Chapter 18 Letter to Fiona
Fiona,
I have received the most distressing accounts from your Aunt Prudence regarding your continued stay at Thornwick Castle. At first I hoped her report might be exaggerated—you know her tendency toward alarm—but further intelligence has unfortunately confirmed the substance of her concerns.
You have been residing, unmarried and without proper chaperonage, in the household of an unmarried gentleman for nearly three weeks.
The servants speak of it. The villagers speak of it.
The matter has already travelled as far as Whitby, and from there—inevitably—to London, where I have been obliged to endure the most uncomfortable enquiries from acquaintances of long standing.
Mrs Ashborn had the impertinence to ask me, at Lady Arlington’s card party, whether my daughter had “secured herself a duke at last.” The implication was perfectly clear and profoundly mortifying.
I do not know what has possessed you. You have always been the sensible one, the practical one—the daughter upon whose judgement I believed I might depend.
To discover that you have abandoned such good sense for—what, precisely?
A man? The idle fancies of a circulating-library romance?
—is a disappointment I scarcely know how to express.
Your father is exceedingly angry. He has spoken more than once of travelling to Yorkshire himself in order to bring you home, though I have thus far persuaded him that such a journey would only inflame the gossip already surrounding your name. I cannot promise to restrain him much longer.
You must return at once.
Come home, Fiona—before matters proceed beyond remedy. Whatever this gentleman may have led you to expect, no private attachment can justify the ruin you now risk.
Your mother,
Helena Hart