Chapter 8
“Harriet. Tell your father that you were forced.”
Hours after the sun had set, her parents summoned her to the library and she had entered feeling sick and light-headed with nerves. Her father stood next to the fireplace and was staring into the flames with his hands shoved into his trouser pockets. Her mother hovered near a chair against the wall, her face so pale and shiny she looked embalmed rather than alive. She still pinned Hattie with an imperious look.
Hattie stood in the cold draft, stupefied. Her mother had been there; she had seen it. The mirrors on the right-hand gallery wall had turned out to be two-way mirrors. In the bright light of noon, the room had been a fishbowl; everyone standing in the dim corridor running behind these treacherous windows had seen them, and had seen them kiss—willingly. Was it true that all she had to do now to make this nightmare disappear was to tell an enormous lie? A shy glance at her father said he was ignoring her. Yes. The small syllable was just a breath away. Her mother clearly, desperately, wanted her to say yes. But what difference would it make? Forced or not, they would send her away. Besides, lying about such a matter was a wretched thing to do. She looked at the floor. “No.” Her life as she knew it was over.
“What was that?”
It was impossible to face her mother. “He wasn’t forcing me.”
“How, then! How could this happen?”
If only she knew. One minute, Mr. Blackstone and she had been sharing an impassioned discussion about art, and the next she had wanted to cling to him. It had felt as impossible to stop herself from kissing him as turning around mid-fall off a cliff. She had leaned in. And then, the shock. The frozen faces and the stares. A shudder ran through her; she wanted to crawl out of her skin to escape the pain of shame raking its claws against her gut.
She closed her eyes. “I’m so terribly sorry,” she whispered.
“None of that matters, as you well know,” her father replied.
Her studies at Oxford were done, she knew it confirmed then. She was to never take a single step alone again without a chaperone. People would whisper behind her back at every dinner, every dance, picking apart her loose morals. No decent young woman put herself into a position that enabled an unsuitable man to kiss her—actually, she wouldn’t receive any invitations at all. Her friends might turn away from her … She pressed her hands over her stomach as nausea threatened to climb up her throat.
Her mother rounded on her father. “My daughter is innocent,” she said. “She was mauled by this man—it was plain for everyone to see.”
“Oh, there definitely was something to see,” her father said, his gaze still fixed at the fire hissing on the grate. “Though I hear it wasn’t clear who was mauling whom—apparently, she leaned in.”
“Mr. Greenfield—we know nothing about that man …”
Now he faced them. “I told you, I have learned a few things,” he said. “He is at least as wealthy as the Astorp-Venables, and that is only to what he admits. He is nine-and-twenty years old. He is the illegitimate son …” He paused. Illegitimate. The word jarred like the sound of something precious smashing on the tiles. “The illegitimate son of a late Sir Murray,” he continued, “an estate owner in Argyll, though his stepfather gave him his name upon marrying the mother—as such, I’m uncertain why he felt the need to disclose his bastardy, but I assume he takes pleasure in adding insult to injury. His mother, also deceased, was in Sir Murray’s employ, I understand as a kitchen maid.”
“Illegitimate.” Her mother sat down hard on the chair. “Mr. Greenfield, how can you even contemplate such an absurdity?”
“Well, you announced to everyone that they were engaged all along.”
Engaged. Hattie saw that her parents’ lips and hands were moving, but not a sound reached her ears. She had missed that announcement in the aftermath, but now it was clear: they weren’t going to send her away. They were marrying her to Blackstone.
Her mother shot back to her feet. “I had to do something—everyone had seen it! These mirrors—they were like windows.”
“And you did the right thing, Adele.”
“I can’t abide it,” her mother said. “Harriet was to marry a peer—”
Her father threw up his hands. “Then she should have dallied with one—preferably in plain sight of the biggest gossipmongers of society.”
“He looks coarse and has a disagreeable disposition,” Adele cried, red in the face. “He will give her coarse-looking, disagreeable children!”