Seventeen
There are all kinds of embarrassment—humiliation, mortification, shame—and it occurred to Mirabelle as she made the trip to her uncle’s house that she was destined to experience each and every one in the course of a single month. First the fall down the hill, then being tormented by a thirteen-year-old, crying in front of Whit, and now the worst, his visit to her uncle’s home.
She’d rather fall off a dozen hills and be set upon by an entire tribe of infantile monsters when she reached the bottom than have any member of the Cole family witness how her uncle lived—and how she lived when forced to be under his roof.
There had always been rumors of her uncle’s behavior—whispers of the reclusive baron’s fractious nature and fondness for drink—but eccentricity from the titled was tolerated, and his secluded lifestyle kept the full extent of his sins from becoming public knowledge. His reputation—and hers by association—remained essentially intact.
What would Whit do once he learned the truth—that her only living relation was a dissolute scoundrel? Not a counterfeiter, mind you. That absurd piece of business could be cleared up. The remainder of her uncle’s offenses, however, could not be denied.
She remembered the time he’d paid for several prostitutes to visit from London. And the memorable dinner at which Mr. Latimer had jokingly offered the baron twenty pounds to take her off his hands. Mr. Hartsinger, overseer of the nearby asylum, St. Brigit’s, had then not so jokingly upped the bid to thirty.
In the eyes of many, both occurrences would be enough to ruin her.
If Whit found out…Her heart stammered painfully at the thought.
Whit had worked so hard to rebuild his family’s good standing in society, and an association with a man like her uncle, or a ruined woman, could undo much of the progress he’d made. Would he distance himself and the rest of the Cole family from her?
It might not be fair that a person be judged by the actions of their relatives, but it was the way of the ton. Whit knew that well enough. It had been the actions of his own relatives, after all, that had so damaged the Cole name initially.
And now he would see. He would know. He would judge.
And there wasn’t a single blasted thing she could do about it.
She had spent the whole of the night frantically trying to find a way out of the situation, but nothing short of running off with the gypsies—or bribing the gypsies to run off with Whit—had occurred to her. The best she could do was to arrive early and attempt to elevate at least some small portion of the house to habitable. With any luck, Whit would be too preoccupied to care overmuch about the condition of the old manor. With an enormous amount of luck, Whit’s presence might induce her uncle and his guests to restrict their revelry to the merely embarrassing, rather than the unforgivable.
The idea that they might behave well was nearly laughable. Nearly.
Her pride, she knew, was going to suffer tremendously. She could accept that or, at the very least, learn to accept it.
So long as she wasn’t banned from Haldon.
She pressed the back of a shaking hand across trembling lips and wished, as she had wished for years, that her mother and father had cared enough to will her into the care of someone like the Coles.
She’d been seven years old when her parents had died in an outbreak of influenza. In life, they had been indifferent toward their only daughter, choosing to have her raised the ton way, by a series of servants.
In death, that indifference proved cruel. They’d warded her to an uncle they barely knew. But the man was a baron, and apparently her mother and father had felt that the title was all the character reference required.
Upon arrival at her uncle’s, she had been swiftly relegated to an out-of-the-way room in the back of the house, assigned a disinterested governess, and otherwise ignored by the baron and his staff alike.
After two months of such treatment, Mirabelle had taken it upon herself to seek out her uncle and demand a room with a properly functioning fireplace, regular meals, and, if it wasn’t too much to ask, a mattress with its insides on the inside. She was, after all, the daughter of a gentleman and a member of the baron’s family.