But she could not think like that. She had started this now, and she had no choice but to see it through. She could not go back, to Mr. Smith and his waiting enforcers, and beyond that, to the desperate daily struggle to eat, survive, keep her head above water. . . .
“Oh, Abel, darling,” Mitzi said, and her voice was a little throaty.
“I’m sorry,” Abel said. He dashed at his eyes again, blinking hard. “I thought—I really thought I’d come to terms with the idea of her death, I mean we hadn’t heard from her for so long, obviously we had all assumed . . . but to think that all that time, and she was alive and well . . . and we never knew. Dear God. Poor Ezra.”
Poor Ezra? But Hal did not have time to disentangle Abel’s remark, for Mitzi was speaking.
“Do you think, Abel,” she began, and then stopped. When she carried on, it was hesitantly, as if uncertain of what she was about to say. “Do you think that’s . . . why?”
“Why what?”
“Why . . . the will. Do you think your mother realized how she behaved, perhaps . . . ? That she had driven your sister away, and perhaps felt . . . I don’t know . . . guilty in some way?”
“A kind of atonement?” Abel asked, and then he shrugged again. “Honestly? I don’t think so. God knows, I’ve never understood Mother’s motives, and in spite of living with her for nearly twenty years, I have precious little insight into her thought processes, but I don’t think guilt was an emotion she even registered, let alone understood. I would like to think it was something as positive as atonement, but the truth is . . .”
He stopped, glanced at Hal, and then gave a kind of shaky laugh, as if trying to shrug off the conversation.
“But listen to me, rambling on. Poor Harriet’s still clutching that thermometer like grim death. Let’s see what it says.”
Hal held it out.
“I’m sorry,” she said again, and she meant it now. “For all this. I’ll be going tomorrow.”
But as Abel held the thermometer up to the light, he whistled and shook his head.
“101.5. No question of you going anywhere, young lady.”
“A hundred and one!” Mitzi gave a little shriek. “Good Lord. You definitely cannot go home tomorrow, Harriet, I won’t hear of it. Anyway”—she glanced at Abel, a quick little look, almost of trepidation—“anyway, you will need to stay around. There’s so much to discuss. After all—this is your house now.”
CHAPTER 15
* * *
Your house now.
Your house now.
The words turned sickly in Hal’s gut as she lay in the darkness of the attic room, listening to the wind in the trees outside, the crackle of the fire in the grate, and the far-off crash of the sea, trying to come to terms with what had just happened.
She had not had the courage to face Harding, and fortunately Abel and Mitzi had fallen in with her plea for an early bedtime. Abel had helped her up the stairs, lit the fire, and then tactfully withdrawn while she got into her nightclothes, her limbs trembling with a mix of tiredness and fever. Then, after Hal was sitting up in bed, Mitzi had appeared with a bowl of soup on a tray.
“It’s only Heinz, I’m afraid,” she said as she placed the tray on Hal’s bedside table and straightened the contents. “Oh, bother. It’s cold already. It was boiling when I left the kitchen, I swear!”
“It’s fine, really,” Hal said. Her voice was croaky, and her face felt hot from the fire, in spite of the damp chill of the bedclothes. “I’m not that hungry.”
“Well, you must eat something, heaven knows you’ve got little enough to spare. Edward will be here in a few minutes, and he’s going to pop up to see you before we sit down to dinner.”
“Thank you,” Hal said humbly. She felt her cheeks burn, not only with fever and the heat from the grate, but with the thought of what she was doing to this family, and how nice Mitzi and Abel were being over it. Back in Brighton, it had seemed so different—so completely different. Risking everything to snatch a few hundred pounds from a bunch of wealthy strangers—it had seemed somehow rather gallant, a touch of Robin Hood about the whole thing.
But now she was here, in their family home, and the legacy was not a few hundred, nor even the few thousand she had been half daring to hope for, but something terrifyingly huge—and what she was doing seemed anything but gallant.
There was no way she was going to get away with this. The fury in Harding’s eye spoke of lawsuits and contested wills and private detectives. But it was too late to turn tail and run away now. She was stuck here—quite literally.
Hal felt her stomach turn and shift and, under Mitzi’s watchful eye, she took a spoonful of the soup and forced it down.
There was a knock at the door as she lifted the second spoonful to her lips, and Mitzi stood and opened it. Outside was Abel, his honey-dark hair windswept and tousled—and a handsome, blue-eyed man wearing a rain-spattered overcoat. He had a thick blond mustache that was new, but in spite of that, Hal recognized him from Facebook even before Abel spoke.
“Harriet, this is my partner, Edward.”
“Edward!” Mitzi kissed him on both cheeks, before ushering him into the little room. He was tall and broad-shouldered, and he seemed to fill the little space. “Come in and meet Harriet.”
“Harriet,” Edward said. “Delighted.” His voice was clipped, as if from an expensive education, and his overcoat looked well-cut and brand-new, but he pulled it off and draped it carelessly over one arm, before sitting on the end of Hal’s bed. “Well, it’s a strange way to be meeting a new niece-in-law, but pleased to meet you. Edward Ashby.”
He held out a hand, and Hal took it hesitantly, feeling the cold of his skin compared to her own hot hand.
“I won’t keep you up, because I’d imagine you’re probably longing to get to sleep, but Abel said you had a bit of an episode, is that right?”
“I passed out,” Hal said. “But it’s nothing serious, I promise.” She tried to keep her voice from croaking. “I’d forgotten to eat, you know what it’s like.”
“I don’t, actually,” Edward said, with a grin. “My stomach is sacred and I start planning lunch around nine thirty a.m., but I’ll take your word for it. Well, you do seem to have a bit of a temperature. Any headaches?”
“Just a bruise where I hit my head,” Hal lied. The truth was her head was aching badly, though the paracetamol had helped a little.
“Any nausea?”
“No, none.” That at least was the truth.
“And you’re eating—that’s a good sign. Well, I think you’re probably all right, but if you start to feel sick, come and tell someone, okay?”
“Okay,” Hal said. She coughed, trying to smother it in her hand.
“Have you taken anything for the temperature?” Edward asked.
“Paracetamol.”
“You could take an ibuprofen as well, if you want—I think I’ve got some.” He stood, and patted first his suit pockets, then his overcoat, and finally came out with some pills. They were in an unbranded dispensary bottle, the only label a handwritten pharmacist’s scribble that Hal could not make out, but he twisted off the cap and shook two out onto the table.
“Thanks,” Hal said. She was longing for them to leave, but she tried to smile.
“Swallow them down,” Edward said, rather heartily. “You’ll feel better if you do.”
Hal looked at the pills. They were white, and completely unmarked. Didn’t pills usually have something on them saying the dosage? It came to her, a fleeting, paranoid thought, that these could be anything, from Viagra to sleeping pills. But that was ridiculous, surely.
“Take the pills, Harriet,” Abel said. “We don’t want your temperature spiking in the night.”
Rather reluctantly, Hal put them in her mouth, took a sip of water, and swallowed them down. Edward smiled as she did.
“Well done. And with that, I’ll leave you to your soup. Sorry we’re meeting under these circs, Harriet,” Edward said as he gathered up his overcoat. Hal wasn’t sure whether he meant the funeral, her head, or all of it. “But, well—sleep well.”