Break of Dawn (10 page)

‘But what if—’

‘
Please
, Patience.’

She hadn’t heard that note in her father’s voice before and more than anything else it brought home to Patience the seriousness of the situation. Her heart in her mouth, she looked down at Sophy for a long moment. She had enjoyed the times her cousin was in trouble with her mother and had done her part in seeing Sophy got the cane on lots of occasions, but this – this was altogether
different. Patience didn’t have the vocabulary to describe how she felt, but she knew that this last act of her mother’s had gone far beyond merely chastising her cousin. ‘All right.’ She nodded. ‘Shall I tell Bridget to light a fire in the guest room and bring some warm water, soap and towels?’

‘The servants are going shortly.’

‘Going?’

‘I have dismissed them, it’s the only way. I will see to their replacements as soon as I can, but until then we will have to manage.’

Patience stared at her father wide-eyed, bewildered at how rapidly her world had changed. ‘She needs to be kept warm,’ she said weakly.

‘Then stay here with her.’ Jeremiah pulled the sofa closer to the fire as he spoke before straightening and adding, ‘I’ll see to everything upstairs as soon as I can.’

When her father had left the room, Patience turned and looked down on Sophy again. The amber eyes were open and tears were seeping from them but Sophy didn’t make a sound. Patience stared at her helplessly. ‘Are you cold?’

Sophy made the slightest movement with her head; even so, it caused her to wince.

‘Here.’ Patience slipped off her thick, woolly dressing gown and placed it over the trembling body of her cousin. ‘It’ll be all right. I’ll look after you.’ And then, aware that this might not be much comfort, she added, ‘I promise I won’t let Moth— anyone, hurt you ever again. I promise, Sophy.’

When Sophy closed her eyes Patience wasn’t sure if she had understood her or not, but anyway, it didn’t matter. She had meant every word.

Bridget, Kitty and Patrick left the house at ten o’clock with a month’s wages apiece and the precious references. By then Sophy was heavily sedated with a generous dose of Jeremiah’s laudanum and consequently unaware of their departure. The family carried all their worldly possessions in three carpet bags, but due to the
back-door trading which went on with most cooks and itinerant traders who presented themselves at the kitchen door at certain days in the month, they weren’t as destitute as they could have been. Beef dripping, rabbit skins, feathers and bones were all disposed of into willing hands, and over the time Kitty had been at the vicarage she had made a tidy sum for ‘a rainy day’. This did not comfort Bridget in the slightest; she was bereft at leaving the child she considered her own, but it would cushion the three against the perils of homelessness while they looked for employment.

A thin dusting of snow lay on the frozen ground from a brief fall the night before, but as Jeremiah watched the small family trudge down the drive from his vantage point at an upstairs window, he felt not the slightest remorse for turning them out in such bitter weather. On the contrary, he was more than a little peeved at having to pay out good money for nothing – as he described it to himself, ignoring the fact that he knew he had underpaid the three for years.

After he was sure they had departed, he looked in on Sophy and Patience now ensconced in the spare room. Sophy was lying as still and white as a small corpse under the heaped covers of one of the two single beds the room held, and Patience was sitting in a chair by the fire reading.

‘Go and get yourself something to eat.’ Jeremiah walked over to the bed and stood looking down at his niece for a moment. ‘She’ll sleep for some time yet.’

Patience didn’t need to be told twice, and once his daughter had disappeared downstairs Jeremiah made his way to the bedroom he shared with his wife. Mary hadn’t moved from the armchair in front of the fire where she had placed herself on entering the room with Patience earlier. When he had come to get dressed before he had carried the child to the spare room she had said not a word and neither had he, but her glance had carried its normal disdain when she had looked at him. Now, as he opened the bedroom door, she again looked at him in the usual dismissive way, but his opening words caused her thin, tight body to sit straighter. ‘The servants have gone, as you directed, so I suggest
you get yourself down to the kitchen and start preparing an early lunch.’

She stared at him as though he was mad. ‘I will not.’

He carried on as though she had not spoken. ‘After which you will carry out the duties Bridget normally attends to, as well as seeing to dinner tonight. And until I can replace the O’Learys, this will continue, so let us hope it can be soon.’

Mary had now risen to her feet, her bony hands joined in front of her waist. ‘Have you lost your mind, Jeremiah?’

‘No. For the first time in years I am thinking clearly, Mary.’ His calm demeanour was holding by a thread and Mary must have sensed this as she took a step backwards. ‘You’ve excelled yourself today, my devout, God-fearing wife. And I am partly to blame, I accept that. I have allowed you sufficient rope to hang yourself, but it wasn’t you who was caught in the noose, was it? It was all of us. You would have destroyed my standing in this community without a second thought because of your obsession regarding the child. But no more. I will not be ruined on the altar of your fixation. Of course this all depends on whether the child lives or dies, because you have taken her to the edge, do you realise that?’

‘Don’t you dare speak to me in this fashion.’

‘I dare much more than this.’ It was a low growl. ‘The child will reside in the guest room with Patience for the time being until I can arrange for her to attend a private school in Newcastle along with Patience.’

‘No, you won’t take Patience from me.’

‘Of course this will mean we have to cut back a little, my dear, so thriftiness will be called for.’

Mary’s breath was coming in gasps. ‘I – I won’t discipline the child again.’

‘Indeed you won’t.’

‘There is no need for such measures.’

‘There is every need.’ Jeremiah spat the words into her stiff face, and only in that moment did Mary realise how far she had pushed him. ‘I see now I cannot trust you around the child and so she needs to be removed from your presence. You will not destroy my
good name, Mary. Not while I have breath in my body. Sophy will go away to school and Patience will accompany her. Anything else would raise suspicions as to why we are educating our niece above our daughter. And while we are talking like this, you had better write to your uncle and inform him that his New Year visit will not be convenient this year. The guest room will be occupied.’

‘You – you devil.’

‘I am but what you have made me, Mary.’

Jeremiah turned and walked out of the room, and if his wife had still had the pearl-handled knife in her possession she would have used it.

‘Aren’t you even a little bit pleased to be leaving school for good, Sophy? I mean, no more arithmetic and French and embroidering those wretched samplers. If I have girls when I get married I shall make sure they never have to do any sewing.’

Sophy smiled at her friend. Charlotte Gilbert-Lee had shared much of the last six years of her life and she was very fond of her, but Charlotte was the only daughter of Mr and Mrs Gilbert-Lee and her father was a prominent solicitor who doted on his offspring. Charlotte went home every weekend to be thoroughly spoiled, and her holidays were spent in a round of entertainment and fun. They were worlds apart, and yet from Sophy’s first week at Miss Bainbridge’s Academy for Young Ladies, Charlotte had taken the frightened and unhappy newcomer under her wing and smoothed Sophy’s path. Sophy and Patience had only gone home to the vicarage at holiday time – Jeremiah had maintained that a weekly trip to Newcastle to bring the girls home every weekend was too much – but neither of them had minded this. In the four months from Mary’s assault on Sophy until Jeremiah had got them into Miss Bainbridge’s Academy, the open warfare which existed between husband and wife had made life at the vicarage unbearable. And this had only got worse over the years.

Thinking of this now, Sophy said quietly, ‘I like it here, I always have, and I’ve enjoyed everything.’

‘That’s because you’re good at everything,’ Charlotte said without a trace of envy. ‘Even the pianoforte with old Potty.’

Miss Potts was the music teacher and Charlotte had been the bane of the poor woman’s life; no matter how Miss Potts tried, she was unable to make Charlotte grasp more than the mere rudiments of the instrument. As Charlotte herself cheerfully proclaimed, where the piano was concerned she had two left hands. Charlotte did have a beautiful singing voice, however, as did Sophy, and the two of them had often performed a duet at the musical soirées Miss Bainbridge put on for family and friends at the end of the summer and Christmas terms. As both girls were very pretty and their voices harmonised perfectly, they had been in great demand.

Sophy had loved those occasions; in fact, she sometimes felt they were the only times she was truly alive, along with the dancing and drama classes taken by Miss Bainbridge’s sister. She could become someone else – anyone else – rather than Sophy Hutton, orphan. She had once daringly asked her uncle why she couldn’t be known by her father’s name of Lemaire, since it was so much more satisfying than plain old Hutton, but he had told her not to be so impertinent and that was the end of that. She knew why, of course. It was because her aunt and uncle had disapproved of her mother’s marriage and were determined to stamp out even the memory of her father’s name. But they wouldn’t. She was determined about that. She often pictured them, her mother and father, when they had been young and in love. Her mother had had deep blue eyes, Bridget had told her that, so she must have inherited her father’s unusual amber eyes. She liked the thought of that. She could see him in her mind’s eye – a tall, dark, handsome Frenchman with black curly hair and a captivating smile. And he was of the nobility, even if he hadn’t had any money. But more than that he had loved her mother, and he would have loved her too, if he hadn’t been taken so suddenly.

‘Miss Gilbert-Lee? Your father is here.’ Miss Bainbridge stuck her head round the door of the refectory where the young ladies
were waiting for relatives or friends to collect them for the journey home, and the two girls looked at each other for a moment before hugging.

‘Don’t forget we’re going to write every week.’ Charlotte was suddenly tearful. ‘And I’ll get Papa to ask your uncle if you can come for a visit over the New Year. We mustn’t lose touch, Sophy. Promise me we won’t.’

Sophy patted her friend’s arm. ‘Of course we won’t.’ She didn’t believe it. The Gilbert-Lees had made numerous requests over the last six years, asking that Sophy be allowed to come and stay, but her uncle had refused every one. Patience, on the other hand, who had been in the year above her and who had finished her schooling twelve months ago, had been given her mother’s permission to accept any invitation which came her way. And Charlotte was off to an expensive finishing school in the spring to prepare her for entry into fashionable society when she reached the age of eighteen; she would make new friends, girls who would invite her to their homes and who would be invited to Charlotte’s. Sophy knew this was the end of an era.

After more hugs and tears, Sophy watched her friend depart before sitting down in a vacant chair in the refectory, her valise at her feet.

She didn’t want to go back to the vicarage
. She drew in her upper lip, biting down hard to prevent giving way. It hadn’t been so bad having to spend the holidays there because she had known she would be returning to the school again, but now . . .

She rubbed at her eyes with the back of her hand, something Miss Bainbridge would have deemed unladylike. There were many things Miss Bainbridge deemed unladylike.

It had been Patience who had broken the news of Bridget’s departure from the house six years ago, and to be fair to her cousin she had tried to be kind. Patience had even gone so far as to rescue Maisie and her other hidden treasures from under the blankets on the pallet bed, along with the two new books, although the ribbons had disappeared, never to be mentioned again.

At first, Sophy had been unable to believe she would never see
Bridget and her parents again, but when it had sunk in that they had gone for good, she had been bereft. She had only really begun to recover from the heartbreak of losing the only people in the world she loved and who loved her, when she had come to the school and Charlotte had befriended her. Charlotte had been her protector in those early days too; although her hair had begun to grow back, Sophy had still had to wear a mop cap for some time, which had been explained by saying she had been very ill and her hair had fallen out. Some of the girls had teased her most spitefully until Charlotte had let it be known that anyone who upset Sophy upset her too, and Charlotte was a favourite with everyone.

She had never told anyone the truth about the loss of her hair, not even Charlotte. It wasn’t out of any sense of misguided loyalty to her aunt, but because the whole episode had made her feel painfully debased and ashamed. It still did.

Sophy raised her hand to her hair, neatly secured in a shining chignon at the back of her head. All of Miss Bainbridge’s young ladies wore their hair in this fashion from the age of fourteen – it was part of their preparation for womanhood; although when she was at home her aunt insisted she scrape her hair back into a tight plait. She had complied with this order thus far, but had vowed when she was sixteen and had left the school, she would tell her aunt she was wearing her hair how she liked. And her sixteenth birthday had passed two weeks ago.

Sophy’s beautiful eyes narrowed. There were going to be battles ahead. She didn’t know exactly when she’d ceased fearing her aunt, but gradually her dread of the woman who had treated her so cruelly had been replaced by hatred, and lately contempt had been added to the mix. Her aunt hadn’t touched her since that day six years ago, but Sophy knew now that if she attempted to do so again, she would fight her tooth and nail. She’d been a slight child at ten, finely boned and thin. She was still finely boned, but now slender rather than thin, and she was tall for her age. Moreover, she knew she was strong inside, where it counted. She’d had to be. She nodded mentally to the thought. Her aunt would not
subjugate her again; she would kill or be killed first. That was how strongly she felt about it.