Unladylike Lessons in Love by Amita Murray

Author:Amita Murray [Murray, Amita]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2023-03-03T00:00:00+00:00

21

The visit to Jonathan Marleigh’s home had brought back old memories that Lila normally kept safely tucked away. That she was good at suppressing. Only in her nightmares, when she tried and tried to wake up but couldn’t, did she sometimes feel the terror of lying awake in the Marleigh house in the dead of night and feeling utterly and infinitely alone. Only in those dreaded hours did she ever go back to her childhood. But the visit to that house had done something and a heavy gloom hung over her. What was it about that place? She had turned up there at age seven, having recently lost her parents. She turned up there with two of her sisters.

She stood at her window twenty minutes after Ivor Tristram had left her at her door, clutching her throat at the memory. And Sarah Marleigh with those strange, glittering, resentful eyes looked the girls up and down and curled her mouth. “Look, Jonathan,” she said, “this is what kept your father so busy for so many years.” Jonathan was seventeen at the time, but in that moment, Lila had thought he couldn’t be more than thirteen or fourteen. The hair was pale, the face cold, the eyes expressionless. “Oh, cheer up, darling,” Sarah Marleigh said to him. “Greet your sisters with a kiss.” She made him kiss each of their cheeks.

Lila squeezed her eyes shut now at the memory. At all the memories of those lonely years. If only, if only she and Mira and Anya had teamed up, worked together, even just spoken about how they felt living there. But they already had a bond sealed by guilt that wedged itself between them. Grief and guilt.

Lila flicked a hand harshly away from her. Lila had walked into a room once, when she was about fourteen or so, and Mira just twelve. She had walked into the room and Jonathan was in the bedchamber. Mira was sitting on the bed, at the edge of it and Jonathan next to her, his hand on the inside curve of her thigh. Lila didn’t say anything, didn’t kick him, punch him or kill him. She stood there, mute with loathing, until he nonchalantly got to his feet and left the room. Lila never spoke to Mira about that.

And the one question that often plagued her. Why did Sarah Marleigh bother? There was not one bit of Sarah that could have wanted Jonathan Marleigh’s bastards living in her house. And yes, she had gotten rid of the girls as soon as she could, sent each one off to boarding school when she turned eleven. But why had she invited them to London to live with her in the first place? Sarah was dead now, and Lila didn’t know if she would ever find the answer. Sometimes she wondered if Anya or Mira might know, or guess what was behind it. Oh, she and Mira and Anya had a lot to talk about. A lot to discuss. But there was never a good time.

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