‘My father never adopted you,’ he said coldly. ‘In the eyes of the law, you are not my sister. And therefore it would be quite inappropriate for you to make your home with me now.’
Nick, who was training for the law, had already given her the devastating news that the Brambles—the house where she had grown up, the place she had thought of as her home—would have to be sold to pay off the debts Hugh had racked up in the latter years of his life.
‘What is left over is to be divided equally between myself, Alaric and Germanicus.’
She had felt as though Nick had struck her. ‘What about me?’ she had asked in a scratchy voice. How could he have left everything equally between the three sons who had left her to nurse their father through his last, protracted illness? Not that she blamed any one of them. Nick was too busy with his law books. Alaric was away with his regiment, fighting in the Peninsula. And Germanicus was a naval lieutenant serving with his squadron in the Caribbean.
No, it was Hugh’s attitude she found hard to swallow.
She had listened with mounting hope as Nick proceeded to witter on about widow’s jointures and marriage settlements, slowly grasping the fact that her mother, at least, had not intended her to be left completely penniless. She had, in fact, bequeathed her only surviving child quite a tidy sum.
Though Nick had not been able to quite meet her eye as he explained that it was to have been hers when she reached her twenty-fifth birthday.
‘Unfortunately, my father somehow got access to it and made some rather unwise investments.’
From the look on Nick’s face, Imogen had gathered he had squandered the lot.
‘What must I do then, Nick?’ she had asked with a sinking feeling. ‘Seek employment?’ She would probably be able to get work in a school. One thing about growing up in the household of a man who devoted his life to studying antiquities was that there had never been any shortage of books. She could teach any number of subjects, she was quite sure, to boys as well as girls.
‘No, not as bad as that,’ Nick had assured her. ‘Your mother’s family have agreed to take you in and, once your period of mourning is over, to give you a Season. If you can make a match your uncle approves of, he will make up what you would have received from your mother upon your majority into a respectable dowry.’
And so, though the prospect of having to endure even a single Season had her shivering with dread, she had been packed off to live with Lord Callandar, her mother’s brother, and Lady Callandar, his wife.
At least it had not been like going to live with total strangers. Though she had never met them, Lord Callandar had written to his sister Amanda punctiliously on her birthday and Imogen’s, every year.
It had never crossed anyone’s mind to approach her real father’s family, not considering their obdurate attitude towards her mother. They had laid the blame for what her aunt termed the Dreadful Tragedy firmly at her door. Imogen had never had any contact with them at all.
‘Are you attending me, Imogen?’ her aunt snapped, rapping her wrist with her fan so smartly that it jerked her out of her reverie. ‘And sit up straight. Hands in your lap, not folded in that insolent manner!’
Imogen flinched to hear her aunt sounding so annoyed, and dutifully corrected her posture. She was truly sorry that she had turned out to be such a disappointment to her aunt and uncle, who had each shown her a great deal of kindness, in their own way. Her uncle had spent an extortionate amount of money trying to make up for what he saw as the deficiencies in her education. He had paid for deportment lessons and dancing lessons, and encouraged her aunt to buy her more clothes than she had believed it was possible for one girl to wear in a lifetime. And that had just been to cover her mourning. They had shopped all over again when she went into half mourning, and again when it was time for her to begin moving about in society a little.
And yet she had never felt at all happy in the Herriard household. It might have had something to do with the fact that she still had vague, shadowy memories of the short time she had lived there before, in the aftermath of the Dreadful Tragedy. Her grandfather seemed always to have been angry, her mother always weeping. And nobody would tell her where her big brother Stephen had gone. Her grandpapa had roared at her that she was a naughty girl for even mentioning him, and said that if she so much as spoke his name again, he would have her beaten. A feeling of utter isolation had frozen her to the spot on a part of the landing that she could still not pass without a shiver. For Stephen had always been the one to scoop her up when the grown-ups were fighting and take her away somewhere she could not hear the raised voices.
There was nobody to stand between her and this large, angry man, and it had terrified her. Even the nursery had been no refuge for the frightened little girl. Without Stephen, it had just become a bleak and empty prison cell. She had the impression of being left for days on end behind locked doors, although she was sure even her grandfather could not have been that cruel. He must have ensured she had at least a nursery maid bring her something to eat!
But no matter how hard she tried to resist them, those unhappy memories came swirling round her every time she crossed the threshold of the grand house in Mount Street.
It was not helped by the fact that once her mother had married Hugh Bredon, her life had undergone such a drastic change. Instead of incarceration and isolation, she had spent her first years at the Brambles learning to fish and shoot and ride, so that she could keep up with her magnificent new big brothers. She did not think she had run wild, precisely, over the ensuing nineteen years, though towards the end of her time there, she definitely had far more freedom than her aunt and uncle deemed appropriate for a young lady. She had thought nothing of saddling up her mare or harnessing the gig to go on errands or visit friends, entirely unaccompanied. And then, after her mother had died, she had taken over the running of Hugh’s household.
Her Uncle Herriard, she knew, would never have trusted a sixteen-year-old girl to run his household for him. Her stepfather might never have shown her much affection, but he had reposed a great deal of confidence in her abilities. Hugh had only checked the household accounts for the first few months she was in charge, and though he never praised her, he never complained about the way she ran things, either. All he wanted was to be left in peace to get on with his studies, and she had taken great pride in ensuring that he could do so.
But she had to face facts. When it came right down to it, Hugh Bredon had never quite thought of her as his own daughter. It was as though he was unable to forget that she was the result of his wife’s first disastrous marriage to Baron Framlingham.
Imogen’s shoulders slumped. ‘I am sorry to be such a disappointment to you, Aunt,’ she said dejectedly. ‘It is not that I am not trying to behave as you would wish…’
‘I know,’ her aunt agreed. ‘That is what is so particularly exasperating. It is so hard to discipline you for faults you just cannot help having! They are so deeply ingrained, that…’ She sighed. ‘If only you were as pretty as your mother,’ she said, for what seemed to Imogen like the thousandth time.
The very first time Lady Callandar had seen her, she had blanched and said, ‘Oh, dear! How very unfortunate!’
With her wildly curling hair and intelligent grey eyes, Imogen was, apparently, the very image of her father, Kit Hebden.
‘Knowing eyes,’ her uncle had said disparagingly. ‘That was the thing about Framlingham. Always looking at you as though he knew something you didn’t.’
‘Anyone who knew him will take one look at her,’ Lady Callandar had wailed, ‘and say she is bound to turn out exactly like him!’
‘Then you will just have to make sure,’ her uncle had said sternly, ‘that she never gives anyone cause to think it!’
‘Imogen, dear,’ her aunt had said sympathetically, once her uncle had stormed from the room,