Page 61 of How to Cross a Marquess (The Way to a Lord's Heart 3)

This was all he had to say to her, when she’d tended his sickbed for months, picked up his responsibilities on the estate. But this was the way it had always been between them. Nothing about her pleased him. If anything threatened to, like her skill with a gun, he turned it into shortcoming.

His disparagement had shaped the timid girl she’d been. It weighed on her now, when she was struggling with more unfair accusations. If this was her last chance to talk to him, what did she want to tell him about the twenty-three years she’d been part of his family?

Fenella realized that he’d opened his eyes again and was looking at her. “Can you wait a bit, for Greta and Nora to come?” Not what she’d meant to say and probably a ridiculous question, she thought. But perhaps the idea would hearten him. “I know they would like to see you.”

“Could have if they wanted to,” he growled. “Not bothered to visit.”

“They have a great deal—”

“Pack of ungrateful brats, all you chits.”

Could he really feel this way about his daughters? Surely not. “Mama told me once that you were over the moon when Greta was born,” she said. At the time this had been a bitter pill, since their father had been so disappointed by Fenella’s birth. Now, she wanted him to agree. “You adore Greta.” Certainly he’d always favored her.

His gaze had gone vague. It roved over the ceiling and the bed curtains as if he didn’t recognize the room where he’d slept for thirty years. “Mary oughtn’t to have left me with a dratted female on my hands,” he said.

“She didn’t want to, Papa.”

“Settled,” he said, as if he hadn’t heard her. “The last one might have been. Wanted her settled.”

This was a form of concern. She chose to see it that way. “I will be, Papa.” It was time to release grudges. What did it matter if he gloated? She’d give him what he’d wanted. “Chatton and I may be married. After all.” For now she would ignore the complications surrounding them.

“Wouldn’t listen,” he muttered. “Ran off and made me look foolish.”

Fenella leaned closer. “Papa, I’m going to—”

“Impossible girl,” he burst out, loud and angry. He lurched as if trying to sit up. But the effort was far beyond him. He fell back; his eyes closed.

His breathing hitched, paused for an ominous interval, then resumed. This happened again and again, the only sign of life. Then his hand went limp in Fenella’s, and his breath stopped forever. The ticking of the mantel clock was suddenly the loudest thing in the room.

Fenella sat on by his bed. Her mother’s death had been more sudden and shocking. Yet this prolonged decline turned out to be no easier, in the end. Death was irrevocable. And with this one she was an orphan. The weight of grief dragged at her.

And these were to be his last words to her, indeed his last on this earth. “Impossible girl.” Full of anger. No regret or reconciliation. No benediction before the end.

She folded her arms over her chest and listened to the clock mark off the passing seconds. Perhaps she was impossible. She’d never fit into the mold her mother had ready for her. Her sisters had found her negligible. She’d certainly never satisfied her father on any count. If she’d told him about Roger earlier… But giving in to her father had never appeased him. There was always a new criticism behind the one she overcame, a demand she couldn’t fulfill. Their relationship was a long history of her failures. At this moment, it seemed as if she could remember them all.

Simpson put a hand on her shoulder. Fenella hadn’t heard the valet come in. “Vicar’s here.”

The Reverend Cheeve stood behind her. “My condolences for your loss.”

Fenella rose. There was nothing to be done about the past. Papa would never approve of her. They hadn’t found a way to resolve their differences. She had to go on from this empty place.

“I expect he made his own peace with God before the end,” said the clergyman.

He hadn’t made his peace with anyone, Fenella thought. But she didn’t say so. “Thank you,” she told him. She looked at the valet. “You’ll take care of his…him.”

“Yes, miss.”

“I must write my sisters.” Greta and Nora could come for the funeral.

Twelve

The sun rose. A new day began. And Fenella found that between one morning and the next, her life had changed. She’d been managing the household and the estate for more than a year, with few complaints and many marks of approbation. But it seemed now that her authority had rested on the presence of her father, upstairs, a tacit endorsement of her commands. Suddenly, the steward acted as if he wasn’t entirely sure she should be giving him orders, and the solicitor who had handled her father’s affairs put off all her inquiries with patronizing blandness. It was as if her status, indeed her very existence, had faded into obscurity with her father’s death. She’d moved from forefront to background. On top of her loss, this made everything feel like a strange dream.

Fenella knew that her father’s property was to be inherited equally by his three daughters. There was no title or entail to consider. He’d been a landed gentleman with a tidy fortune, not a peer. Fenella would become a woman of independent means, and though she wasnotglad that her father was dead, not in the least, the prospect was heartening. She would have decisions to make, once matters were settled. She expected the estate would be sold, and felt a pang at the prospective loss of her home. Yet it had never been a place of unalloyed happiness for her. She would find her own way when it came time to plan.

Neighbors called to offer their sympathy, Roger and his mother among them. Fenella was happy to see them. But even when Roger pressed her hand, gazed into her eyes, and said, “Please call on me for anything, anything at all,” she couldn’t find any words to reply. Her life had fallen into a kind of limbo—a floating existence plagued with trivialities that no one would allow her to resolve.

On the second day after her father’s death, a post chaise arrived carrying John’s father, Sherrington Symmes. Greta’s thin, discontented-looking husband had brought Wrayle with him, and the latter’s narrow smile implied that he had retribution in mind. A few hours later, another vehicle pulled up and disgorged Nora’s husband, Donald Gissing. When Fenella asked about her sisters, she was given to understand that both of them were prostrate with grief at having missed their father’s demise. Fenella was berated for depriving them of the chance to say farewell and informed that their husbands woulddeal with her. Whatever that meant. She wanted to argue with them, but she kept her tongue between her teeth.

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