She pulled back her shoulders and took a deep breath. She had come so far. Her place at Oxford was the culmination of hard work, and this held special weight for someone who was usually given things before she even knew she needed them. Her paintbrush used to be awkward and slick with her fear in her right hand; she had practiced for a thousand hours with gritted teeth until she had wielded her tools as competently with her right as with her left. She had battled through all of Ruskin’s wordy books, including The Laws of Fésole. Word blind or not, she was currently learning from the best. Fine, Oxford was not Paris, where she, like any artistically inclined, fashionable young woman would have preferred to go—but it was as far as they had let her go, and she would not give it up because of a crisis over a kiss …
“Harriet!”
A small sigh escaped her. Perhaps it was also time to escape from under her family’s thumb. Inviting a potential husband to dinner was the first step.
The memory of a cool gray gaze brushed her mind then, and a tiny, indeterminable shiver prickled down her spine.
The Friday family dinner in St. James’s quickly verged on riotous. Flossie was visiting from Amsterdam with her baby son because she had fallen out with her husband, and Zachary had returned from Frankfurt. Debates were heated before the main course was served. Flossie sat across from Hattie between Benjamin and Aunty, the color in her round cheeks high with chagrin. “I hadn’t expected such a laissez-faire attitude on the matter of starvation, not from you, Mama,” she said as she stabbed her fork at the steaming mushrooms on her plate.
Their mother’s displeasure washed over the table with the cool force of a wave.
“Quarrelling so severely with one’s husband is excessive and in poor taste.”
Flossie’s red curls bristled. “Not when he is defending grain-price speculation.”
“Your tone has a strangely proselytizing quality to it, which I find tiring.”
“Hardly as tiring as hungry children! Have we learned nothing from the latest Indian famine?”
“Or the Irish one,” Hattie murmured.
“As for that, Lord Lytton hasn’t learned a thing,” Zachary remarked between bites. “I hear he’s still objecting to the Famine Codes for India. Deranged creature.”
Flossie raised her brows at her mother, as if to say, See?
“Famines, dreadful as they are, are a natural occurrence,” Adele said. “As inevitable as snow falling from the skies in winter.”
“However, financing the British infantry in Afghanistan with famine relief money is not a natural occurrence,” Flossie said, “which is what Lytton did last year. This famine was greatly exacerbated if not caused by the British government by transporting all the wheat of Bengal straight to London, and then certain men compounded the issue by deliberately withholding the distribution and speculating on grain prices.”
“According to whom?” Adele demanded.
“According to Florence Nightingale,” Mina said calmly. “I read her reports.”
“I say.”
“She concludes that the famines are a result of gross failures on the part of the British government,” Mina added. “This includes the diversion of famine relief funds to finance the infantry in Afghanistan.”
Adele’s lips flattened. They all knew she admired Florence Nightingale’s contribution to the nursing profession and occasionally turned to her for advice on her own charitable efforts. From politics, she respectably stayed away.
“My dear, these mushrooms are excellent,” said Julien Greenfield. “A new recipe?”
Hattie eyed him with suspicion. Her father rarely intervened in dinner quarrels, but he had been radiating quiet satisfaction all evening, and with the white beard framing his mouth down to his chin, it gave him the look of a contented walrus. Probably because Flossie was home. Flossie was a credit to him. She knew about shorting stock, how to hedge a long position, and which industry would boom next. She and Zachary would be debating the best strategy for this or that in Uncle Jakob’s German portfolio by the time the main course arrived. Mina would join them—she was already following every word, occasionally making a blind pick at the food on her plate. Benjamin, at fourteen years of age, in the awkward place between boy and man, would just fervently support anything Zach had to say. Mina would ridicule him for it. She had already poked fun at him for wearing his chestnut hair the same way Zach wore his: short at the sides, wavy on top. Inevitably, when matters became too rowdy, someone, probably Zachary, would turn to Hattie and say, How is your art, Pom Pom? Her art was neutral territory in that it roused no strong emotions in anyone present. It was the palate cleanser in between the meaty courses.