A Stolen Heart. Candace Camp

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СКАЧАТЬ she stepped inside the front door, however, all such pleasant thoughts fled. One of the maids was standing on the stairs, crying, with another maid trying vainly to soothe her, while her mother’s companion Nancy Turner stood apart from them, looking disgusted, her hands on her hips. From upstairs came the sound of pounding, punctuated by her aunt’s voice, calling, “Rhea? Rhea? Let me in!”

      “Mercy’s sake, child, stop all that blubbering!” Nancy Turner exclaimed, her voice filled with exasperation. “You’d think nobody’d ever gotten mad at you before.”

      The girl’s only response was to cry harder, and her companion said sharply to Nancy, “None of her employers has thrown a teapot at her head before! It’s not her fault. It’s you and your heathen American ways, all of you.”

      “Exactly what heathen American ways are those, Doris?” Alexandra inquired icily.

      Doris gasped and whirled around. When she saw Alexandra, she blushed to the roots of her hair and bobbed a curtsey. “Oh, miss, begging your pardon. I was—that is, I wasn’t thinking clearly. I’m that distracted. I didn’t mean—well…” She wound down lamely in the face of Alexandra’s coolly inquiring expression. “It ain’t what we’re used to, and that’s a fact!” she declared defiantly.

      “Presumably not, if it involves flying teapots. That’s not exactly accepted behavior in the United States, either.” Alexandra turned toward her mother’s companion, a sturdy American servant they had brought with them and who had worked for their family for years. “Nancy?”

      “Mrs. Ward didn’t want her tea, miss, and she, well, flung it, but I’m sure she wasn’t aiming at the girl. You know Mrs. Ward couldn’t aim that well.” Nancy sent the snuffling maid a hard look. “It wasn’t even hot—and I must say, I don’t know what she expects when she brings a pot of barely warm tea to the missus.”

      “Probably not to have it thrown at her,” Alexandra said with a sigh. “I take it that Mother is in one of her moods?”

      Upstairs, the pounding, which had been going on throughout their conversation, grew more fierce, and Aunt Hortense’s voice was sharp as she shouted, “Rhea! Unlock this door this instant! Do you hear me?”

      Nancy nodded, sighing. “Yes. Miz Rhea’s locked her door now and won’t let anyone in.”

      “All right. I’ll go up and see about her. Doris—you take Amanda down to the kitchen and get her a cup of tea. See if you can calm her. I am sure that my mother meant her no harm. Perhaps she should take off the rest of the afternoon and go up to her bed and rest.”

      The maid nodded, put her arm around the other girl and led her toward the kitchen. Alexandra started up the stairs toward Nancy.

      “What happened?”

      “It was my fault, miss,” Nancy admitted with the air of a martyr. “I shouldn’t have left her alone. But she’s been right agitated all day, and I thought a cup of hot cocoa might calm her down. So I went down to make it myself because she likes it just the way I fix it, you know, and I can’t get that foreign cook to make it right.”

      Alexandra nodded sympathetically, resisting the urge to point out to Nancy that she was the foreigner here, not the English cook.

      “But then, when I get down there, they tell me they already sent up a cup of tea—and after all the times I’ve told them that Mrs. Rhea doesn’t like tea in the middle of the afternoon! Not only that, that silly twit Amanda took it, and she’s enough to make anyone throw something at her, I say. Always blathering on in that little voice of hers, and you can’t even understand half of what she says. By the time I got back up the stairs, I hear a crash, and Amanda comes flying out of your mother’s room, crying up a storm, a big wet spot all down the side of her dress—where that tea was, I’ll warrant the pot didn’t come anywhere near her head—and then Miz Rhea slams the door and locks it. She’s been in there for twenty minutes, refusing to come out, and Miss Hortense can’t make any headway with her, it seems like.”

      “Oh, dear.”

      “She’ll open it for you,” Nancy went on confidently.

      Alexandra wasn’t so sure. There had been one or two times since they’d been in England that her mother hadn’t even seemed to know who she was.

      However, she continued up the stairs and strode with more confidence than she felt toward the door where her aunt stood, red-faced, her hand poised to knock again. When Aunt Hortense saw Alexandra, she let out a sigh of relief and started toward her.

      “There you are. Thank heavens. Maybe you can get through to her. Rhea’s locked herself in and won’t come out. It’s bad enough when she acts like this at home—I don’t know what she’s thinking, behaving this way in front of a bunch of Englishmen.” Her tone invested the term with scorn. Alexandra’s aunt was a sturdy, middle-aged woman in a sensible brown dress with a plain cap covering her hair, and her features, now frowning, were usually pleasant.

      “I’m afraid she doesn’t think about such things, Aunt Hortense—or care, either. Why don’t you go down to the sitting room, and I will see what I can do. Oh, and, Nancy, get her some of that cocoa now. It might just do the trick.”

      Alexandra waited while her aunt and the other woman walked away, giving her mother a moment of silence. Then she tapped lightly on the door. “Mother? It is I. Alexandra. Would you let me in?”

      There was a moment’s silence, then her mother’s voice said faintly, “Alexandra? Is that really you?”

      “Yes, of course it is, Mother,” Alexandra replied pleasantly. “Why don’t you unlock the door so we can talk?”

      After a moment there was the sound of the lock being turned, and then the door opened wide enough for Alexandra’s mother to peer out. Her face was drawn and worried, her eyes suspicious. Her expression lightened a little when she saw Alexandra. “Where have you been?” she asked as she opened the door wide enough to allow Alexandra in.

      “I had business to conduct. I told you that this morning. Remember?”

      Rhea Ward nodded vaguely, and Alexandra was not sure that she remembered at all. “Why do you have on your hat?” Rhea asked in a puzzled voice.

      “I haven’t had time to remove it, I’m afraid.” Alexandra reached up, untied the ribbon and pulled the hat off, continuing to talk in the soothing voice she used with her mother. “I just walked in, you see, and I came right up. Aunt Hortense was rather concerned about you.”

      She studied her mother unobtrusively as she spoke, taking in her untidy hair and messy appearance. Several buttons were unfastened or done up wrong, and stray hairs straggled around her face. Remembering her mother’s once neat, trim appearance, Alexandra felt her throat close with tears. What had happened to the gentle, sweet woman she had known in her early years? Though she was still a pretty woman, even in middle age, her face was becoming lined beyond her years, with an unhealthy puffiness that was echoed in her once petite figure. The degeneration was due, Alexandra was sure, to Rhea’s obsessive worries and her unfortunate, secretive dependence on bottles of liquor.

      “Mother, what’s the matter?” Alexandra asked, her worry showing through her assumed calm. “Why did you lock the door against Aunt Hortense?”

      Rhea Ward made a face. “Hortense was always a bossy soul. You’d think the world couldn’t СКАЧАТЬ