Page 7 of Lady Fiona's Tall, Dark Folly
Chapter 2
April 30, 1816
“You are quite certain you'll be able to manage without me?" Fifi asked her butler and her mother's nurse one last time. They stood in the upstairs hall outside her mother's suite with Fifi in a muddle.
Jerrold bristled, insulted, and drew himself up into his dignity. "Yes, milady."
"Oh, yes, ma'am," said the nurse who'd weathered many a storm caused by Fifi's mother in her bouts of hysteria.
"You'll fetch Porter if you need him?" Fifi insisted on the footman intervening whenever her mother became agitated or unmanageable. Porter was a former bare knuckle boxer. With broken nose and cheekbone, he was a hulking mountain of a man.
The butler and maid assured her it would be so.
Her mother was particularly worrisome this morning. Raving on about her hair, how silver it was, how the nurse must have dyed it in the night as she slept, running at the dutiful servant as if she were a mouse to be chased through her rooms.
"We'll get on," Nurse Pritchard said, a mournful downturn to her mouth. She'd been with the family all her life and felt maternal toward Fifi. "You must go to this party, my lady. You always do. It will do you good. Spring air, you know."
"The doctor's suggestion of laudanum is not one I wish you to use."
"Yes, ma'am." The nurse nodded, her eyes cast downward. "I remember."
"Only in severe situations." The trouble was every one of her mother's outbursts could be termed just that. Fifi did not like the addictive nature of the poppy, but she didn't like her mother to be tied to her bed, either. Still, they had few options to calm her when safety of others was a concern. In a fit the countess had been known to pick up chairs, destroy furniture, yell obscenities at the top of her lungs. Unnerving to say the least. And at worst...
Fifi swallowed on the harsh matter of restraining her mother. "I don't like to subject any of you to the terror of it, but I frankly do not know what else to do." The physician offered no alternatives of any value, save the opium extract which given liberally made her mother listless.
Jerrold scowled. He'd served in this household for three decades. He could tell tales Fifi did not wish to hear, not only about her mother's irrational behavior but also her father's rake hell nature. "If she cannot be dissuaded, my lady, we can usher her into the back room we've prepared."
Fifi grimaced. Over a year ago, Jerrold had led the staff to strip their mother's dressing room not only of clothes and hats and shoes, but also of any hairbrush or comb or instrument she could use to attack them. The countess had done so twice, sending one poor footman to the servants' quarters with a broken arm and another, a maid, against the wall, head first. Dizzy and crying, the girl recovered quickly, but others on staff grew leery of their mistress. Fifi had been horrified, outraged as she had never been since before her father died.
After that incident,Fifi had ordered a tiny room carved out of her mother's quarters. This room was minus all furniture and contained only soft bedding. Fifi also sought out a giant of a man as a servant to protect them during her mother’s rages. In Bath, she'd found a former pugilist. Porter was now their footman and he helped defend them all from her mother.
Why her mother acted as she did was a mystery to Fifi. The woman was free of her abusive husband and to Fifi's thinking, her mother should rejoice at that. The old earl had always acted brutishly to his wife. How Mama could not celebrate that monster's passing, Fifi could not fathom. She lived each day without him with a joy untold to anyone. Even to her best friend Mary, Fifi had not breathed a word of her father’s abuse. Though the man had never laid a finger on Fifi, she damned him to eternity for what he'd been and what evil he'd visited upon her mother. From snippets of arguments between her parents that she’d overheard, Fifi concluded her father had probably treated other women cruelly as well.
Fifi nodded at her staff. "Yes, if you must, do lead her to the quiet room. Our best alternative." She inhaled, eager to escape to the country for the respite from care of her mother that she dearly needed. "I will go in and bid heradieu."
Pritchard curtsied.
Fifi collected her courage, for she feared her mama would violently object to her departure. "You may go, Jerrold. Do send on my luggage to the coaching station. I meet Lady Mary there at half the hour. No need to open the door for me here. I'll go in as I wish."
"You will call if you need me."
If her mother was agitated this morning, Fifi would need her strong footman rather than her frail butler. "Of course, Jerrold. Not to fear." Good words for herself, too.
Both servants backed away.
Collected and calm, Fifi stepped to the door, knocked and entered.
Her mother was not in her sitting room but in her bedroom. Attired in the simple cotton gown without ties or adornment, her aging mother—white-haired and lovely still at sixty-four—sat in her enormous wing chair near the window. The chair, upholstered and solid walnut, was one the woman could not lift to hurl at anyone.
"There you are, Fee. Come." She crooked a finger at her only child as if Fifi were a scullery maid. This morning, the lady had agreed to bathe, but would not allow Pritchard to comb her hair. The long silver tresses flowed over her tall, sturdy form like an untamed river.
Fifi approached her. Closer than she had drawn near to her earlier this morning, Fifi detected that her mother had dispelled her earlier rage and would not attack her. "I wished to tell you that I am off to the market."
"Oh, bother! Allow the maids to shop! Why dirty your hands! I need you here."
Fifi inhaled. She would go to this May Day party. She had to learn why and how her cousin Esme had captured the elusive Northington as her husband. "I must go, Mama. The maids don't choose the best cuts of meat."
"Dismiss them then. Who needs them?"
