“Not to mention that my stepmother sent an eviction notice to his widow yesterday.”Ĭherryderry frowned. “Well, now his children have to get over the loss of him,” she said unsympathetically. “Mind you, it’s not easy for a man to get over the loss of a limb.” “He left her with four children,” Kate said. Seems that a vicar shouldn’t take his own life.” After his death, I moved the family to the far cottage.” “I have to talk to Herself about the vicar’s wife,” she said, handing her pelisse to Cherryderry. Poor Victoria didn’t have much going for her outside of her pretty face and prettier frocks it would break her stepsister’s heart if she were permanently disfigured. Sour as she felt, Kate felt a pulse of sympathy. “Dragging the lip down, so her maid told us this morning. Though as Cherryderry had once commented, one can only hope. Not after years of false alarms and voices screaming in the middle of the night about attacks…which generally turned out to be indigestion. Time was when she might have actually wondered if her stepmother (known to the household as Herself) was malingering, but no longer.

“Having a spell, is she?” Kate pulled her gloves off carefully, since the leather was separating from its lining around the wrist. “Herself sent the footmen off to London to fetch a doctor,” Cherryderry said. “Hello, Cherryderry,” she said, as their dear old butler opened the door. She stomped up the front steps girding her loins for battle, as her father himself would have said. It was fueled by humiliation, and despair, and the absolute certainty that her father must be turning in his grave. It was the self-loathing of someone who can’t quite bring herself to leave home and have done with it.

It was being relegated to a chamber in the attic, with faded furnishings that advertised her relative worth in the household.

It was the pitying glances she had from acquaintances who never met her at dinner anymore. Anger was watching her father’s money be poured into new gowns and bonnets and frilly things…so numerous that her stepmother and stepsister couldn’t find days enough in the year to wear them all.

Anger was watching the crops wilt and the hedges overgrow because her stepmother begrudged the money needed to maintain the estate. Daltry – who had held that title for a matter of mere months – started ruling the roost, that Kate really learned the meaning of anger.Īnger was watching tenants on the estate be forced to pay double the rent or leave cottages where they’d lived their whole lives. But it wasn’t until he was gone, and the new Mrs. Before her father died seven years earlier, she found herself sometimes irritated with her new stepmother. It should be said that the condition wasn’t unfamiliar to her. Miss Katherine Daltry, known to almost all as Kate, got down from her horse seething with rage.

A Kiss at Midnight by Eloisa James