Undoing of a Lady by Nicola Cornick Page A

summer morning. That was one aspect of her situation she had blindly refused even to consider until Nat had put it into words the previous night.
    She allowed her hand to slide down over her night rail, following the flat planes of her stomach. She looked the same. She felt the same. In fact she felt sick, but that was the brandy rather than anything else. She could not be pregnant. That truly would be a disaster. The thought of it terrified her. It was all very well for Laura Anstruther, for example, to have a child. Laura was old—at least thirty—and already had a daughter and anyway, she was a grown-up. And Lydia Cole—well, Lydia’s pregnancy had caused a most terrible scandal but Lydia herself would be a wonderful mother because she was so sane and so calm and so loving that she could surely look on her baby and feel all the right emotions rather than the sheer terror that Lizzie would feel if only she permitted herself to think about it for a second…Her thoughts ran wild like rats in a trap until she took a deep breath and calmed herself.
    Nothing happened …
    Her heart steadied. She would carry on as before. What to do today? Life felt strangely empty. All her tomorrows stretched out before her now and it was odd that she could think of nothing that she wanted to do with them. She realized that so many of her activities had been shared with Nat in the past. They had particularly enjoyed riding out together. A summer morning like this was made for a gallop on the Yorkshire fells. Except that she would be going out on her own in future.
    She found a clean gown folded in the wardrobe and struggled to put it on, bundling her hair up with a ribbon. When she threw back the curtains the sunshine was bright and hot, pouring into the room and showing up the dust and cobwebs. Something had to be done about Fortune Hall, Lizzie thought. It was going to rack and ruin whilst Monty grasped after people’s money and spent it all on drink. Soon—in two months time, in fact—he would be entitled to enforce the Dames’ Tax and to take half the dowry of any heiress left in the village who had not wed. That included her, of course. She was the only heiress left, apart from Flora Minchin and Mary Wheeler. Monty’s money-grubbing ways really had to be stopped once and for all, Lizzie thought. She knew that Laura Anstruther had instructed her lawyers to start working on the case the previous year. She needed to talk to Laura and see what they could do about Monty. She would go to the Old Palace after she had scraped together some breakfast. She could see Laura and Lydia, too, and inquire after their health, for both were advanced in their pregnancy now. And she need have no fear that her friends would suspect that anything was wrong with her because all was settled.
    Nothing happened …Lizzie remembered her childish nightmares, and how she would pretend that if she did not look at the monsters that would mean that they really weren’t there at all.
    She went out onto the landing. The door of Monty’s bedroom was closed whilst that of Tom’s stood ajar with the light streaming out into the corridor. Dust motes jumped and danced in the sunlight. The plaster was peeling from the walls and the floorboards creaked beneath Lizzie’s feet. At times like this Fortune Hall seemed every one of its three hundred and more years old. It feels like I do, Lizzie thought, old and worn. She had come to Fortune Hall to live with her half brothers after her father had died. She had been eleven years old and to be plunged from the warmth, laughter and hedonism of Scarlet Park into the peeling and decrepit existence of Fortune Hall had been a terrible shock. Scarlet Park had been a bright, shining world. Fortune Hall was its opposite in every way.
    Shivering, Lizzie hastened down the wide wooden stairs and into the kitchen, where a sullen youth was listlessly sweeping the flagged floor and the kitchen maid was peeling a pile of rotting