“Before ye go out, Susan, I want ye to take off that rag you’re wearing and put on one of the new riding blouses Thorin sent ye week before last. It’s the least ye can do to show yer—”

Anything her aunt might have said past that point would have been lost in anger even if Susan hadn’t interrupted. She passed a hand down the sleeve of her shirt, loving its texture—it was almost velvety from so many washings. “This rag belonged to my father!”

“Aye, Pat’s.” Aunt Cord sniffed. “It’s too big for ye, and worn out, and not proper, in any case. When you were young it was mayhap all right to wear a man’s button-shirt, but now that ye have a woman’s bustline...”

The riding blouses were on hangers in the corner; they had come four days ago and Susan hadn’t even deigned to take them up to her room. There were three of them, one red, one green, one blue, all silk, all undoubtedly worth a small fortune. She loathed their pretension, and the overblown, blushy-frilly look of them: full sleeves to flutter artistically in the wind, great floppy foolish collars... and, of course, the low-scooped fronts which were probably all Thorin would see if she appeared before him dressed in one. As she wouldn’t, if she could possibly help it.

“My ‘woman’s bust-line,’ as you call it, is of no interest to me and can’t possibly be of any interest to anyone else when I’m out riding,” Susan said.

“Perhaps, perhaps not. If one of the Barony’s drovers should see you—even Rennie, he’s out that way all the time, as ye well know—it wouldn’t hurt for him to mention to Hart that he saw ye wearing one of the camisas that he so kindly gave to ye. Now would it? Why do ye have to be such a stiff-kins, girl? Why always so unwilling, so unfair?”

“What does it matter to ye, one way or t’other?” Susan had asked. “Ye have the money, don’t ye? And ye’ll have more yet. After he fucks me.”

Aunt Cord, her face white and shocked and furious, had leaned across the table and slapped her. “How dare thee use that word in my house, ye malhablada? How dare ye?”

That was when her tears began to flow—at hearing her call it her house. “It was my father’s house! His and mine! Ye were all on yer own with no real place to go, except perhaps to the Quarters, and he took ye in! He took ye in, Aunt!”