Page 48 of Bad Luck Bride

“We were trying to save the estates, which was also saving you, young lady, and your baby sister, and hundreds of other people. Or would you have preferred we let Raleigh Grange fall to pieces and watch our tenants and our servants and the village suffer without trying to save them just so that you could marry for love? Love,” she added with disdain. “No eighteen-year-old girl even understands what love is. You’d known That Horrible Man less than three months. Love? Don’t tell me.”

“What about Papa? Wasn’t saving the estates, taking care of us, and ensuring everyone’s future supposed to be his office?”

“He tried!” For the first time, a quaver came into Magdelene’s voice. “You know the income from land rents is dismal nowadays. These beastly agricultural depressions, tenants giving up their farms to work in factories… all that puts a peer in an almost impossible position. When your father realized that mortgaging the estates wasn’t going to be enough to carry us through, he put what money we had left into funds and investments, but then…”

“But then,” Kay finished for her, “he lost it all.”

Magdelene sniffed. “Your father was an earl, Kay, not a financier.”

“So I became the only card he had left to play. He refused to allow me to consider Devlin as a suitor, but that wasn’t because Devlin didn’t have the money to supportme.”

As she spoke, the girlish delusions she’d clung to about her father began breaking apart and falling away, and she was astonished at how liberating that felt. “No,” she continued, “it was because Devlin didn’t have the money to bail him out of the mess. He needed to sell me off.”

“I refuse to allow you to denigrate your father in this ungrateful way!”

“Ungrateful?”

“Yes!” Magdelene cried. “It was not your father’s fault that things happened as they did. You have no idea how it worried him that he was not able to take care of us. All the sleepless nights he went over and over the account books, trying to make the money we had stretch a little further. And none of this was his fault. Most of the money had dried up long before he even became the earl.”

“So you and Papa transferred the burden of responsibility for our future onto me without even consulting me on the subject.”

“Our fortune was gone. We were practicing every economy possible, paring staff down to the bone, making over clothes season after season, cutting house parties to one a year. You have no idea how hard it was.”

“Only one house party a year?” Kay echoed. “Oh, well, I’m sure I don’t know how you managed to hold your head up in the county.”

Magdelene drew herself up with injured dignity. “There were far worse things than that, things we never told you. Did you ever go into the attics at Raleigh Grange? No?” she added when Kay shook her head. “Shall I tell you what they contained? Bowls, pots, and buckets everywhere to catch the rain from the roof, a roof that leaked like a sieve and could not be repaired because there was no money to do so. Cracks in the very foundations of the house that we had no money to fix. We mortgaged everything we could, but it still wasn’t enough.”

She sniffed and lifted a corner of the counterpane to dab at her eyes. “The tenant cottages were in need of repairs, too, but we couldn’t afford any, so we had to lower the rents. That, of course, meant even less money coming in.” Her mother’s voice was shaking, and Kay braced herself for the inevitable bout of weeping that was about to commence. “There were times when Mrs. Jones was at her wits’ end to make a decent meal on the food budget we had to give her. We were teetering on the brink of destitution long before your father died, Kay. We hid it from you, of course, but now, after a year of living with what I had endured for two decades, surely you have come to understand the hard reality of our situation?”

“Given that I am now marrying a man I do not love to save us from poverty, I can assure you that I understand the situation quite well, Mother.”

“Love,” her mother said with a sniff as she tucked her handkerchief back in her pocket. “You keep throwing that word around as if it is the only thing that matters. Going without food and a roof over your head would be worse, young lady.”

Kay didn’t know if her mother was exaggerating what she’d put up with during her years at Raleigh Grange. With Magdelene, one could never tell where truth ended and fiction began. But she did know that her childhood had not been one of money being extravagantly flung about. Even when she was a little girl, there had been economies. She also knew that her mother was right. Love was all very well, but it didn’t pay the bills.

Despite that, however, she could not forgive her parents’ deceit so easily. “You lied to me. You and Papa lied, and you schemed, and used me. You put the burden of saving us on me.”

“Who would you suggest carry that burden, if not you? Would you prefer to lay the responsibility on Josephine?”

Kay sucked in a deep breath, that question like a punch in the stomach. “Giles,” she said after a moment, “would have saved the estates with his money when he became the earl, with or without marrying me. I don’t see why you needed me.”

“We were still hoping for a son. And our hopes were justified when I became pregnant again.”

“What?” Kay stared at her parent, aghast. “When was this?”

“Right after you eloped. Why do you think your father and I did what we did? Why we were so desperate for you to marry someone suitable? Were we to leave our son with a bankrupt, decrepit estate?”

“And I,” Kay murmured bitterly, “was to be the sacrificial lamb for this potential son and heir.”

“Don’t pretend you don’t understand how families like ours work! Daughters must take second place. But then, I lost the baby, and we knew all was probably lost for us as well. But we still hoped to secure your future and your sister’s. That was why your father was pushing you so hard to marry Giles, and why we had to keep you away from That Horrible Man. With Giles, your future would have been secure, and Josephine’s, too. And you already knew him, you were fond of him, and you had so much in common. We felt he was the perfect person for you, a far better choice for you than the penniless fifth son of a baron who would have hauled you off to the savage wilds of Africa.”

For the first time since beginning this conversation, Kay felt her anger faltering. Whoever said there were two sides to every story had known what he was talking about. Her family story, she appreciated, had at least three. Perhaps more.

“What a shock it must have been,” she murmured, “when my elopement became public knowledge and Giles threw me over.”

“It was the most devastating blow of our lives,” Magdelene said simply. “Your father was never the same man after that. He died heartsick, blaming himself, knowing you and Josephine would now be left with nothing.”

Kay tried to shore her anger back up, but she couldn’t do it. She wanted to hang on to resentment and blame, but what good would it do? Her duty remained the same, for Josephine’s sake. Still, there was one thing she had to say, one thing she needed her mother to understand before this matter could be put behind them.

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