“Mother, you cannot keep ignoring me. It will do no good.” Rachel watched her mother for a moment, but the woman was deliberately not meeting her eyes.
“I do not speak to ungrateful children, and you are ungrateful.” Lady Haven was seated at the dining room table looking over a letter.
Rachel knew what it was; Lady Haven had reached some peace concerning Rachel’s jilting of Lord Yarnell and his subsequent elopement. It helped immeasurably that she despised Lady Yarnell so thoroughly. But that was not to say it still did not sting that she had had a daughter on the verge of wedding a marquess in a highly public, completely suitable ceremony in London.
And every once in a while something would remind her of all that they had lost with Yarnell’s rejection. Rachel knew what it was that had triggered this bout of anguish. She had heard at length about the letter her mother had received the day before from Haven, her only son, another “ungrateful child,” as their mother styled them. He had eloped just a month or so before rather than enjoy the glorious London wedding she was planning for him and his fiancée. The eager couple had fled to Yorkshire, wed in haste, and were living on the Haven estate, but not at magnificent, ancient Haven Court; instead, at the new Lady Jane Haven’s request, they were cozily occupying a cottage on the grounds. His letter spoke no apology, though, for their rash behavior in forgoing the grandeur of a London wedding. Instead he gushed immodestly of how happy he was, how perfect his life and how wonderful his wife.
Lady Lydia Haven could not even think about the missed opportunity to celebrate the ancient and noble title of Lord Haven in suitable wedding, displaying to the ton the grandeur of their splendid line, without becoming choleric. She was livid with fury over her son’s ingratitude to his mother for all of her labor to create the perfect wedding for the Haven name. But in the end, after much debate on both sides, he had chosen to honor his wife-to-be’s wishes over those of his mother, and had carried Jane north to marry hastily and enjoy the fruits of his marriage in bucolic peace. Society was snickering, Lady Lydia felt sure, behind their fans and gloved hands.
And now Rachel had rejected a suitor she had chosen herself, with no prompting from her mother, and all for some unfathomable scruples about the gentleman’s past love life. Incomprehensible. Her children were most certainly a flock of mockingbirds in the familial nest, for they surely were not her own offspring, to be so cavalier about the important things in life: status, wealth, a good settlement, and the proper and elaborate display of all of the aforementioned. That Pamela’s wedding had been celebrated in London was not even to be mentioned, for it was a hasty thing, accomplished within two weeks of the proposal instead of two months.
Rachel knew the labyrinthine pathways of her mother’s resentment because before she had stopped speaking to her daughter, the area had been well canvassed. She let the subject drop. Just a month or so before she would have agreed wholeheartedly with her mother and could not begin to explain the strange changes that were taking place in her heart. “I am going to sit with Grandmother for a while, and then I have promised Miss Varens and Belinda that I will accompany them to a poetry reading.”
Lady Haven snorted, but it was followed by a quick frown. “Your grandmother . . . ask her if she needs anything. I will see that cook makes her a beef broth for her luncheon, if she will just try to take some of it.”
Rachel, rising from the table, paused and sat back down, watching her mother’s lined face. “You aren’t worried about her, are you?”
“She’s over eighty,” Lady Haven said with apparent asperity, staring down at the letter—her son’s ungrateful missive—and folding one corner of it over and over. “She’s outlived her usefulness. Time and past that she should go to her reward.”
“Mother,” Rachel said sharply. “Just admit you’re worried about Grandmother. Why can you not do that?”
The woman shrugged, then her shoulders dropped, and she slumped. “I have known her for almost thirty-four years. I cannot imagine what will happen when she . . . when she goes.”
“I know. She’s so strong.” Rachel was silent for a moment, wondering how to ask what she wanted to know. “But . . . pardon me, Mother, you two always seemed to dislike each other so. And you bicker constantly. Will you not at least enjoy some peace once she is gone?”
“I suppose.” She tossed the letter aside and clasped her hands together, staring at them, her lips working as if she were fighting some strong emotion. “But I would rather not have that peace yet.” She swallowed hard and cleared her throat. Her gaze became unfocused, as though she were looking back on some past scene. “I will never forget when . . . when I was very ill and lost a child. I was devastated. I pray you never suffer that torment, Rachel. She was a rock, not like your father, who just closed himself off and would not speak to me. He never could bear illness, coward that he was.”
Lady Haven had always spoken disparagingly of her husband, and Rachel resisted the urge to lash out. Her father had been dear to Rachel, and yet she must live with her mother the way she was, not how she would wish she was. It was a hard-learned lesson.
“She gave me the strength to go on,” Lady Haven said, squeezing her eyes shut. “She knew just what to say, as she had been through it herself more than once. I have been thinking of that a lot these last few days. I have been thinking of all those times I had forgotten, when she was there when no one else was.”
Rachel had no answer and did not think one was required. She left her mother alone, head bowed, at the table and went to her grandmother’s room with a renewed sense that life was a mystery. Her mother had always been a closed book to her, distant, difficult, abrasive. But the fear on her face as she acknowledged that losing her mother-in-law would be a sad day made Rachel realize that no person or emotional attachment could be categorized or easily explained. She would never be able to express it, she knew, but she felt a tenderness toward her mother, seeing a vulnerable side to a hard and difficult woman.
The dowager was pale and her breathing was shallow, though she was sleeping deeply. Rachel told the maid who was sitting with the woman to go and have her breakfast, or rather, luncheon, more likely.
Rachel sat down in the bedside chair and covered her grandmother’s hand on the coverlet with one of her own, examining the contrast between the knobby white blue-veined hand and her own smooth and young one. “I will miss you too, when you do decide to go. But I don’t believe you will go this time. I still need you, Grand, and so does Mother.” She squeezed the hand that lay so still, and closed her eyes, saying a little prayer.
Silence fell in the dim room. It was the only bedroom on the ground level of the ugly Haven town house, and so the sounds of the house could be heard beyond the door, the bustling of servants, a knock at the front door, voices. But in the dowager’s room it was muffled.
“What should I be doing with my life now, Grandmother?” Her voice echoed strangely. “You told me to just enjoy my time, but I don’t think I know how. I’m so accustomed to having a purpose to form my days. Shall I become a spinster like Andromeda? I don’t think so, since I do not believe I have even her inner resources. I shall dwindle into a pettish, unhappy old woman.” She sighed, and then frowned at the self-pity she heard in her own voice. “How idiotic! I will do no such thing, and I know you will be there so I do not.”
A tap at the door, and Andromeda Varens slipped in quietly. “How is your grandmother?” she said, approaching the bed.
“Sleeping.”
“Best thing for her. I brought a jar of calf’s foot jelly; good for what ails her. So nutritious and yet palatable even for an invalid. Lady Haven said she would make sure she had some at luncheon.”
Rachel heard tension in the woman’s voice and thought perhaps something was wrong, but she would wait until they were away from her grandmother’s bedside. “That is very kind of you.”
Andromeda looked the woman over with an expert eye. “Hmm, I think she will recover from this,” she said.
“Do you think so?” Rachel asked. “How do you know?”
“Her breathing. I have attended many bedsides of those who are passing on, and have noted a similarity of wind; impossible to explain, really.”
Rachel examined the older woman curiously as she bent over the sleeping dowager, listening and watching, her sharp, dark eyes knowledgeably sliding over the invalid. As a child, she had been grateful for Andromeda Varens’s care, especially during that two-month period when Pamela was sick and Rachel was banished to Corleigh, the Varens estate.
So how had she gone from that state of respect and affection to the almost-enmity that had existed between them these last years? She knew she had changed when her father died. It had felt like going into a long, dark tunnel, and when she came out the other end she was not the same person. She felt frozen and distant from life, separated even from those she loved. And yet she had no one to talk to about it, no one to tell how she missed her father, and how lonely she felt.
It was an awful time at Haven Court. Her grandmother had just lost her only child, and her mother had lost her husband. They were wholly consumed with arrangements and services and finances. Visitors streamed to the estate and there were letters of sympathy to answer. Her brother was adjusting to the importance and duties of his new title; Pamela was so very young, just a child who didn’t wholly understand. Rachel had felt alone in her overwhelming grief for the one family member who had adored her above everyone else.
Perhaps if she had turned to Andromeda, things would have been different. Instead she withdrew from everyone. Then a few years later Colin had begun to court her. Flattered at first, and willing to practice her flirting on him, she had not turned him away resolutely. Seeing it fresh from Andromeda’s view she must have seemed like a jade, to lead him to think there was a possibility that she would marry him, only to finally say no when he offered, and then to repeatedly and with increasing sharpness turn him away. A sister’s partiality would find no reason for her rejection of him.
Andromeda finally took a seat, sighing. “Yes, I really do think your grandmother will come out of this. I fear she will be weak for a long time, though. The best thing for her would be fresh air, but there is precious little to be had in London, I am afraid.”
“Should we take her back to Yorkshire immediately?”
“She won’t be ready to make such an arduous journey for some time, I think. At least a month or so.”
“Oh. Where is Belinda?”
“With Lady Haven.”
Rachel’s eyes widened, but Andromeda, seeing that, said, “I warned Belinda that your mother can be . . . difficult, and told her to be on her best behavior.”
“That will not even help, not in her present mood. I am afraid my broken engagement following upon my brother’s elopement has affected her in an adverse manner.”
“It seems to me—pardon, Miss Neville, for my bluntness—that your mother can be just as difficult in a fine mood as she can be in a troublesome one.”
They both saw the dowager’s lips curve up in a smile. Rachel wondered if she was awake and listening, or if it was just a random occurrence indicating that she was dreaming.
Andromeda merely smiled and turned back to Rachel. “Before we go this afternoon to the poetry reading, I wished to speak to you alone, Miss Neville—Rachel—about a matter of some importance to me.”
“Speak on . . . uh, Andromeda,” Rachel said, trying to not sound awkward. They had been on first-name terms many years before, but had gotten out of the habit. Surely now, as adults and neighbors, and now as friends, they should be able to return to that friendly footing.
Andromeda shifted uneasily on her chair. She fiddled with her gown and folded the material between her gloved fingers. “You know how concerned I am about Colin’s new pastime, boxing. Sir Parnell has been training him and now they have scheduled a match. Try as I might I can persuade neither of them to stop this foolishness and find some safer way to spend their days.”
Rachel shrugged. “Men will be men. If they want to spend their time battering each other senseless, what are women to do?”
“If it were anyone else but my brother, I would concur. Men are unfathomable a great deal of the time; the things they think are important, the joy they take in senseless activities! However, I fear for Colin’s safety, and cannot hold my tongue in this instance.” She took a deep breath and met Rachel’s gaze. “You are perhaps too young to remember, or your mother kept the information from you, but several years ago a fellow died boxing in Lesleydale.”
“Died?”
“Yes. He, from what I heard, seemed to be just fine after a fight in which he took several blows to the head, but then later he began to complain of a headache, and then he fell down in a fit and passed away.”
Shocked, Rachel remained silent, watching Andromeda’s gloved hands twisting around and around each other.
Finally, Andromeda spoke again, urgently, leaning forward, her words tumbling over each other like fretful acrobats. “I cannot just sit idly by while my brother pursues a course that I feel will end in disaster.”
“But what can you do?” Rachel asked, feeling helpless. “He is a man, and will do what he wants.”
“I don’t know. But I do know that the first rule of engagement is that one must study the enemy, learn all one can about that which one must combat.” She seemed unaware of the irony inherent in her combative words, in relation to her distaste for fighting.
“And what does that mean in this instance?”
“It means I must ask a favor. I feel that even though there have been . . . incidences between Colin and yourself, that you do care for him as a friend. Am I right about that?”
Rachel felt the flush rise in her cheeks. Andromeda’s eyes were shrewd. Many people did not see beyond her romanticism and her resolute chase after Lord Haven for so many years and thought she was just an eccentric spinster. But when she was passionate about a subject, she was fiercely committed; it would be a mistake to underestimate her intelligence.
“Of course you’re right. Colin and I have cried friends now that he has gotten over his ridiculous infatuation.” It was said stiffly, and Rachel hoped Andromeda did not take offense.
“Then help me stop this; help me find out the truth about these boxing matches,” Andromeda urged. “Sir Parnell has Colin in a match two nights from tonight, his first. Let’s see for ourselves what brutality men inflict on one another.”
“You mean—”
“I mean we should dress as gentlemen and see the match.”