She’d successfully gone out a window on asheet. There was a trick to alternating one’s feet that transformed it into a sort of ladder. A sort of puzzle to it. And she’d done it! If she ever needed to climb out a window using a sheet again, she’d be prepared.
She wished it seemed unlikely.
She’d not only gone out the window on a sheet, she’d apparently found the limits of her own self-sacrifice, which had heretofore seemed limitless. Not even to help her beloved father would she allow Mr. Daggett to squeeze the bottom of the daughter of an earl.
She didn’t know what she would tell her father when she returned home. Especially since she hadn’t yet been paid.
Lorcan St. Leger was precisely right. Pride was about the only thing that stood between her and ruin. Pride was the thing that had sent her leaping into the dark into the arms of a stranger, and pride was why she now had an enigmatic fake husband who was possibly a criminal. Pride was the boat she frantically paddled even as the steep Waterfall of Doom loomed to pull her over.
She couldn’t imagine why fate should take such an interest in her. She had been dutiful and uncontroversial. She hadn’t fatal beauty or reckless habits. Apart from her mother dying when she was young, there had been no warnings, no inklings, that her life would be happy to a certain point, and a disaster thereafter. That the scalding shame of Henry’s perfidy would be just the first of a seeming endless cascade of shame. More shame when she’d learned that her father was in desperate financial straits, more and more during the gradual peeling away of all of the trappings of their station, the servants, the horses, the house—scarcely noticeable at first, and then, terrifyingly swift, like the sands of an hourglass. More whenshe’d been compelled to discreetly find a renter for their home while she and her father moved into the caretaker’s cottage. Still more when she’d taken what had seemed to be an easy enough little job as a companion to Mrs. Leggett, only to discover what men like Mr. Leggett thought he could do to women who needed to take easy enough little jobs. She’d never before taken a job. It wasn’t what the daughters of earls did.
“You do not always have to know thewhyof things,” Henry had once told her, affectionately. Or so she’d thought. He’d said this when she’d tried to tell him why she loved oranges.
Because that was just it: she usually did thoroughly know. Why things moved her or did not. Why she liked or did not like them. Why things happened. She was filled with thoughts and feelings and no one had any use for them.
Now she wondered if she’d merely made Henry tired.
To her, the “why” of things enriched the good things in life, and made the bad things bearable, or at least more interesting.
If she’d known why any of this was happening, could she have somehow traced it to the beginning? Could she have stopped it?
At what point does a person going over a waterfall realize that paddling is futile? At what point does the attempt to forestall the inevitable seem ridiculous to anyone watching from a distance—that frantic scrabbling in midair before the plummet to doom?
Was she already laughable?
She wondered at Delilah’s journey from countess to boardinghouse proprietress. Had there been an interval of awkwardness and terror between her old life and the improbable one she’d embraced? Had Captain Hardy already been waiting in the wings to snap her up? Were the rules she’d written a clue to the contentment with which she glowed?
Because reading them only reminded Daphne that “pride goeth before a fall.”
She lifted the little card left on the charming and plain writing desk and read:
All guests will eat dinner together at least four times per week.
All guests must gather in the drawing room after dinner for at least an hour at least four times per week. We feel it fosters a sense of friendship and the warm, familial, congenial atmosphere we strive to create here at The Grand Palace on the Thames.
All guests should be quietly respectful and courteous of other guests at all times, though spirited discourse is welcome.
Guests may entertain other guests in the drawing room.
Curfew is at 11:00 p.m. The front door will be securely locked then. You will need to wait until morning to be admitted if you miss curfew.
If the proprietresses collectively decide that a transgression or series of transgressions warrants your eviction from The Grand Palace on the Thames, you will find your belongings neatly packed and placed near the front door. You will not be refunded the balance of your rent.
Gentlemen may smoke in the Smoking Room only.
They were reasonable rules, of course. Comforting. Even genteel. The kind of rules a lady raised according to the etiquette and mores of fine society would compose.
But nearly every one of them meant she would need to convincingly pretend to be married to Lorcan St. Leger in front of an audience, and God help her and him.
She blew out a long breath.
Tucked in a walking shoe in her portmanteau was a plump letter she’d received from the Earl of Athelboro, whom she’d met once a half year ago, and with whom she’d spent a pleasant enough few hours when he’d visited her father. It had been sent to her care of Mrs. Leggett, and she’d needed to pay the postage with her dwindling funds when she fetched it only yesterday. She was down to just enough money to pay for a cheap room and a mail coach home.
The Earl of Athelboro had a weary smile and a countable number of strands of hair left on his head. He was fit enough, if gone to comfortable plumpness; outwardly, at least, he exhibited noneof the usual habits that would lead to self-ruin. And he’d just been widowed for the second time. He’d fathered five children on two countesses, and they were all motherless now. She thought she knew what the letter would say.
She didn’t dare open it yet. She was too weary to think; she hadn’t any strength left with which to entertain either crushing disappointment or elegiac relief.
Best to read it by the light of day.
