Chapter 9

Harriet woke with a start. There was a body in the bed with her.

She fumbled to release herself from the sheets and was standing on one bare foot and the curled edge of the other on the scratchy wool of the rug before she was fully awake.

A noise like the snuffle and squeak of a hedgerow animal came from the mound under the covers. Of course. It was Alice. She’d forgotten her cousin was sharing her bed. Harriet tiptoed to the bureau at the bottom of the bed and ferreted around in a drawer, pulling out a pair of thick socks. She sat on the edge of the bed, which creaked noisily, and pulled them on, massaging her foot for a few seconds to relieve a cramp, before getting back under the covers.

Alice snuggled against her. ‘Where did you go, Lally?’

‘Nowhere. Shush. Go back to sleep. It’s very late.’

Harriet had no idea what time it was, but the sound of laughter from the front parlour told her it could not be the dead of night.

Harriet’s bedroom was at the gable end of the house, downstairs, across the hall from the room where Walter was entertaining his guests. It was a large room that she’d shared with her brother when they had come to live with their uncle and aunt, but now it was hers alone, a refuge, the only part of the house in which she could occasionally close the door and draw the curtains against the world. Not tonight, though. Aunt Polly in her wisdom had suggested Alice might benefit from a night in her favourite cousin’s bed. The poor mite was highly strung, and the previous night had woken screaming in fright from a bad dream. She was also frequently to be found swaying at the top of the staircase, fast asleep, and had to be guided back to bed.

‘If she’s with you,’ said Aunt Polly, ‘she won’t be falling down any stairs.’

Or disturbing her mother’s slumber, Harriet thought, but as with so many of her mutinous thoughts, did not say them out loud.

She had some of her mother’s possessions in this room, not many. Jewellery and gee-gaws did not figure among her few treasures. She had kept a piece of unfinished embroidery that was propped on an easel in the corner of her room. The outline of a slim girl in a ballgown, holding a closed fan in one delicate hand, a tiara balanced on her head. A princess, her finely drawn features barely discernible. Only the hair piled under the tiara had been coloured in with orange thread. Harriet had no wish to complete it and had resisted Alice’s pleas to finish the tapestry. She would leave it as her mother had.

As a very young girl, Harriet had been taught how to peg rugs by her mother and the first rug they made together was now back in her possession. It lay on the floor by the bed, on what was Alice’s side tonight.