Page 119 of Wild Lily
Julian clasped his hands together. “We can discuss this after all have left us.”
“No.”
Her belligerence sent Lily backward in her chair. All others in the room, save Julian, got to their feet, intent on the doors.
“What is my portion?” the dowager persisted, her inquiry of Phillip Leland.
“Tell her. She might as well know all.” Julian rose.
She sneered at him and fixed her gaze on Leland once more. “My portion? You read no amounts.”
Leland stood with an apologetic glance at Julian. “His Grace, your husband, did not wish the sums to be known publicly, Your Grace.”
She grumbled. “But I must know.”
“Three thousand a year.”
She winced. “Absurd. When I married it was be ten.”
Leland inclined his head. “It was. But conditions have changed and three is what the estate can afford you.”
She faced Julian. “I demand more.”
“There is no more to give you. Father did not invest your jointure in stocks that bore sufficient interest. Even three thousand a year is a huge amount to divest from the family assets.”
Her mother-in-law cast her gaze about the salon, her dark eyes a venomous snap. Beneath her black veil, she indicated her sorrow with a quivering chin and an appropriately crushed handkerchief in one hand. “I cannot live on three. I will not.”
“I’m sorry.” With a polite incline of his head and finality to his tone, Leland let that be the end of this topic.
“The servants’ stipend?” The dowager duchess would not let go her ire, pinning the lawyer to his spot. “Where did that money come from?”
Leland barely breathed. “Your son, the duke gave it to the estate.”
“Really?” She spun toward Julian with violence in her gaze. “From where?”
Lily could bear this woman no longer. Her bitterness, her false dignity, her sense of entitlement were appalling. Lily could not wait for the day she moved to the dower house.
“Where?” the woman insisted with a stomp of her foot. “Ah. The American’s dowry.”
One brow arching high, Julian considered her with a disparaging eye. “No.”
“Where then?”
“You are being unruly, madam,” Julian warned her.
“I insist.”
“Do it all you like,” he said and made for the doors. “I will not remain to listen.”
“I am your mother.”
He whirled to face her. “Yes. And I wish, only once, you might have acted like it. But for more years than I care to recall, I have seen you teach me by word and example, that more than my mother, you have become a selfish, rude, ruthless creature.”
Lily stood, she knew not how. Never had she heard anyone in her family have such an exchange. Never had she deemed it possible. But suddenly, she saw clearly one reason why Julian might never love her. Might not even be capable.
He’d been nurtured by people who knew not how to care for others. Not selflessly. Not completely.
One glance at Elanna told Lily she was horribly right.
The young woman was smiling, the expression triumphant. Sardonic.
Marriage had transformed Elanna. How, why, what Carbury and she did together, how they got on, would never be fully known to Lily. Nor did she wish to learn.
But to look at Elanna told her one more fact very clearly. Elanna had withdrawn from her husband along with all others in her family. Her reasons were her own. She’d had examples set before her of parents who tormented each other. If her own marriage was not happy, she could think that the norm.
Did her brother bear the same tendencies?
Could Julian turn on Lily the way his mother had turned on his father? Would he love? Or did he only lust?
