Keeping the Castle - By Patrice Kindl Page 0,11

so much cleaner than it used to be, for one thing.”

Shrieks from both my stepsisters alerted me to the fact that they regarded my words as ill-advised.

“Thoughtless, heedless Althea! We are so sorry, Lord Boring. Our deepest apologies, but you see how she is!” they cried in a confusion of voices. And, “Of course, the former Lord Boring was never very well, was he? Quite naturally he—And a single man, without a wife to see to the servants!”

Belatedly I realized that they were in the right. Would I never learn to tame my tongue and keep imprudent thoughts within my heart? I sighed. There went yet another young man, within moments of meeting him, and this one was far and away more desirable than Mr. Godalming, with his receding chin and his forward mama.

Lord Boring laughed. “Quite right, Miss Crawley. It is much cleaner than it used to be. Well do I remember it on the occasions I came to Gudgeon Park to see my uncle. My dressing room always smelled odd, for instance,” he said reminiscently, “and I could never quite identify the odor. I shall pass your words of commendation on to my mother and her staff.”

My stepsisters shrieked again and begged him to do no such thing.

“I shall make a point of it,” he said, and put an end to their horrified protestations by engaging all three of us, in order of age and precedence, to dance, after which he bowed and moved off to fulfill his duties to his other guests.

4

“. . . ALTHEA? ARE YOU THERE?” Mama was attempting to introduce me to the lady with whom she had been conversing. “Prudence, Charity, would you be kind enough to step aside so that—ah! There you are, my dear! Your stepsisters are so tall, and their headdresses are so . . . imposing, that for a moment you quite vanished behind them.”

My stepsisters moved away with an ill grace. The lady, it proved, was a Mrs. Colin Fredericks, late of London, now come to live among us.

Miss Clara Hopkins leaned forward and said something to Prudence, who in turn whispered loudly in Charity’s ear, “A merchant’s widow, or so Clara tells me!” Charity’s eyes grew round and she shied like a nervous filly in a thunderstorm.

Quite frankly, I too was surprised to see someone whose income derived from vulgar commerce here at the Boring ball. I knew nothing of His Lordship save that he cut an elegant figure in evening attire, but even my slight acquaintance with his mother made me believe she was unlikely to harbor egalitarian impulses; on the contrary, she struck me as a woman who, having married into the nobility from a wealthy but undistinguished family, was determined to turn her back on her own less exalted origins. I thought she would be acutely alive to the finer distinctions of rank and consequence.

“And she is, of course, the present Lord Boring’s aunt and the sister-in-law of Mrs. John Westing,” added Mama, thereby making all plain.

I regarded Mrs. Fredericks with interest and sympathy. It was an old tale from before I was born: a sister of the former Lord Boring, apparently bewitched by a handsome face and form, had bestowed her hand in marriage on a man in a position much inferior to hers and had, in Lesser Hoo, at least, never been seen or heard from again.

“Ah!” My stepsisters also had made the mental connection and recollected the existence of this almost mythical creature, who had been so willful in her affections as to abandon a Baron’s seat in order to live above a shop in London’s Cheapside.

Prudence had called Mrs. Fredericks’s husband a “merchant,” but I suspected that the word was a piece of embroidery on some very plain cloth. We had always been told that Mr. Fredericks was a man of no fortune or property; he was not even the proprietor of the small business where he labored for a living, but a mere hireling. And now, it seemed, he was dead, and she had returned to her childhood home.

“Oh, I see!” said Prudence, wagging her feathered head vigorously and making it clear to all present that the relationship alone explained the otherwise inexplicable, namely, Mrs. Fredericks’s appearance at this august gathering. Still, by birth Mrs. Fredericks was the daughter of a baron, so Prudence and Charity curtsied, rather stiffly, and then began slowly to edge away. Only a short time ago her neat figure and graceful bearing had raised

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