Yarrow House,
the residence of Mrs. Mariana Daltry, her daughter Victoria,
and Miss Katherine Daltry
Miss Katherine Daltry, known to almost all as Kate, got down
from her horse seething with rage.
It should be said
that the condition wasn’t unfamiliar to her. Before her father died seven years
earlier, she found herself sometimes irritated with her new stepmother. But it wasn’t
until he was gone, and the new Mrs. Daltry – who had held that title for a
matter of mere months – started ruling the roost, that
Kate really learned the meaning of anger.
Anger was watching
tenants on the estate be forced to pay double the rent or leave
cottages where they’d
lived their whole lives. Anger was watching the crops wilt and the hedges overgrow
because her stepmother begrudged the money needed to maintain the estate. Anger was
watching her father’s money be poured into new gowns and bonnets and frilly
things…so numerous that her stepmother and stepsister couldn’t
find days enough in the year to wear them all.
It was the pitying
glances she had from acquaintances who never met her at dinner
anymore. It was being relegated to a chamber in the attic, with
faded furnishings that advertised her relative worth in the household.
It was the self-loathing of someone who can’t quite
bring herself to leave home and have done with it. It was fueled
by humiliation, and despair, and the absolute certainty that
her father must be turning in his grave.
She stomped up
the front steps girding her loins for battle, as her father himself
would have said. “Hello,
Cherryderry,” she said, as their dear old butler opened the door. “Are
you playing footman now?”
“Herself
sent the footmen off to London to fetch a doctor,” Cherryderry said. “To
be exact, two doctors.”
“Having
a spell, is she?” Kate pulled her gloves off carefully, since the leather was
separating from its lining around the wrist. Time was when she might have actually
wondered if her stepmother (known to the household as Herself) was malingering, but
no longer. Not after years of false alarms and voices screaming in the middle of
the night about attacks…which generally turned out to
be indigestion.
Though
as Cherryderry had once commented, one can only hope.