A flash of memory from ten years past came vividly back to her, summoned by the intensity of Lord Alan’s gaze. She and her mother had been sitting at their dining table in a pool of candlelight. Supper was long over, but Bess stayed at the table, and so Ariel stayed with her. Her mother was silent, distant and cold, drinking brandy. Something had happened. Ariel didn’t know exactly what. At the theater, after the play, there had been some incident—something that had punctured the buoyancy of a good performance. Bess wouldn’t tell her about it, but it had brought on one of the black moods that descended on her mother from time to time and plunged the entire household into gloom.
“Stop staring,” Bess said sharply. Her hands swooped down on the decanter and she poured a tiny bit of brandy in a small glass. “Here,” she said, sliding it across to Ariel. “Try it.”
Doubtful, Ariel took the glass, raised it to her lips, and cautiously touched the tip of her tongue to the amber liquid. It burned and tasted horrible. Wrinkling her nose, she put it down.
Her mother laughed, and as usual, Ariel gauged the quality of the sound as a connoisseur might have judged the vintage she’d just been offered. There was as yet no edge of hysteria, no threat of a night when Bess would have to be soothed till dawn.
“You’re ten years old,” Bess said then, as if the fact had just occurred to her. “It’s not long before you’re a woman.”
Ariel simply looked at her, knowing better than to reply to this tone.
“You’d best face the truth of it now,” her mother added. “Men will want you, and if you let them, they’ll take everything you are and expect gratitude for their theft. They’ll talk of devotion, but what they mean is bondage.”
Ariel shivered. Her mother had made the word sound like the knell of doom.
“Men don’t see us, really,” Bess went on, almost as if she were talking to herself. “They see a story that satisfies their secret desires, an image that rouses their lusts. So you tempt them, echo their dreams, and when they fall at your feet, you take what you want.”
She sounded like one of the plays she acted in, Ariel thought. Except that love so often conquered in those. “What about love?” she asked in a small voice.
Bess glared at her. “Love? Is that what you think you want?” She bared her teeth. “Believe me, its price is too high.” She reached across the corner of the polished table, grasped Ariel’s wrist, and squeezed it hard. “There’s only one sure course in this life, and that’s to rely on yourself. Most people don’t give a brass farthing for you. And the ones who do will want to ‘help’ you as they see fit, not give you what you want. Only you can get that. You understand?”
Ariel gazed up at her. She’d seen this mood before. It was as if a cold fire had ignited in Bess, so that she blazed with ice and spoke like an oracle. It frightened Ariel, not because of anything her mother might do, but because of the otherworldly crackle of her personality.
“You don’t understand,” Bess accused. Letting go of Ariel’s wrist, she stood, resting her palms on the table and looming over her. She had always loomed, Ariel thought now. She still did.
“Miss Harding?” said a deep voice.
She startled and found that Lord Alan was looking at her with what seemed to be a mixture of uneasiness and concern.
“Are you all right?”
She had to appear calm and composed and logical, Ariel thought. She had to keep this situation under control. Love was the last thing to be thinking of; she couldn’t imagine why it had entered her mind. “We should search for the servants,” she began.
“Some member of your family must be summoned,” he interrupted. “You cannot stay here alone.”
Ariel sat straighter in her chair, relieved at this response to her solitude.
“We must send word at once,” he added.
He said it so easily, as if it were so simple and obvious that an idiot would have thought of it. He was so very large, and secure, and confident in his position and wealth of family connections. “I will be perfectly all right,” she said. “I will hire servants.”
“You need someone other than servants,” he declared. “In these circumstances…” He looked around the room as if