Page 10 of The Lady's Companion
“I will see that a message to Quilling Manor goes on the mail coach tonight,” he promised. “There’ll be someone waiting for you in Quilling tomorrow night.”
They paused in front of Aunt Louisa’s town house. Steinman stood, hand in pocket, observing the impeccably swept front steps and the door knocker. “You know, if you change your mind about leaving all this, I will certainly understand,” hecommented.
She shook her head. “Don’t give me any outs, Mr. Steinman,” she said. “For all that this is an impressive house, it has a way of absorbing one.”
He chuckled. “I am certain your friends will wonder if you have taken total leave of your senses.”
“Do you think I have?” she asked frankly.
He shrugged. “Who of us really knows anything about the lives of others?”
“That’s no answer,” she said, amused.
“It’s a very good answer,” he declared, then winked at her. “Besides all that, Miss Hampton, a good Jew always answers a question with a question. Good day.” He looked up at the house again. “And good luck?”
“Do I need it?” she questioned back, quizzing him with her eyes. He laughed out loud and started back toward the employment agency, head down against the wind that had picked up as the afternoon lengthened.
I will tell them over dinner, Susan decided, so I will only have to tell the news once. She wanted to begin packing, but that would have required her trunk from the attic, and she did not wish to alert the servants to her plans. Instead, she spent the little time until dinner sorting through her clothing, searching for the serviceable, winnowing out the frivolous. There was soon a respectable pile of sober clothing ready to be folded and packed into her trunk. She sighed and put her evening dresses and ball gowns in cloves and a sturdy box. She hesitated over her silk drawers and chemises, then added them to the pile. No sense in abandoning all pleasure for duty. When I am frumpily proper in serge and wool, she decided, I will enjoy my silk all the more. No one will know.
It was a small victory in an afternoon of reflection that was swallowed up totally by the sound of the dinner bell. “I cannotface them,” she said out loud, clutching a shawl of Norwich silk to her like a breastplate of steel. What had seemed so sensible and realistic before the dinner bell now felt foolish and desperate. If I say nothing at dinner, I can send round a note to the Steinmans in the morning, she thought, as she poked at her hair in the mirror and tried to squeeze a little color back into her cheeks. I can stay here and let Aunt Louisa throw me the occasional bone.
She stared at her own anxious face, closing her eyes against her own eyes so wide and frightened in the glass. Everyone knew that Sir Rodney Hampton had never kept a promise in his life; why should his daughter? “But I have promised I would go tomorrow,” she said and opened her eyes cautiously. The fright was still there in her reflection, but something more, too, a curious kind of resolution more felt than visible, but real all the same. “I promised,” she repeated. “I promised.”
Susan saved her news until after the fish course had been removed by the mutton. At least they cannot accuse me of springing horrible news on an empty stomach, she thought, as she speared a slice of mutton with more intensity than usual. And I do not much care for mutton in the first place. She put down her fork.
“I have something to tell you.”
They looked at her, and some instinct told her that even years from now, these would be the faces she remembered—Emily, her air of vague distraction made more pronounced by the burden of being a violet female in a daffodil year; Aunt Louisa, faintly annoyed to be disturbed from her mutton’s path from fork to mouth; and Papa, wary and eager-eyed at the same time, desperate for good news from some source. And what had Susan ever been to him but pleasant company?
“I have accepted a position as companion to an elderly lady living in the Cotswolds. I leave tomorrow morning.”
It sounded bald, even to her. The silence that followed her quiet pronouncement was the silence of disapproval so profound that there were no words. “I will be paid thirty pounds a year, plus my room and board,” she added, wanting to fill that enormous silence, even if it was only with puny words that sounded like chicken peeps.
Papa spoke first, and this startled her. She glanced at Aunt Louisa, wondering if the news had rendered her speechless, and angry at her father for throwing her off balance.
”I spent more than that on gloves last year,” he said, his tone oddly placating, which only brought her own anger to a high boil.
“I know, Papa!” she said, her voice big in the room. It was almost a relief to talk back to him, to cow him in his chair and watch him shrink before her eyes. “I am tired of your endless, silly promises and your spendthrift ways. They have quite ruined me!”
He winced at her words as though she had lashed him with a whip. “Hamptons don’t behave like this, daughter...” he began, but she would not let him continue.
“I know that,” she raged. “They smile and simper and look big-eyed at the world, and hope for charm to help them over life’s little trials. No, I am not like you,” she finished, each word a slap in his face. “And I thank God for that.”
“That is quite enough, Susan.” Aunt Louisa was on her feet now, the fork with its bit of mutton still in her hand. “You will apologize to your father!”
Susan leaped to her feet and flung down her napkin like a gauntlet. “I will not! You cannot make me!”
Aunt Louisa seemed to tower over her. “You will apologize to your father, and we will forget this conversation ever took place.”
“I will not revoke a word of it,” Susan said, with a calm now to match her aunt’s. “It is enough that I have to earn my bread andspend a lifetime living down my father’s sorry reputation.”
Sir Rodney closed his eyes as if she had slapped him. Susan looked at him, suddenly aghast at herself because she felt nothing – no pity, no sorrow, no remorse. Pathetic man, she thought. Why should a body feel anything for you? She looked up from her contemplation of her father. Aunt Louisa was speaking again.
“You will apologize or you will not return to this house, once having left it.”
“If that is your choice, Aunt,” Susan said, as she started from the dining room.
“No, Susan. It is yours.”
