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My aunt, Mrs. Patience Barbary—mother of Edwin Barbary—was, like my mother, a widow. She had been wed to Mr. Richard Barbary; Mr. Richard Barbary was the half brother of my own father, Jonathan Steele, whose claim to Highgate House was entire and never called into question in my presence. I presumed that our Barbary kinfolk resided with us due to financial necessity, as my aunt could not under any circumstances be accused of enjoying our company.
In fact, one of our visits to the main house, shortly after my ninth birthday, centred around just such a discussion.
“It is so very kind of you to have us for tea,” Anne-Laure Steele said, her smile glinting subtly. “I have said often to Jane that she should better familiarise herself with the Steele estate—after all, she will live here when she is grown, and mon Dieu, to think what mismanagement could occur if she did not know its—I think, in English—intricacies?”
Aunt Patience was a sturdy woman wearing perennial mourning black, though she never otherwise appeared to regret her lack of spouse. Perhaps she was mourning something else entirely: her lost youth, for example, or the heathens in darkest Africa who perished in ignorance of Christ.
Certainly my uncle Richard was never mentioned nor seemed he much missed, which I found curious since his portraits were scattered throughout the house—a wedding watercolour from a friend in the drawing room, an oil study of a distinguished man of business in the library. Uncle Richard had owned a set of defined, almost pouting lips, an arched brow with a tuft of dark hair, and something rakish in his eyes made him seem more dashing than I imagined “men of business” ought to look—ants all walking very fast with their heads down, a row of indistinguishable umbrellas. I thought, had I known him, I should have liked him. I wondered what possessed him to marry Aunt Patience, of all people.
Thankfully, Patience Barbary was blessed with a face ensuring that conjugal affronts would not happen twice, which did her tremendous credit—or at least, she always threw beauty in the teeth, as it were, of my own mamma, who smiled frigidly following such ripostes. Aunt Patience had a very wide frog’s visage with a ruddy complexion and lips like a seam in stone-masonry.
“So much time passed in our great Empire.” Aunt Patience sighed following my mother’s uncertainty over vocabulary. “And despite that, such a terrible facility with our language. I ask you, is this a proper example to set for the—as you would have it—future mistress of Highgate House?”
“It might not be,” my mother replied with snow lacing her tone, “but I am not often invited to practise your tongue.”
“Oh!” my aunt mused. “That must be very vexing.”
I yearned to leap to my mother’s defence, but sat there helplessly dumb, for my aunt hated me only marginally less than she did my mother. After all, I was awkward and gangly, possessed only of my mamma’s too-thin neck and too-thoughtful expressions. My eyes were likewise catlike—voluptuous, in truth—but the plainest of ordinary cedar browns in colour. My mother ought to have done better by me, I thought on occasion. Her own irids were a strange, distant topaz like shards of frozen honey.
I never blamed my father, Jonathan Steele, for my shortcomings. I never expected anything of him—not remembering him—and thus could not expect more of him.
“Aimes-tu ton gateau?” my mother asked me next.
“Ce n’est pas très bien, Maman.”
Aunt Patience simmered beneath her widow’s weeds; she supposed the French language a threat and, in retrospect, she may have been correct.
“Pauvre petite,”* my mother commiserated.
Mamma and Aunt Patience embarked upon a resounding and communicative silence, and I felt Cousin Edwin’s eyes on me like a set of hot pinpricks; when the adults abandoned decorum in favour of spitting false compliments and heartfelt censures at each other, he launched his offensive.
“I’ve a new bow and arrows I should show you, Jane,” he murmured.
For a child’s tones, Edwin’s were weirdly insinuating. The quick bloom of instinctual camaraderie always withered upon the instant I recalled what my cousin was actually like. Meanwhile, I wanted to test his new bow very much indeed—only sans Edwin or, better still, with a different Edwin altogether.