Days of Gold (23 page)

“No, I won’t. I don’t understand. He seems to love me but then he doesn’t.”

Harriet had an idea that the young man loved Edilean as much or more than she loved him, but he was that rare breed of man: one of honor. When Harriet was standing outside the door, she’d heard enough to know what his problem was and she agreed with him. For all that Edilean liked to think she was just like everyone else, she wasn’t. She’d been pampered all her life. She had no idea what it was like to want something, even a new dress, and not have it. If she were to marry Angus now, Harriet felt sure that she’d come to dislike him.

“Sssh,” Harriet said soothingly. “I’m going to get you some sherry, then I want you to sleep.”

“I can’t sleep,” Edilean said. “I don’t want to sleep.”

“I know,” Harriet said. “But you need to. Things will look better in the morning.”

“No, they won’t. I know I’ll never recover from this.”

Harriet took Edilean’s hands in her own and looked her in the eyes. “No, you won’t recover from this, but in your lifetime you’re going to go through several events that you’ll not recover from, will barely be able to survive. It’s how life on this earth is. Only in Heaven do we get true peace. Now lie down there and be still, and I’m going to get you some sherry, maybe a whole bottle of it. Do you understand me?”

“Yes,” Edilean said as she lay back on the pillows and pulled the cover up to her neck.

P
LEASE
, I
BEG
of you, on bended knee, I beg you to stop moping,” Harriet said two mornings later as she looked at Edilean sitting at the table, an untouched breakfast in front of her.

“I am not moping,” she said, but then after a glance at Harriet, she sighed. “All right, perhaps I am a bit. But, really, it’s more that I’m... sad, maybe. Rejection hurts.”

“He didn’t reject you,” Harriet said for what had to be the hundredth time. She’d made Edilean tell her every word of what happened so she could talk to her and not let Edilean know she’d been listening outside the door. “He has very good reasons for what he did.” Harriet didn’t tell her that she thought Angus was right.

But no matter what was said to her, Edilean was still in pain. For days, she’d gone over and over what had happened. Maybe Angus was right and she’d been spoiled all her life. Maybe she’d had it too easy with men. She knew they liked her. They liked the look of her,
the way she smiled at them, and, yes, they liked that she came with a dowry that could support them comfortably all their lives.

But when she’d finally made up her mind about a man, he’d rejected her. “And that makes two,” she whispered.

“What, dear?”

“Two men. I’ve chosen two men and they’ve both rejected me.”

“Edilean, no one has rejected you,” Harriet said. “If you want to hear rejection, let me tell you about
my
life.”

Edilean looked at Harriet. She was going through the morning’s post, perusing the many invitations in it. If anyone in Boston gave a party, they were sure to invite the beautiful Miss Edilean Harcourt. As she looked at Harriet’s tall, lean figure, at the gray in her hair, and when she thought about how Harriet had been shuffled from one relative to another in her life, Edilean shuddered. Would she end up like her? Alone, unwanted by any man? Or would Edilean have to settle for a man she didn’t like as well as she did Angus?

She got up from the table and went upstairs to her bedroom. Two men, she kept thinking. First James had betrayed her in a spectacular way, and if it hadn’t been for Angus—She didn’t like to think what her life would be like now if James had succeeded in his diabolical plan. She would have had to go back to her uncle and live on his charity for the rest of her life. After all, if men she fell in love with didn’t want her when she had a dowry of gold, who was going to want her when she had nothing?

She looked at her bed, now freshly made up and looking so calm, but she remembered the way she’d thrown herself at Angus. Harriet had told her how her former fiancé had done everything to get her in bed with him, but she’d refused.

“But not me!” Edilean said out loud. “Not me. I offered myself to two men, but neither of them wanted me.”

She didn’t know exactly what happened, but one moment she
was standing in the doorway and the next she was attacking the room. There was a little desk with a penknife on it, and she opened the blade and began to stab at the bed. She tore off sheets, blankets, then the mattress, attacking it all with the sharp little knife. She swept her hand across her dressing table and sent bottles crashing, then overturned the table. She was pushing over the big chest of drawers when a man grabbed her about the waist and picked her up. She hit at him and clawed, but he didn’t let her go.

Vaguely, she heard Harriet’s voice over what sounded like screaming, then someone was thrusting a cup at her lips and telling her to drink. Edilean fought the hands that were holding her down, but someone put strong fingers to her jaw and forced her mouth open. She tried to keep her teeth together, but the hand tightened and the liquid was poured down her throat. She was choking and coughing, but they kept pouring. Someone was holding down her feet and someone else was holding her arms out from her body.

After a while she began to feel dizzy, and the anger and rage began to recede into a cloud of calmness, and she slept.

Edilean awoke slowly and she wasn’t sure where she was. When she tried to sit up, her body ached and she winced with pain.

Immediately, a lamp was turned up and Harriet was hovering over her. “How do you feel?”

“Awful,” Edilean said as she looked about. “Why am I in your room?”

“You’ve been asleep for a couple of days and it was easier for me to watch over you in here.”

Edilean lay back against the pillows. “Why did I sleep?”

“I drugged you.”

“You—?” She sat up abruptly, but then it was as though all the
blood rushed to her head and it felt like it might explode. She fell back against the pillows with a groan. “What happened?”

“What do you remember?”

Edilean turned and looked at her with eyes as hard as steel. “I don’t know what I remember. I want to be told the truth. What happened?”

Harriet sat down on the chair by the bed. “Do you remember Angus coming to your room?”

It took Edilean a moment, but then she remembered every second of that night, every word, every touch. Most of all, she remembered the way she’d begged him to marry her and take her with him. But he’d turned her down. Spurned her. Tossed her away, as though she were worthless.

“Yes,” she said at last. “I remember all of that. But why am I... ?” She looked at Harriet. “I tore up my room.”

“Yes,” Harriet said. “You cut the bed to ribbons with your penknife and you broke all the furniture except for the big chest. You even cut up your pretty dresses.”

“Good,” Edilean said. “They were never mine anyway. Who brought me in here?”

“Cuddy.”

Edilean looked at her in question.

“Cuthbert, the second footman. I’m afraid I’m going to have to let him go. He enjoyed holding you to the bed much too much.”

“Don’t discharge him, give him a pay increase,” Edilean said. “It’s nice that some man on earth
wants
to touch me. I guess you gave me laudanum. Your brother was a master at passing it out.”

For a moment Harriet didn’t say anything as she looked at Edilean. “Please don’t let this make you bitter.”

“And what should it make me? Happy that I got away from a man who doesn’t want me? I could have married him and spent the
rest of my life trying to prove to him that I was more than just a useless piece of fluff. You know what he told me? That he should marry someone like Tabitha.”

“And who is Tabitha?”

“A thief on the ship, one of the women prisoners. She told Angus a long story about how she’d been unjustly punished because she fell in love with her employer. She even said she’d given birth to his stillborn child. Oh! And having the baby was why she stole in the first place. According to Tabitha, the Holy Mother wasn’t as good as she is.” Edilean looked at Harriet. “You know what the truth was?”

“What?” Harriet asked, frowning, her worry about Edilean’s anger showing.

“Margaret told me Tabitha was one of the best pickpockets in London.”

“Margaret?”

Edilean waved her hand. “Another one of the prisoners. She did some sewing for me. Margaret told me that Tabitha had grown up on a farm, but she ran off because she wanted the excitement of the city, and that’s where she learned how to pick pockets.”

Edilean raised her fists in the air. “But Angus believed every word that lying woman said! She told him a sob story about her life and he swallowed it. He was like a fish taking the bait and waiting to be reeled in. Yet he never believed anything
I
said. I told him I’d had a difficult life and he said I’d always had the cushion of my father’s money to fall back on.”

Harriet put her hands on her lap and didn’t look at Edilean for fear she’d see the agreement on her face. Maybe Angus was wrong to believe a thief—if he actually did—but he wasn’t wrong in his assessment of Edilean. She took the way Harriet ran the household and looked after her in stride, never once questioning that these things should be done for her.

Edilean again tried to sit up on the bed but collapsed against it, as she was still dizzy.

“You still have the laudanum in your system,” Harriet said as she went to her. “I think you should sleep some more. Tomorrow will be soon enough to—”

“Start a new life?” Edilean asked, one eyebrow raised. “Another one? A new life when my father died, a new life with my uncle, a new life with James, and now I’m in a new life in a new country. What am I to do this time? Choose one of those namby-pamby men you introduce me to and marry him?”

Suddenly, Harriet had had all she could take. “If you don’t want a namby-pamby man, then you should stop being such a delicate lady.” With that, she left the room, closing the door loudly behind her.

“What does that mean?” Edilean called out after her. “I’m not delicate, I’m—” She started to get up, but her head hurt so much that she lay back down. She stayed in bed but she didn’t sleep. Later, she heard Harriet closing up the house before she climbed the stairs and went across the hall into Edilean’s bedroom and closed the door. She didn’t say good night.

“Why does everyone think I’m worthless?” she whispered in the dark. Angus said she was a woman who waited for a man to rescue her and that they always showed up. While it was true that James had rescued her from her uncle, and Angus had saved her from James, there had been times in her life when she’d done things on her own. She’d...

Think as hard as she could, she couldn’t remember a single time when she’d been her own rescuer. Just as Angus had said, she sat in one place and waited for a man to come and fix whatever was wrong in her life.

Since she’d been asleep for days, she didn’t want to waste more
of her life unaware of what was going on. It was still night when she got up and went downstairs to Harriet’s big secretary desk in the parlor.

First, she needed to take care of Angus. When she thought of the night he’d climbed into her bedroom—if she could put her mind away from the touching and the kissing and the way she’d humiliated herself—she remembered that she’d sensed there was something wrong with him. For one thing, he’d lost weight. For another, his clothes were worn around the sleeves. The diamonds had been enough for him to buy new clothes, but he hadn’t. Why? Was he too cheap to shell out the money? For all that she knew him, she really didn’t know how he handled money.

She spent hours thinking while drawing a pen and ink sketch of a face she knew as well as her own.

When the sun came up, Edilean went upstairs to dress. She quietly knocked on her bedroom door, and Harriet answered. She was already dressed for the day. “Are you still angry at me?” Edilean asked.

“I don’t like the destruction of property, and I truly
hate
feeling sorry for one’s self.”

“Not me,” Edilean said. “In fact, I’ve thoroughly mastered self-pity.”

Harriet couldn’t help but smile.

“But I’m going to stop it,” Edilean said. “As of today, I’m no longer going to sit in one place and wait for some man to come rescue me.”

“And what does that mean?”

“I have no idea in the least,” Edilean said brightly. “But I do know that I don’t want to end up old and alone. Oh!”

“It’s all right, it wasn’t what I wanted either.”

Edilean’s face turned red at her faux pas, but she smiled. “When
I get what I need to do done, I’m going to find you a husband.”

“Oh, that’s a good one,” Harriet said. “And how will you do that? Conjure him from a bottle?”

“If I have to, I’ll buy him.”

Harriet blinked at her for a moment. “With a farm?” she asked softly. “Not a large one, but something nice with big trees. A widower with children would be all I want in life.”

Edilean stared at Harriet, unable to say anything. They hadn’t been together for long, but during that time she’d never once thought that maybe Harriet would like something more in her life than taking care of Edilean and listening to her bellyache all day about how boring her suitors were. “Widower with a farm and children,” she said. “I’ll do it if I have to buy all of Boston.”