Page 2 of The Lady's Companion
He was in such a good mood that Susan hoped he did not notice her little sigh. He came around the sofa and sat down beside her, looking around the room.
“We’ll have new draperies before the week is out, and I’ll get the plasterer in to do something about the ceiling. Just see if I will, Susan.” He kissed her cheek. “Happy birthday, my dear.”
She smiled at him, but said nothing, knowing well that Papa would supply the text, if she was reluctant.
“Susan, I have been invited to such a card game at White’s!” hesaid when she continued her silence.
“Papa, no...” she began, but he cut her off with one elegantly shaped finger to her lips.
“Susan, trust me to know what’s best. There now. He is an industrialist from somewhere to the north,” he explained, gesturing vaguely in the direction of Scotland. “Lord Kinsey tells me that he is ripe to pluck, has a face as easy to read as a mirror, and a hammy hand with wagers.”
“No, Papa,” she cautioned more urgently, but she might have addressed the fireplace for all the attention he paid her. Sir Rodney Hampton was on his feet now, pausing in front of the mirror for one final prink at his collar points. She started toward him, but Wilde stood in the doorway now, extending Sir Rodney’s coat to him.
He allowed the butler to help him into the coat, and accepted his hat before turning to his daughter again. “Susan, sometimes I wonder if you are really a Hampton,” he scolded, his voice light and teasing. “One could almost call you stodgy.”
“One could almost call me sensible,” she said to the window glass a moment later as she watched her father pick his way down the icy sidewalk. The glass fogged over, and by the time she had wiped it clear, Papa had settled himself into a hackney. She sighed. He would ride it to within a block of his destination, then get out and walk the rest of the way, so no gentleman looking out of White’s big bay window would suspect that Sir Rodney Hampton had sold his carriage horses. But if she could believe the arch looks that she endured when they were out in public, the only one fooled by his charade was Sir Rodney himself.
Her heart burned for him, but she did not know what to do, beyond saying a little prayer that he would not be fleeced beyond his means, and that he would remember to come home in time to share her birthday dinner. Cook had promised Georgianapudding with fruit sauce, one of her particular favorites. She grinned at the windowpane, fogging it again. At least I need not fret and starve myself like my cousin Amanda, she thought. We Hamptons may not be blessed with too many coins of the realm, but we do have slender figures.
“Even if I am now facing the perils of my twenty-sixth year, I can do it with a little waist,” she said out loud, then hurried upstairs to make her bed.
She ate her Georgiana pudding alone that night, alert for the sound of Papa’s key in the lock. It didn’t taste as good as she remembered, but she knew better than to allow Jane to take even a stray spoonful belowstairs. Cook would mope and stew and create scenes that would require all of Wilde’s patience, so Susan forced herself to eat it all, even though her mind and her heart were on Papa.
He did not come in at bedtime, and she allowed herself the luxury of a little hope. If he was having a successful run of cards, she reasoned, he would stay. When she finished the last of her mending, she lingered a few minutes more in the sitting room, soaking in warmth to carry upstairs to her cold bedroom. I am too old for a come out now, she thought, spreading her fingers over the cooling fire. But if there is a respectable dowry, even a small one, perhaps I could attract a widower.
And that, she concluded, would be better than no man at all. Susan hurried into her nightclothes and leaped into bed, blessing Jane for providing a rare warming pan in honor of her birthday. I would like it if he were not bald, or paunchy, or lacking teeth, she thought, after she said her prayers in bed (The Lord would understand how cold the floor was, she was sure, and it was her birthday). If he liked to carry on conversations about books, and didn’t mind her sketches, that would be so much leaven in the loaf.
And that was as far as her fancy ever took her anymore. “Isuppose Iamstodgy, for a Hampton,” she told the ceiling as she hugged her pillow to her. “Oh, Papa, even a little dowry would make such a difference!”
She was just about asleep when she heard Wilde open the front door. She lay there smiling into the dark, then got up and padded on stockinged feet to the stairway landing that looked down on the front hall.
Papa stood there in his coat. He held out his arms automatically for Wilde to remove it, then shook his head and said good night to his butler.
Susan got no farther than the first step down. She was about to call a greeting to her father, but something in his stillness stopped the words in her throat. Scarcely breathing, she lowered herself to the top step and sat crouched in the shadows of the chilly upper landing.
She held her breath and watched him standing so motionless, his eyes riveted to the floor as though he searched for something he had dropped. She let her breath out slowly and put her hands to her mouth as he sank to his knees, pitched forward onto his elbows, then rested his forehead against the cold parquet flooring.
He didn’t cry so much as moan. It was a ghastly sound, worse than Mama’s last, long breath that had gone on and on until it seemed to blend with the breeze of a long-ago summer. That was death, and it comes to all. This was worse: it was the sound of hope gone.
Susan closed her eyes against the sight of her father groveling on the floor below. There was a pain in her as though someone had slit open her chest, ripped out her heart, wrung every drop from it, then crammed it back into her body. She opened her eyes and calmly observed her father. She rose to her feet, more steady of motion than she felt, and climbed the one step to the landing. She would not stomp on his dignity by rushing below tojoin her tears to his, but would wait until morning.
Bad news always keeps, she thought as she dragged herself into bed and closed her eyes again. Papa will have to tell me tomorrow, but we will deal with it. She pulled the covers up to her chin. But as for me, I will not trust another’s promises ever again. And when I get up in the morning, I will have turned a page in my book of life.
Chapter Two
As it turned out, there wasn’t time to mourn the evaporation of social repute, town manor, household effects, and servants on the turn of a card; the matter came to a head too quickly. Papa’s disgrace crashed down around him on a Tuesday night. By Friday evening, that most enterprising young Lancastershire mill owner was sitting with a sigh of satisfaction in Papa’s favorite chair, snapping out Papa’s newspaper, and waiting for Wilde’s summons to dinner.
Susan and her father followed the carter in a hackney to Aunt Louisa’s house six blocks over on the corner of Timothy and Quayle streets. Susan would have walked to save the pence, but Sir Rodney wouldn’t hear of it.
“Tush, my dear,” he said with a wave of his hand, “how would it look?”
She turned toward the window, biting back angry words that she would only have regretted later. In the three days since his ruin and their expulsion, she saw her father quite clearly for the child he was, and would always be. As long as Sir Rodney possessed two groats to rub together in his pocket, he would always choose to flick one at a beggar, squander the other on a bunch of violets, and look around for someone to provide him with two more.
“Besides, Susan, you know that we will come about again,” he said, taking her clenched fist between his two hands and trying to smooth out her fingers. He leaned closer, speaking confidentially. “And I have heard of a wonderful game tonight at Lord Crutchley’s.”
She jerked her hand away. “Papa! We have lost everything! How can you speak of gaming!”
The hurt look came into his eyes and he pouted, leaning back against the dusty cushions. “I had thought... your mother’s pearls,” he said finally, his voice heavy with misuse.
