confidential authority that our Gentleman Dairyman could very well be attending Lady Wilfer’s gathering this evening. It’s to be a great surprise, don’t you think?”

Unwilling to embarrass the woman, Phyl thought carefully before speaking. “If it’s to be a surprise, Ma’am, how, then, does anybody know about it?”

“He’s been at everybody’s balls this season! Why not Lady Wilfer’s? Her premises offer the most perfect setting for an intrigue, don’t you think?”

Phyl and Pen gave each other a sidelong glance, trying hard not to widen their eyes at the way Ma’am noisily smacked her lips after loudly sipping her tea. “I’ve never been to Lady Wilfer’s,” Phyl admitted shyly.

“That’s wonderful! She’ll not know who you are. You’ll have the run of the place and be able to speak to everybody.”

“But if she doesn’t know who I am, how am I to be admitted? Surely, I’ve got to present an invitation.”

Ma’am’s imperious nod impelled the maid, a pimply girl in a stained mobcap, to give Phyl a card that had been lying on the table beneath the silver tea set.

Phyl fingered the fine paper, curdling with an odd anxiety. “You’re certain I can get by?”

“I’m certain you can get in. How you get by is entirely up to you.”

“Oh, cheer up, Phylidda!” Ma’am joyously counseled as the girls stood to take their leave. “I know men, and I know balls. Believe me, discovering the identity of an upstart pleb is not a job for decorous Lady Athol-Hight. It is an endeavor for a witty, pretty young thing like yourself. Once you see the setting and the people, Nature will overtake you. You’ll catch that masculine scent and go directly for the kill.”

Sunday, June 10, 2007

The Domino Effect, Chapter Two

The drying pen scratched the paper, turning what had begun as a neatly written sentence into a trail of disjointed black specks. Though Phylidda could complain about finding a hair in her breakfast, she said nothing about the loss of ink. She understood that she must wait until she arrived at the shop to finish writing. She slipped the paper into her reticule, tied on her bonnet, and began walking towards town.

It was a fine morning, bright and fragrant with the young green of blooming May tree leaves. She kept to the side of the wheel-rutted lane, refreshed by the shade that dappled the lawn and letting her feet, in their badly worn slippers, enjoy the luxurious, ankle-deep grass. Every so often a phaeton or curricle would pass by, and she would turn her head, hoping not to be recognized, pretending to admire the bright red roses that peeked amid the hedgerow.

One person she could not hide from: Ronald, who maintained a dignified walk in the presence of a carriage or a pedestrian, but who broke into a trot once the person or vehicle had passed. Phylidda heard him pulling on his jacket as he slowed down beside her. Individual words panted out of him: “Are. You. Posting. A. Letter. To. Bernard?”

Phylidda again turned her head to the hedgerow, believing the bonnet would shield her flaming cheeks from her brother’s curiosity about her relationship with yet another former suitor. “I do wish you would stop introducing me to men who refuse to marry a girl who has no dowry.”

“If they refuse to marry a girl who has no dowry, then they’re not worthy of being your husband.”

“That doesn’t say much about your friends, then, does it?”

“On the contrary, it doesn’t say much about your brother, that he would associate with people like that. I was wrong to introduce you to them. I can’t imagine the hurt and shame I’ve inflicted upon you.”

Phylidda smiled, and together, arm in arm, they walked in the comfortable silence that passes between siblings long confident in the affection they hold for each other.

“What hurts is people not believing that Papa left us so little,” Phyl said softly, as traffic grew heavy .

Ronald muttered as he nodded to an acquaintance across the street. “I’ve an idea.”

“You mean to marry me off to the highest bidder.”

“No, I mean to find a husband for Mother.”

“Ah! You mean to sell her off to the highest bidder! How glaringly expedient. I can’t help but wonder which will prove to be more work for you: finding Mama a husband or finding yourself a position.”

“I’d prefer to do neither, thank you! I want to be home, overseeing the estate."

“I do wish you would stop referring to it as home. It hasn’t been our home for six months.”

“I can hope, can’t I?”

“I wish you wouldn’t. It smacks of delusion.”

“Say that when you’re once again having tea in the orchard or painting pictures of the autumn woods at sunset.”

“That’s enough, Ronnie!” Such was Phyl’s distress at Ronald’s dreams that she suddenly stopped and scowled him in the face. “Nothing good can come of schemes. It’s better if you spent your energy and creativity on finding a decent position. What’s wrong with teaching or tutoring? You’d make a fine teacher. Papa always said as much.”

Annoyed—or was it unnerved?—Ronald twisted his mouth and glared at the pavement. “I’ve no patience with children. And I abhor discipline. If I couldn’t make myself rise in the morning for my own studies, how can I expect it of others?”

“Try.” Phyl squeezed the hand that had remained on her arm. She glanced at an ivy-covered brick house several doors away. A barouche was parked at the curb. Its two horses, tethered to the post, had lowered their heads; their eyes were half closed, a sure indication that their owner was immersed in a lengthy, detailed fitting. “I’ve got to go.”

Ronald grumbled tensely as he walked her to the door. “I don’t know how you can sit for hours on end, sewing dresses day after day, week after week, month after month."

I don’t, she thought as she kissed him goodbye.