Page 70 of A Sense of Misgiving
He treated her to a soft smile. ‘As if you needed to ask.’
*
Flora slept better than she had anticipated, given the task that she had set for herself. She could have written to her father outlining what she knew, and that would have been enough to keep him in line. But she was no longer a child, no longer petrified of his volatile temper, and needed the satisfaction of confronting him.
She was driven to the station early the next morning by Luke’s coachman and reversed the journey that she had made six months previously as a nervous yet determined rebel. She hardly recognised the person she had turned into during the short intervening period. It was the person she was supposed to be, accounting for her inability to settle into the life of a docile and obedient clergyman’s daughter.
Her train deposited her in Salisbury in the middle of the morning. She walked the short distance to Cathedral Close with her head held high. One or two familiar faces glanced her way but didn’t greet her. Presumably the improvement in her clothing and her confident demeanour made them doubt their own eyes. Just as well. She had no desire to be diverted from her purpose. She was not nervous, precisely. More resolved, and in no mood to idle her precious time away with mindless gossip.
She approached the house she had hoped never to see again. Large by most people’s standards, to Flora it looked smaller than she recalled, perhaps because she had become accustomed to more space and greater opulence. She didn’t knock, but turned the handle and walked straight in. The one servant her father employed was overworked and did not come to investigate. She heard the piano being badly played by one of her sisters and the voices of them all, led by her mother, rising up in a hymn. Flora didn’t pause, but made her way straight to her father’s library. It was his custom to work there alone every morning, and he disliked interruptions. His gruff voice barked out an impatient order to enter when she tapped at the door.
‘What is it, my dear? I especially told you that this…’ He glanced up, his eyes widened and his mouth fell open. ‘Flora.’ He half rose from his chair. ‘You are come home.’ But he looked wary, presumably because her expression was carved in stone and he sensed she had not come to stay.
‘Not for long, Father.’ She closed the door behind her and calmly took a seat in front of the fire. She had seldom entered this room during her childhood, unless it was to be chastised for her latest wrong-doing, and she was never invited to sit. This time she did not wait to be invited. ‘I have read Grandmamma’s diaries,’ she said without preamble.
The colour drained from his face as he plopped down in the chair across from hers. ‘I had not realised that Farthingale had already passed your bequest on.’
‘I asked him to when you became so insistent upon my returning here and threatened to make trouble for the earl and his family. They have been kind and generous, treating me as one of their own, and I will not permit you to sully their reputation.’
‘You will not?’ His chest swelled and he looked on the point of delivering a set-down, seeming to forget that he no longer held the upper hand in their relationship.
‘Your thuggish threats are not what brought me here.’ She fixed him with a look of steely resolve. ‘I know you killed your own father.’
Papa’s cheeks bulged and flushed a deep shade of red. ‘That is ridiculous! As always, my mother exaggerated.’
‘You did not quarrel about a séance he held, to which a member of the senior clergy had inveigled an invitation? The man was a critic of yours and could stall your career’s progression because you had given him your assurance that your father no longer practised spiritualism?’
Her father didn’t respond immediately, and Flora knew he would be thinking hard about how to defend his position. He would also resent having to explain himself to a disobedient daughter. But Flora held all the aces and he had no choice.
‘I was angry when I heard what had happened, I won’t deny it. I confronted my father and reminded him of his promise, but he denied making it.’
‘Perhaps because he did not. Grandmamma says that you argued the point. Grandpapa had agreed to exercise discretion, but he never ever said that he would give up trying to help people.’
‘Help?’ Papa threw up his hands, still struggling to contain his temper. ‘All that mumbo-jumbo was no help to anyone. Telling people what they wanted to hear about an afterlife, indeed.’
‘Isn’t that what you do every Sunday?’
‘I will not tolerate blasphemy in this house, Flora.’
‘You are no longer in any position to give me orders.’ Flora adjusted the fall of her skirts. ‘Tell me what happened between you and Grandpapa. I can easily imagine that you were furious. I have been on the receiving end of your fury often enough to know that you possess a quick and violent temper and that you are not always reasonable.’ She glanced at his desk and shuddered, recalling the numerous occasions when she had been forced to bend over it whilst he applied a birch with considerable force to the backs of her bare thighs in punishment for some mild transgression of his rules. Given the frequency with which such punishments had been administered, Flora suspected that he had taken some sort of deviant pleasure from delivering them. ‘You confronted him, naturally.’
‘I did, and matters became heated.’ Papa puffed out his chest, righteously outraged. ‘He refused to listen to reason and tried to push past me and leave the room. I pushed him back, unwilling to let him go until we resolved the matter once and for all. He stumbled over a fold in the rug, fell and hit his head on the mantle.’ Papa shook his head. ‘It was an accident. There was nothing anyone could have done to save him. He had a weak heart and was dead the moment he hit the floor.’
‘How convenient for you.’ Flora sent him a sceptical look. ‘No wonder Grandmamma said she was your conscience. She kept quiet about what she knew in return for not being committed to a lunatic asylum, when in fact she was as sane as you or me.’ She made no attempt to keep the contempt out of her voice. ‘You must be so very proud.’
‘It was not my finest hour, I’ll be the first to admit that, and the circumstances have haunted me ever since. However, I prayed for guidance and the good Lord saw fit to call me to his service.’
Flora rolled her eyes. ‘Of course he did.’
‘What are you doing to do?’ he asked.
Flora should have felt some satisfaction at having her father beholden to her for the first time in her life. Their roles had been effectively reversed. Instead, she felt an overwhelming sadness for the lost little boy who had just wanted to be accepted by his peers and had turned his obsessive nature into a religious quest when that had not happened.
‘Tell me how you came to hear the rumours about Lord Swindon’s father’s gambling debt.’
She thought at first that he wouldn’t answer her but, of course, he had no choice.
‘Captain Redfern came to see me one day, out of the blue. A war hero, injured during battle in Afghanistan.’
