A Harvest Passion by Emily Murdoch

Author:Emily Murdoch
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Emily Murdoch

Chapter Seven

“And you are absolutely sure that you cannot join me?”

Her mother’s voice was almost pleading, but there was absolutely nothing that Mrs Walsingham could say to Victoria that would convince her otherwise.

“Mama, have you been outside?” Victoria asked lazily, lying on the chaise longue in their drawing room with a fan, gently wafting the baking hot air around her face. The heat was so overwhelming that she had even, against her wishes, been forced to pin her hair up in order to allow the air to circulate around her neck. “I do not think that I have experienced such temperatures – and I do not believe that anyone, even in India, has! It is quite impossible for me to move one step from this room, and I ask that you do not pay your calls this afternoon. One day will not affront a soul!”

Mrs Walsingham sniffed as she stood upright in a rather uncomfortable looking damask gown. “Are you telling me, young lady, that it is too hot to move?”

Victoria considered nodding, but that would require even more effort than that exerted to move the fan. “Yes, Mama: precisely.”

The drawing room was usually the coolest of the house, and no fire had been lit in the grate, and yet it was still unbearable. The smallest of breezes pushed at the curtains by the windows that had been opened to their fullest extent, but Victoria felt none of the benefit. Her mother, on the other hand, was seated close by them, and she closed her eyes in silent appreciation of the breeze, small though it may have been.

“Mama,” continued Victoria with a concerned tone, “really, you have spent every afternoon since we arrived home paying calls! Is it really so necessary? Consider that we are at home, and these are our friends, not our London acquaintances who require so much in the way of civility.”

“You forget that I am now the Dowager of Cheshire,” Mrs Walsingham returned, with a smile that was not as strong nor so convincing as when she usually spoke about her new position. “To be remiss in my social requirements now would not just be a slight of a personal nature, but one of a noble level. The last thing that I would wish is to bring disrepute on Stuart’s title.”

Victoria laughed weakly. “Mama, I do not think that you will.”

“Then you do not think at all!” Her mother snapped, the unbearable heat finally breaking her nerves. “You may spend the day indoors if you so wish, Victoria, if that is all that you require of yourself and if that is all that society requires of you; but I am now the female face of the fifteenth Earl of Cheshire, and I am beholden to exact these social niceties on his behalf! And I may find it difficult, and irritating, and at times utterly ridiculous, but that is what needs to be done!”

Tension between mother and daughter was added to the heat, and if Victoria had thought the former situation unbearable, it was nothing on this.

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