She rushed toward the hallway, but he stopped her forward momentum with a few words, as surely as if he’d ordered it.
“Miss Harper—I apologize. That was uncalled for.”
“Yes,” she said, not looking at him.
“I won’t speak of your mother again.”
She let out a breath.
“And I have no intention of ordering you to do anything beyond what we already discussed yesterday,” he said.
“Do you need to teach me anything else?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Then,” she said, voice steely, “leave any instructions for me in the brewing room. With luck we’ll hardly ever have to talk to each other.”
He thought of the Miss Harper he’d seen briefly—funny and resilient and joyful—and felt a guilt so strong it was more like grief.
“As you wish,” he said.
CHAPTER 13
Beatrix dunked a rag into a bucket and scoured the tile floor in her parents’ room. Except it wasn’t her parents’ room. Or, rather, it was their room, but they weren’t her parents.
This seemed perfectly reasonable.
As she neared the air-conditioning vent(oh, to have air conditioning),she heard the voice of her mother—who wasn’t her mother—filtering up from two floors below. She caught “next year’s crop of students.” Then “scholarship.” She froze, straining to hear the rest.
“Angela Smithson certainly seems deserving,” said Mrs. Price, her prim tones unmistakable.
“Her grades are average, but I would like her to have a chance at bettering herself,” Beatrix’s not-mother said. “And Betsy Stevens, too. She wants to be a nurse.”
“There is of course Peter Blackwell to consider.” Mrs. Price said this as if she were barely holding back a tut-tut.
“No.”
“Oh?” Mrs. Price’s response covered up the sound of Beatrix’s gasp. “His backgroundisunfortunate, but you must admit he is an excellent student.”
Mrs. Harper lowered her voice. “The girls and boys we send represent us, Amelia. They’re the face of Ellicott Mills, and an illegitimate child is an embarrassment.”
Beatrix wanted to scream down the vent,How can the child possibly be to blame?But she couldn’t form the words. Her tongue felt iced over.
Mrs. Price was demurring. Mrs.Price, the compassionate one of the conversation. “You realize his grandmother will never be able to scrape the money together to send him.”
“I refuseto condone licentious behavior by providing a scholarship to the result. I’d sooner quit.”
“Well ... far be it from me to argue otherwise,” Mrs. Price said. “Could I possibly have another slice of that delightful pineapple upside-down cake?”
Beatrix staggered to her feet. The room seemed to be closing in on her. The entiretownwas closing in—she would never get free. She caught her reflection in the mirror on the back of the bedroom door: a shaken thirteen-year-old boy, one knee peeking through threadbare pants, chocolate-brown hair cropped painfully short.
She woke gulping air, her sister leaning over her.
“Are you all right?” Lydia asked, putting a hand on her arm.
“Dream,” Beatrix gasped. “Bad dream.”
“Yes, but are you OK?”
