The Heiress Effect

But he didn’t start in on the usual lecture, the one she almost had memorized. There was no temporizing over the immoral tendencies that she had so clearly inherited from her mother, the ones she needed to guard against. Instead he frowned.

“What worries me this time,” he said, “is that you appear to have wrapped your sister up in one of your ploys.”

Jane swallowed.

“I had thought that I would serve as a softening influence on you, but I fear that the reverse is happening. Your ways are instead extending to your sweet younger sister. In her innocence, I suppose she imagines that you feel affection for her.”

“I do,” Jane protested. “Do not doubt that, if you doubt anything.”

He simply shook his head. “If you cared for her,” he said, “you would not draw her down your dark path.”

“What dark path?”

“The path of lies,” Titus said gravely. “You have taught your sister how to lie.”

Emily hadn’t needed any teaching on that front.

“If this continues,” Titus said, “I will have to send you away to my sister. Lily is not as kind as I am. She wouldn’t allow you to gad about to party after party without making an attachment. She tells me on a regular basis how I have erred with you. She’d have you married off in no time.”

Marriage—marriage to any man—would have been bad enough. As a married woman, she simply wouldn’t have the excuse of living in her uncle’s home. Her husband might take her away from Emily for months at a time. But marriage to a man her aunt favored…

Jane clutched her skirts under the table. “No,” she said. “Please, Uncle. Don’t send me away. You haven’t erred. I am trying.”

He didn’t accept her apology. Instead, he shook his head as if Jane had run to the end of even his vast gullibility.

“Jane, you bribed the good doctor to tell lies,” her uncle said patiently, holding up a finger. “You convinced your sister to tell him falsehoods about our prayer habits, when I have done my best to raise you both as good Christians.” Another finger went into the air. “You interrupted him and drove him off before he had a chance to see the effect of his treatment on Emily. The treatment he described was sound.”

“It was quackery,” Jane said. “He exposed her to electric shock, Uncle, and he planned to do so repeatedly just to see what it would do.”

She shouldn’t have spoken, shouldn’t have argued. But this time, he didn’t lecture her on her recalcitrance. He simply shook his head sadly. “And that is not all. Even I, as insulated as I am from the madness of the social whirl, have heard tales of your behavior.”

Only Titus would refer to the tepid occasional dinner engagements held in Cambridge as “the madness of the social whirl.” Most Cambridge events were unsuitable for young women, seeing as how they involved young men who were pretending to be adults for the first time in their lives.

Titus had a healthy competence that paid a few thousand pounds a year. Because of that, he’d never needed any sort of profession, and consequently, he hadn’t bothered to get one. He’d enjoyed his years at Cambridge so much that he was now something of a hanger-on. He styled himself a tutor. “A tutor for the right sort of boys,” he often told others, jovially.

He had only one such boy this year, and she suspected he preferred matters that way. He attended lectures, halfheartedly looked for students who wanted his assistance in studying for the Law Tripos, and generally imagined himself a figure of greater importance than he was.

“Why is it,” Titus said, “that nobody likes you?”

It stung, those words. Even though it was a reputation that she herself had assiduously cultivated. Jane flinched.

“My information does not say that your behavior is improper,” her uncle said, “and for that, I am grateful. But there is improper behavior, and there is behavior that is unacceptable, and by all accounts yours falls into the latter.”

The unfairness of it stung her.

“A right-thinking lady,” her uncle said, “never insults a gentleman. She never talks when her betters speak. She eats very little, and that with her mouth always closed. She always knows the correct fork to use. She never uses her hands, except when it’s appropriate.”

“Appropriate!” Jane said. “How am I supposed to know what is appropriate? Every other girl has had a governess since birth. Some of them attended finishing schools; the others were finished by aunts and mothers and sisters—anyone willing to spend the years necessary to make sure they knew all the rules. How to curtsy, and to whom. How to eat. How to speak to others.”

She drew in a ragged breath, but it didn’t assuage her hurt. It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t.

“My father,” Jane said, “put his wife and daughters away for nineteen years. Mother passed away when I was ten. For nine years after that, I lived on an isolated manor, begging my father to do something with me. I had no governess. I learned no rules.” Her voice was shaking. “And then you inherited me and decided I needed to be married off. What did you imagine would happen when you tossed me out in polite society with no training?”

“A true lady,” Titus said primly, “would have known—”

“No, she wouldn’t have. Or there would be no finishing schools. Babies aren’t born knowing how to curtsy. They aren’t born knowing what subjects of conversation are not allowed.”

He looked mulishly stubborn.

“I didn’t know,” Jane said. “I didn’t know anything. You threw me out to society with no preparation or instruction, and you have the temerity to criticize me because I didn’t take?”

“Jane,” her uncle said, “I don’t want to hear this disrespectful claptrap again.”

She opened her mouth to argue once again, before remembering that it would do no good. He had already made up his mind. And that—despite her angry words, despite how things had started—at this point, she bore a great deal of responsibility for her own reputation. She’d made that choice. Mostly.

“I think,” Titus said, “that I will give you another chance. My every rational impulse counsels against such a thing. I will not let your sister follow in your footsteps. But…” He sighed.

“If you’d only let her out, sir. She is—”

He cast her a look. “Enough of that. She is too fragile to be allowed out. I’m giving you another chance, Jane. Don’t use it up before you leave this room.”