And then her face crumpled before her eyes. She dropped her face into her hands and sobbed with unabashed self-pity.
•••
“Emilywill come home with Constance and me,” Victor said. His face was unsmiling, almost grim. “’Tis only fitting. I am her brother, head of her family. Elm Court is where she belongs. I will be able to keep an eye on her there.”
“And Charlotte and Jeremiah will be close by,” Constance said. “’Twill be a consolation to her to be close to the church.”
Jeremiah added, “I have always said—have I not, my love?—I have always said that an unmarried daughter’s place is in the home of her birth with whoever is head of that home. Emily can be taught to be useful at Elm Court. And Charlotte will help Constance to provide moral guidance.”
“La, it sounds almost,” Doris said, “as if Luke is not considered a responsible guardian.”
The Earl of Weims laid a hand over hers on the table and she subsided into silence.
“Emily would probably be happier away from here,” the Dowager Duchess of Harndon said. “With her own family and away from all members of mine.”
“Emmy will stay where she belongs,” Anna said, her cheeks flushed with color. “Where she has always been happy and loved. She will not go with you, Victor, to be made to feel that she is somehow a child who needs to be disciplined.”
Luke did to Anna what the earl had just done to Doris. He set a hand over hers. “You need not upset yourself, my dear,” he said.
“If truth were known,” Victor said, “Luke will be only too glad to be rid of Emily, Anna. It cannot be comfortable for him to know that his brother was the one to dishonor her or that our sister was the one who refused to allow Lord Ashley to retrieve his honor.”
“’Tis true, Anna,” Constance said, looking as if she was on the verge of tears.
Anna already was in tears.
“And you must consider your husband’s feelings before your own or Emily’s, Anna,” Jeremiah added. “He is your lord and master.”
“’Tis remarkable, by my life,” Luke said, his eyebrows raised haughtily, though the eyes beneath them looked more lazy than cold, “to find that so many people are privy to my inmost thoughts and feelings and choose to speak for me.”
He had not finished. But Emily, who had been sitting at the breakfast table, watching herself being spoken of in the third person, watching her future being decided for her, though she had kept her eyes determinedly on her plate for much of the time, did not wait for the rest. She got to her feet, folded her napkin and set it neatly beside her plate, and left the room. She resisted the urge to run.
There was nowheretorun. There was nowhere to go. Whether she wished it or not, they would decide for her. She was now and forever the spinster member of the family, a burden on them all whether or not they ever admitted it, even in the privacy of their own minds. It was the desire to avoid that very situation that had made her decide upon marriage. Better an unexciting marriage in which there was no deep love, she had decided, than dependence upon her relatives for the rest of her life.
Now she had no alternative to dependence.
And worse now was the fact that she was not even amaidenrelative dependent upon them. She was a fallen woman. Perhaps they would never describe her as such, but every word that had been spoken at the breakfast table this morning had presupposed that fact. And the fact that she was subnormal, incapable of managing her own life. How weary she was of the sight of sound—too weary even to be amused by the thought. Sound, it seemed—voices—ruled the world. It was the only sanity.
She went upstairs for a cloak and then walked outside. She walked all the way down through the terraces of the formal gardens and across the lawn below them. She crossed the bridge and walked down the driveway into the trees. Strangely, in seven years she had never come back to that particular tree. But she knew it unerringly. She stood against it as she had stood that morning. She set her head back against the trunk and closed her eyes. Shutting herself in again.
This morning she was several hours too late.
•••
Lukewaited for Emily to leave. He curled his fingers about Anna’s hand. Like Emily, she had remarkable control over her emotions. Rarely did she become openly and publicly upset.
“’Twould seem to me,” Luke said, “that two important facts have been ignored both yesterday and today. Perhaps three. First, Emily is a person, with intelligence and a will of her own. Second, she is an adult—two-and-twenty years of age. Thirdly, she has already taken responsibility for her own questionable actions of two nights ago and has already decided her course. Perhaps discussing her future among ourselves, especially in her presence, is not the right thing to do. Perhaps we should consult Emily’s wishes.”
“Bravo, my lad,” Lord Quinn said.
“Emmy will wish to stay here, Luke,” Anna said.
“Emily must learn that she gave up her right to choose yesterday,” Victor said.
“Emily needs to learn that she must be ruled by the men in her life,” Jeremiah said. “In this case, by Victor.”
“I shall offer Emily a choice that has not been mentioned yet,” Lady Sterne said, entering the discussion for the first time. “I shall offer it, not dictate it. And I would remind anyone who speaks of the men in a woman’s life”—she looked severely at the Reverend Hornsby—“that some women manage very nicely without such a disagreeable watchdog. Harndon has already reminded us that Emily is of age. If she chooses, she may return to London with me. ’Tis the Season, when all the fashionable world will be assembled for enjoyment. I shall take her about and have the happiest spring since I had Anna and Agnes to bring out. ’Tis time that Emily was no longer coddled. She isdeaf,not a mindless infant.”
“Bravo, Marj, m’dear,” Lord Quinn said.
