Lady Midnight by Amanda McCabe

Author:Amanda McCabe [McCabe, Amanda]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: ePublishing Works!
Published: 2016-06-25T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter 17

Kate folded the last of her garments and placed it neatly in the battered old valise. The clasp did not close, as usual.

"If I am going to be gadding about all the time, I must use some of my wages on new baggage," she muttered, pinching the stubborn old clasp together.

She stepped back and surveyed her bedchamber. The bed was neatly made; the draperies were drawn back from the windows to let in the waning daylight. Everything was just as she had found it when she first arrived at Thorn Hill. The tall wardrobe was empty of her clothes, the dressing table cleared of her brush, combs, and rosewater scent bottle. Her precious sapphire brooch was hidden deep in her valise. It was almost as if she had never been here at all.

The day she had known, feared, would one day arrive was nearly upon her. She was leaving Thorn Hill. Yet not as her dark imagination would have told her. She was not leaving alone. She was traveling forth in the company of the Lindleys, still safely a part of their odd, beloved household.

Kate sat down in the chair by the window, propping her chin in her hand to stare out at the garden. The landscape had now had a week to recover from the rampages of the rainstorm; the flowers and untrimmed bushes had sprung to a new, green life. They overflowed the walkways even more than before, almost with a bursting enthusiasm for the revival of spring. A solitary gardener, stooped and gnarled in a stained smock, labored at trimming and weeding, assisted by Christina. The girl was bent over a clump of yellow pimpernel, carefully pruning at its delicate branches and examining the cuttings she made in the late afternoon light. Her bonnet dangled down her back by its ribbons, as usual. Kate was surprised that Lady Darcy was not out there to lecture her daughter about her carelessness over her complexion.

Indeed, it was probably Kate's own duty to go down there and make Christina come inside, or at the very least put her bonnet on properly. But Kate had no desire to rise from her chair and go to the garden. Right now, she was too overcome by the same strange, lazy daydreams that had affected her all this long week.

A week. An entire week since her night in the sheepherder's cottage with Michael. That sweet, wild night. No, it had been longer—eight days.

Eight days in which she threw herself as hard as she could into work, driving Christina and Amelia along with French verbs, dancing lessons, and geography tests until they both protested wearily. Days in which she took all her meals in the schoolroom, and went for solitary walks along the pathways and roadsides—but never by the river or the lake. Never as far as the tiny cottage. She was careful not to be alone with Michael, not to converse with him except on the most harmless of topics, such as the weather or Amelia's progress with her Italian vocabulary.

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