Lady Odelia's Secret by Jane Steen

Author:Jane Steen [Steen, Jane]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781913810184
Publisher: Aspidistra Press

Guttridge returned about two hours after dinner, by which time I felt exhausted and peevish. My solitary dinner hadn’t helped. It wasn’t one of the cook’s best efforts, coated in a sauce that reminded me rather too well of the glutinous mess that pooled under the sticky fur of the animal in the parcel.

Odelia had not joined me, pleading an upset stomach. I couldn’t really blame her for that, but I was irked by the conviction that one of her reasons for not appearing was to avoid a repeat of the conversation interrupted by Maisie’s screams.

All I’d really wanted to do after dinner was lie down, but I’d forced myself to go to the writing desk. After staring into space for a full twenty minutes, I’d thought of ringing for Guttridge to see if she could find the lavender and chamomile distillation we’d made to soothe just such a troubled brow as I now had. Finding that she was still out when I needed her was enough to plunge me into a state of headache and nervous irritation.

I could have looked for the lavender water myself, of course. Or rung for a cup of tea—or even a small brandy for its medicinal properties. But I had worked myself up into that mood where one refuses to seek relief for one’s ills, a state of martyrdom aimed at justifying my bad temper while simultaneously stoking it. The result was that I stared with sore eyes at the blank paper, sighing out my griefs to an empty room—and it was not the events of the afternoon, but the luncheon with Fortier and his father that ran around the inside of my head like a rat in a trap.

Eventually, I realized the problem lay in the fact that I was seeing Fortier differently, and I didn’t want to. His father’s story had inevitably cast a somewhat romantic air over a man whose personality and, yes, drat him, physical attributes already had too much power to disturb my equilibrium.

And now I had to summon him to come to my aid. I couldn’t think of anyone else I could ask for an opinion on the nasty mess now lying in the toolshed. Certainly not Odelia. I’d never imagined she’d have such a weak stomach. For heaven’s sake, she was country-bred like me and therefore perfectly familiar with the grosser side of nature. When I was eight years old and she eighteen, she had come home from her first fox hunt with the blood from the animal’s severed tail on her cheeks and a triumphant smile on her mud-splattered face—a savage princess, a true descendant of our warrior ancestors. Had living in Town really made her that fastidious?

I certainly couldn’t ask any of the servants to help me. Perhaps if Guttridge had been there—but she was not and I was cross with her.

My note to Fortier no doubt sounded a little curt in consequence of my mood, but once done, I had signed and sealed it

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