LITMIR.BIZ

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the time Chloe left the library it was nearly dinner time and she was soon caught up in the rush and urgency when Cook burned her hand and the cook maid dropped a pint of cream on the kitchen floor. She felt a sadly neglectful mother by the time the family and their guests were all served and the kitchen was calm again and she was free to make her way upstairs to spend a few minutes with her daughter.

      ‘There you are, Mama,’ Verity exclaimed, looking up from the much-crossed and amended first attempt at an essay her headteacher had set her. ‘I was never more pleased to see you in my life,’ she admitted with a quaintly adult shrug and mischief in her bright blue eyes.

      ‘Because I am an exceptionally wonderful mother, or because you need help with whatever fiendish task Miss Thibett set you this time, my love?’

      ‘Both, of course,’ Verity said and Chloe wondered if her father had been a charmer as well—if so, it seemed little wonder poor Daphne had found him irresistible.

      ‘What have you been afflicted with, then?’

      ‘It’s geography, Mama,’ Verity said tragically, as if she had been asked to visit Hades and report on the scenery.

      ‘Oh, dear me, that’s certainly not your best subject,’ Chloe sympathised and wished she had more than a scratch education. ‘There must be some clue in one of Lady Virginia’s books or on one of the globes.’

      ‘I can’t find the Silk Road on a globe,’ Verity said with a pout that told Chloe she hadn’t tried very hard.

      It was a trait that reminded Chloe of Daphne and, whilst she would always defend her sister fiercely if anyone else criticised her, she refused to let Verity grow up with the same belief she only needed to cry or bat her eyelashes to get unpleasant tasks done for her.

      ‘Then you will find it in the new atlas Lady Virginia purchased last year for times like this. Once you have a list of the countries it passes through you can look up the history and trade it carries in the books the last Lord Farenze collected about the more exotic corners of the world. You should be grateful to have such knowledge at your fingertips so you can answer your headmistress’s questions when you return to school next week.’

      ‘Oh, Mama, must I?’

      ‘Yes, Verity, you must.’

      ‘I thought you might help me. It would be so much more interesting than wading through a lot of dry-as-dust philosophising about the savage ways of peoples those dreary old travellers considered less civilised than their own kind on my own.’

      ‘You must have been looking in the wrong ones. Find a book by someone who loved exploring new places and meeting new people and read what he has to say instead of some person who probably never went to the places he wrote about. There must be writings like that in such a collection. Lady Virginia’s husband doesn’t sound the sort of man who was happy to be bored witless every time he picked up a book.’

      ‘Then I must plough through every book in the library to find out a few facts that will satisfy Miss Thibett I didn’t idle my time away this week?’

      Chloe was tempted to snap an easy reply and go back to her housekeeping accounts. She knew an unsaid question about where her daughter now fitted into the world lay under her Verity’s fit of the sullens and she must set aside her not-very-tempting household accounts to deal with it.

      ‘You need an occupation, my love. Miss Thibett is a wise woman who knows far more about life than you do and she knows Lady Virginia stood in the place of a family for both of us. That is why she let you come home to say farewell to her ladyship. I was wrong to try to shield you from the pain of loss, my love, and your headmistress was right to let you grieve for the person who meant so much to you.’

      Suddenly her daughter wasn’t a young lady, or the mischievous urchin who had torn about on her pony and worried her mama with daring exploits until Lady Virginia offered to send her to school. Chloe tried not to let her own tears flow as Verity turned into her arms to be comforted.

      ‘I miss her so much, Mama,’ she wailed and wept at long last.

      ‘I know you do, my darling,’ Chloe whispered into the springing gold curls making their escape bid from Verity’s fast-unravelling plait. ‘You have every right to cry at the loss of such a good friend. Lady Virginia loved you very dearly and I know how deeply you loved her back.’

      For a while Verity wept as if her heart might break and Chloe rocked her gently, as she often had in her early years, when Daphne’s child sometimes went from happy little girl to a sobbing fury in the blink of an eye, as if she wept for all she had lost at birth. All Chloe could do back then was hold her until Verity calmed and slept, or Lady Virginia managed to divert the little girl from her woes with a joke or a funny story about her own misspent youth. This time there was no Virginia to make light of such woe and Chloe felt terribly alone and as bereft as Verity.

      ‘Where shall we go, Mama?’ the desperate question stuttered from Verity’s shaky lips as she battled dry sobs and looked tragic, as if all Chloe had been worrying about for the last weeks was crushing her, too.

      ‘Oh, my love,’ Chloe responded with tears backed up in her own throat as she realised she should have had this conversation with her daughter as soon as she came home. ‘I don’t know if we can stay here, but Lady Virginia left me a full year’s salary in return for a trifling charge she laid on me. I have enough saved to live comfortably on for a year or two after that, if I should choose not to look for a new post yet, and Lady Virginia left you an annuity, so you will never starve. Please don’t run away with the notion you’re an heiress, though, will you?’

      ‘Then I shall not. I love her even more though, now I know I shall be able to look after you one day, Mama, when you are too old to do it yourself.’

      Chloe went from the edge of tears to fighting laughter. ‘We probably have a few years before I’m too bowed with age to work, darling,’ she said with a straight face.

      ‘You’re laughing at me, aren’t you?’ Verity accused.

      ‘I’m sorry, love, but I’m not even eight and twenty yet. That might sound as if I could shake hands with Methuselah on equal terms to you, but I feel remarkably well preserved when my daughter is not making me out to be an ancient crone.’

      ‘That’s what age does to a person, Lady Virginia told me,’ Verity informed her with a solemn shake of her head, as if she saw through her mother’s ruse.

      ‘Lady Virginia was at least fifty years older than me, Verity love, and that was only what she admitted to. Her age varied every time someone was rude enough to try to find it out. I’m unlikely to follow Lady Virginia into the grave for a great many years yet and you must stop fretting about me.’

      ‘But what if you die in childbed, Mama? I can tell Lord Farenze wants to marry you and ladies die giving birth, particularly when they’re old.’

      ‘Why would Lord Farenze want to marry me?’ Chloe asked; shocked that her brain picked that rather than thinking how to reassure Verity ladies gave birth safely time after time at much more than seven and twenty.

      ‘Oh, Eve and I realised ages ago,’ her daughter said, as if it was so obvious she was amazed anyone could miss it.

      ‘I hope you kept that conclusion quiet then, as you couldn’t be more wrong.’

      ‘Bran and Miss Culdrose agree with us.’

      ‘And whatever would the rest of the household make of such a silly idea?’ Chloe asked faintly, dread at facing even the smallest scullery maid eating at her lest they were already speculating about it.

      ‘They think Mrs Winterley will put a stop to it, but Eve says her father takes no notice of what his stepmother says and even less of what she thinks.’

      Chloe sighed and decided she could put off telling Verity the story of her own birth no longer, if only to scotch any false hopes of becoming Eve’s stepsister, but her niece’s eyes were red and tired after her crying bout and

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