“I’ll have dinner tonight with you all so I can spend more time with Prudence,” I went on. “Then I’ll get out of your hair tomorrow.”
Though I had no idea where I’d go, but it seemed I had no choice but to go.
I was about to walk out of the room when he spoke.
“You threatening to leave, take yourself from Prudence, truncate this visit she’s been looking forward to for months, is not going to get me to agree to your terms.”
Of all the…
“That’s not what I’m doing,” I denied hotly. “As my grandmother always said, fish and guests stink after three days, Your Grace. If I had my nose stuck in journals and letters for two weeks, and you all rarely saw me, that’s one thing. But now I have to figure my shit out, and I have no reason to be here, so I’ll be doing that elsewhere.”
“And what will Prudence do?”
“I have a six-month lease on a cottage about an hour away.” That lease started in two weeks, but he didn’t need to know that. “If I have breaks from writing whatever I’m going to need to talk my publishers into wanting to publish, she and I can take some day jaunts.”
His attractive chin jerked into his corded-with-muscle neck, and he said, “Day jaunts?” like I suggested Prudence and I fly to Australia to have lunch on a cruise of Sydney Harbor and then fly back.
“Day jaunts,” I reiterated.
“Except to go to the village, Prue hasn’t left this estate in six years.”
I blinked.
And then I said, “But just at tea, she said we had to go to Glastonbury.”
Suddenly, it looked like he was seeing me.
Of course, it wasn’t as if he didn’t know I was in the same room for the last however long we’d been in the same room.
But now, for some reason, he was seeing me.
“She hasn’t left The Downs or the village in six years?” I asked softly.
“I take it in your online friendship, she didn’t share that with you,” he replied.
Perhaps we were getting somewhere, and his mention of “your online friendship” was what made me wonder if he thought I was some kind of reprobate, using a relationship I formed with Prudence to get through the front door so I could steal the family silver.
“No, she didn’t share that,” I informed him. “Is she…” I looked to the door and again to him. “Is she okay?”
“As years passed, Prue’s world narrowed. I don’t fully understand it. Tempie doesn’t. Nor does Chastity. It’s concerned us, she only felt safe in this house and its surroundings. Both my sisters talked to her. It makes Prue uncomfortable. So they stopped talking to her.”
“And have you talked to her?” I asked.
“I don’t need to talk to her.”
Okay.
I was getting mad again.
It wasn’t my business, but Prudence was a friend. If that friendship formed online or not, she was still my friend, and if she was dealing with something so huge she’d made herself a kind of hermit, well…
“Why not?” I demanded.
“Because Prue has always been what many consider odd.”
Oh dear.
I was getting madder.
