Percy grimaced. His mother was ever hopeful and ever the hopeless romantic. He must write to reassure her—and squash her expectations—before he rode off in the direction of London. Dash it all, that was going to delay his departure by at least half an hour.
And double dash it all, he was going to be letting her down.
Again.
And disappointing her.
Again.
She never said as much, but he knew she was still hoping that one day he would make her truly proud of him. She was forever declaring her love and her pride, but he knew he had disappointed her from the moment he left Oxford after scaling such heady academic heights there and slid into a life of idleness and frivolity.
His eyes had become unfocused and gazed through the page rather than at it. There was only a sentence or two left, though, probably just the courtesies with which one always felt obliged to end a letter. He focused his eyes upon them.
“I will do all in my power to lift your spirits, Percy,” she had written. “I and perhaps a few of your aunts and uncles and cousins. We never did have a chance to celebrate your birthday together as a family. We will do it belatedly. I will be leaving for Cornwall tomorrow morning.”
He stared at the last sentence in the hope that somehow, by some wizardry, the words would change before his eyes, dissolve and evaporate, become something else or nothing at all.
His mother was coming.
Here.
With other assorted and unidentified relatives.
To stay. To celebrate his birthday belatedly. To lift his spirits.
By now she was already on her way. Given his mother’s usual manner of moving herself with her baggage and entourage from one geographical location to another, it would take her forever to get here, since she was coming all the way from Derbyshire. But even so . . . She was on the way. That meant there was no chance of stopping her. And maybe there were hordes of aunts and uncles and cousins all gradually converging upon this particular spot on the globe too. There was no way of stopping them—assuming any of them had heeded his mother’s rallying cry, that was.
It was a pretty safe assumption that some of them had.
All would be hearty jollification at Hardford. A family party. A grand one. It would not be just about his birthday either, or just about family, he suspected. It would be about his homecoming as Earl of Hardford too. There was a ballroom at the back of the house, a largish room, gloomy, shabby, and sadly neglected. He would be willing to wager half his fortune that his mother would take it on in a great burst of energy as her special project. The birthday-cum-family-cum-welcome party would become a grand ball the likes of which Cornwall had never seen before—and throw in Devon and Somerset for good measure. He would wager the other half of his fortune on it.
One thing was crystal clear. He was not going to be galloping off anywhere today after all. Or tomorrow.
Crutchley creaked his way into the hall. Prudence came darting after him and growled at Percy before darting away again. It was like déjà vu.
“Crutchley,” Percy said, “give the order to turn the house upside down and inside out, if you please. My mother is expected within the next couple of weeks, with the possibility of an indeterminate number of other guests ambling in either before or after her. Or even with her, I suppose.”
If his butler was taken aback, he did not show it. “Yes, m’lord,” he said, and creaked away back whence he had come.
Percy proceeded upstairs with lagging steps to see if Lady Lavinia was anywhere to be found. He would be willing to wager another half of his fortune—no, that would make three and there were not three halves in a whole, were there? Anyway, he would wager something that she would be ecstatic when he told her the news.
So he was fated to see her again, then. He did not want to see her. She bothered him.
He wished he had not pressed her to tell any of her story. The gap in it made his stomach churn even more than the whole thing had before she told him.
*
Two days later Imogen admitted to herself that she was restless and unhappy. And lonely. And very, very depressed.
She had hit bottom, it seemed, a dreaded place to be. It had not happened since she left Penderris five years ago. Not that she had ever been happy during the intervening years. She had never wanted to be. It would be wrong. And she had certainly felt moments of loneliness and depression. But she had never allowed herself to be engulfed in near despair without any discernible way of dragging herself free.
She had held her life to an even keel by killing all deep feeling, by living upon the surface of life. The only times she had allowed her spirits to come close to soaring were those three weeks of each year when she was reunited with her fellow Survivors. But that was a controlled sort of euphoria. Although she adored those friends, sympathized with their continued sufferings, rejoiced in their triumphs, she was not intimately involved in their lives.
Now her life felt frighteningly empty.