Carla Kelly by The Ladys Companion Read Free Book Online

and the door knocker. “You know, if you change your mind about leaving all this, I will certainly understand,” he commented.
    She shook her head. “Don’t give me any outs, Mr. Steinman,” she said. “For all that this is an impressive house, it has a way of absorbing one.”
    He chuckled. “Well, I am certain many of your friends will wonder if you have taken total leave of your senses.”
    “Do you think I have?” she asked frankly.
    He shrugged. “Who of us really knows anything about the lives of others?”
    “That’s no answer,” she said, amused.
    “It’s a very good answer,” he declared, then winked at her. “Besides all that, Miss Hampton, a good Jew always answers a question with a question. Good day.” He looked up at the house again. “And good luck?”
    “Do I need it?” she questioned back, quizzing him with her eyes. He laughed out loud and started back toward the employment agency, head down against the wind that was picking up again as the afternoon lengthened.
    I will tell them over dinner, she decided, so I will only have to tell the news once. She wanted to begin packing, but that would have required her trunk from the attic, and she did not wish to alert the servants to her plans. Instead, she spent the little time until dinner sorting through her clothing, searching for the serviceable, winnowing out the frivolous. There was soon a respectable pile of sober clothing ready to be folded and packed into her trunk. She sighed and put her evening dresses and ball gowns in cloves and a sturdy box. She hesitated over her silk drawers and chemises, then added them to the pile. No sense in abandoning all pleasure for duty. When I am frumpily proper in serge and wool, she decided, I will enjoy my silk all the more.
    It was a small victory in an afternoon of reflection and was swallowed up totally by the sound of the dinner bell. “I cannot face them,” she said out loud, clutching a shawl of Norwich silk to her like a breastplate of steel. What had seemed so sensible and realistic before the dinner bell now felt foolish and desperate. If I say nothing at dinner, I can send round a note to the Steinmans in the morning, she thought as she prinked at her hair in the mirror and tried to squeeze a little color back into her cheeks. I can stay here and let Aunt Louisa throw me the occasional bone.
    She stared at her own anxious face, closing her eyes against her own eyes so wide and frightened in the glass. Everyone knew that Sir Rodney Hampton had never kept a promise in his life; why should his daughter? “But I have promised I would go tomorrow,” she said and opened her eyes cautiously. The fright was still there in her reflection, but something more, too, a curious kind of resolution more felt than visible, but real all the same. “I promised,” she repeated. “I promised.”
    Susan saved her news until after the fish course had been removed by the breast of mutton. At least they cannot accuse me of springing horrible news on an empty stomach, she thought as she speared a slice of mutton with more intensity than usual. And I do not much care for mutton in the first place. She put down her fork.
    “I have something to tell you.”
    They looked at her, and some instinct told her that even years from now, these would be the faces she remembered—Emily, her air of vague distraction made more pronounced by the burden of being a violet female in a daffodil year; Aunt Louisa, faintly annoyed to be disturbed from her mutton’s path from fork to mouth; and Papa, wary and eager-eyed at the same time, desperate for good news from some source. And what had Susan ever been to him but pleasant company?
    “I have accepted a position as companion to an elderly lady living in the Cotswolds. I leave tomorrow morning.”
    It sounded bald, even to her. The silence that followed her quiet pronouncement was the silence of disapproval so profound that there were no words. “I will be paid thirty pounds a