No such luck.
She drew in a steadying breath, then descended the last few steps.
May had never liked White Lodge, which had been designed as a hunting retreat years ago, its low-ceilinged rooms painted in muted colors. There was a stale, defeated air to the place, as befitted the Tecks’ diminished status, but the living room was worst of all. When they’d returned to England after their years abroad and were granted use of White Lodge, the Tecks had stuffed it with old furniture from Kensington Palace—furniture that was drastically out of scale, making it look like the house had swallowed another house twice its size. Fringed ottomans sprang up from the floor like mushrooms, rugs overlapped each other in chaotic disorder, and oversized curtains dragged along the floor.
Her father, Francis of Teck, sat in one of the wingback chairs, staring listlessly into the empty fireplace. He did this alot lately: just sat there, as immobile as the footmen who stood around Buckingham Palace. Except that they were young and dashing, while Francis was a shadow of his formerself.
“Hello, Father,” May said politely.
Francis had leaned forward at the sound of her footsteps, but when he saw that it was May, he sagged, as if he’d been craving the prospect of shouting at her mother. Now he was left with nothing but May, who never gave him the satisfaction of fighting back.
Sometimes, when he smiled, May caught a glimpse of the man he’d been before bitterness and abandoned dreams wore away at him. She remembered that version of Francis from her childhood, back when he used to make up silly games—like the one where they would each describe a made-up monster, and the other person attempted to sketch that monster while blindfolded. They used to dissolve into fits of laughter comparing their atrocious drawings.
Francis so rarely laughed anymore. Now he was almost always the other version of himself: apathetic, callous, cruel.
“What did you think of last night?” he asked, then answered his own question. “It was a little crowded for my taste, but I suppose when you’re the Prince of Wales, you have to invite everyone to your daughter’s wedding.” The bitterness in his tone was caustic.
“There certainly were a lot of people.” May had long ago stopped contradicting her father. At least to his face.
Francis grunted in agreement, then looked sidelong at his daughter. “You didn’t dance very much.”
“I danced with Prince Eddy,” May hurried to say.
“No good barking up that tree!” Her father laughed asif he’d said something uproariously funny. “He’s as good as engaged to that Hesse girl. You know, the pretty one.”
“Yes,” May replied, because that was the safest word around her father.
An enormous beribboned form appeared in the doorway, and May’s heart sank. She could just about manage her father when it was the two of them alone, because she knew how to placate him, to stay quiet and walk on eggshells. But her mother was too angry to behave. She deliberately provoked Francis, stomped on the eggshells.
“Well, look who the cat dragged in.” Mary Adelaide’s words were directed at her husband, who lifted one hand in a careless wave.
“Sorry to have been gone all night. I was otherwise occupied.”
He may have spoken the wordsorry,but there was no hint of apology in his tone. His words were sharpened like a weapon.
Mary Adelaide snorted. “I don’t especially care who you spend your nights with, Francis. God only knows why I married you.”
“You married me because no one else would have you,” he spat.
“Please. I could have married a nice duke, and instead you came courting, poor as a church mouse, hat in hand.”
“ ‘A nice duke’?” her father repeated incredulously. “Not even thebaronetswanted you. I should have known to back off when I saw the other princes running the opposite direction, the way they’ve all done to May—”
That would have stung, except that May had long sincegrown numb to her father’s cruelty. Of all the things he loved to criticize his wife about, May’s failure to find a husband wasone of his favorites.
She backed away, already forgotten by both parents.
May was sheltered, but she wasn’t completely ignorant of other people’s suffering. She had visited the poorhouse with other girls from church, had seen the women with bruises or broken limbs.Things could be worse,she’d told herself after that visit. At least her father never harmed her physically.
The bruises that Francis inflicted were invisible, emotional. He belittled May and her mother, laughed at their hopes, mocked things that mattered to them; and his mood swings were lightning quick. He’d always been erratic, but the cruelty had escalated after May’s brother, Dolly, enrolled at the military academy at Sandhurst last year, leaving the two women with Francis alone.
Once, when May was a child, her father had bought her a shiny red balloon at a county fair. May remembered walking home with it tied to her wrist, heart swelling with pride.
The moment they got home, Francis slashed it with his knife.
May had started sobbing. She couldn’t help it: the tattered remnants of her balloon drifting down through the air had such an awful finality to them.
“You see, May?” her father had asked, with that eerie, manic gleam in his eye. “Life can be unfair sometimes. You need to learn this at a young age. You care about things, and then you lose them, and there’s nothing you can do about it.”
