Startled, I look up.
It is Mrs. Dowell.
She is standing in the doorway and lookstriumphant.
As I hold stock-still, my heart thumping with dread, Mrs. Dowell tilts her head into the corridor and calls out, “I found her! She’s in here, searching through Father’s things. I told you she is a spy. You said she is just a dunderhead.”
Good God, she is loud!
Like the town crier extolling the time, but smug.
So smug.
“Eleanor thinks she is a dunderhead.”
That is Sarah.
I hear her before I see her.
She is still in the hallway when she adds, “Ithink she is a fortune hunter. Granted, I do not think she is the brightest fortune hunter in the kingdom, but I did assume she had more brains in her head than to attempt something this asinine and flagrant.”
And then she is here, in the room, her eyes widening as she spots me standing over her father’s desk, and I feel color flood my face.
I am hot.
The room is sweltering.
Sweat drips down my back as Eleanor enters and says thatthiswas precisely the level of dunderhead she had meant. “That said, I did not expect her to be quite so stupid as to be found clutching Father’s will. I figured she would make a series of asinine comments like her mother and then fall into mortified silence.”
Father’s will?
The legal document of indeterminate significance is their father’s will?
I refuse to believe it.
Cruel fate cannot be quitethatcruel.
I do not look.
Why should I look?
What will knowing accomplish?
As it is, I have to leave here tonight and never return.
Mama will be so upset!
And Russell—he will never let me live it down. I will be two and fifty on my deathbed and he will still be crowing about the time I was caught in Bedfordshire with my beau’s father’s will in my hand.
It would be better if I died right here.
You may strike me down now, my Lord. Go on, you do not need to be shy.
Remarkably, I feel the worst of the panic begin to leave me at the thought of Russell’s inevitable gloating. I have spent the whole of my life trying to prove my superiority, and losing in such an extreme fashion lets me off the hook.
I never have to prove anything to anyone ever again.
It is over.
