Page 42 of Appointment in Bath

The old housekeeper’s perpetually sour countenance was unusually blank. “Your father wishes to see you, miss.”

Meg’s stomach tensed. She cast one final look in the mirror of her dressing table. Her thick hair was twisted back in a simple chignon, her twilled silk gown neat and pressed. Miss Adams had once said that a lady’s toilette provided a degree of armor in difficult situations. As Meg rose from her seat, she hoped it was true.

Exiting her room, she turned in the direction that led to her father’s wing.

Mrs. Church stopped her. “He’s in his study.”

Meg’s already pounding heart gave a decided lurch. If her father had managed to dress and come downstairs, all the way to his study—a room he hadn’t occupied since his fall from his horse—it meant his anger had reached frightening proportions.

She smoothed her skirts. She’d told Ivo she wasn’t afraid of her father. And she wasn’t.

She refused to be.

“Thank you, Mrs. Church,” she said.

The housekeeper lingered a moment. She looked as though she very much wanted to say something. To scold Meg, no doubt, for having broken bread with a Beresford.

Meg gave the woman a level stare. If she wasn’t going to be afraid of her father, she certainly wouldn’t be frightened of one of her own servants. “Is there anything else?”

Mrs. Church pursed her lips. Something in Meg’s face persuaded her to hold her tongue on the subject. “No, miss.”

That’s what I thought, Meg uttered silently.

Like her father, Mrs. Church and Mrs. Stapleton claimed to value meek obedience in a young lady. But they none of them really did. What they respected was strength. Meg was no longer going to hide hers to please them. It served no purpose at all except to diminish her in their eyes—and in her own.

From now on, she was going to assert her wishes, come what may, even if her father did bellow and threaten like Henry VIII. He couldn’t, in reality, send her to the tower. This wasn’t the Middle Ages.

Shoulders set, she made her way down the hall to the main staircase. She descended the marble steps, her skirts clutched in her hands. Her father’s study was at the back of the house, near to the library. She found him there, seated behind his massive Jacobean desk, engaged in writing a letter.

He was in his paisley silk dressing gown, worn over a pair of loose-fitting wool trousers. Perspiration beaded his brow. He was obviously still in pain.

She hesitated on the threshold. “You wanted m-me, sir?” No amount of resolve could completely quell her stammer in his presence.

Sir Frederick didn’t look up from his letter. His quill pen continued scratching over the page with unusual force. “Come in and close the door behind you.”

Meg worried her lip with her teeth as she shut the door. The curtains were drawn over the windows, leaving the study to look as out of use as it had been in the previous months. Only the small fire crackling in the grate and the single candle flickering on her father’s desk leavened the darkness. They cast shadows across the heavy furnishings, streaking over the floor like long fingers reaching out to her.

Knees trembling, Meg walked to her father’s desk. She sat down in one of the two leather-upholstered armchairs arrayed across from it.

Her father dashed the nib of his quill into the inkpot, splashing a drop of black ink onto the blotter. “I didn’t invite you to sit.”

On any other occasion, Meg would have leapt straight back to her feet. But not this time. She remained in her chair, reminding herself that she’d done nothing wrong.

Nothing that he knew of, at least.

He didn’t have any inkling that she’d been meeting Ivo by the river, only that she’d dined with him in company. It was a minor sin in comparison. Indeed, it was no sin at all.

The thought restored Meg’s courage. “You’d rather I stood in f-front of you like a servant b-being dressed d-down for breaking a vase?”

It was quite the most impertinent thing she’d ever said to him.

Impertinent enough that he finally stopped what he was doing to glare at her. “What did you say to me, girl?”

“I asked you if I—”

“You dare take that tone with me?” He cast aside his quill, leaving his letter unfinished. “You who have gone behind my back to do what I’ve expressly forbidden any member of my household from doing?”

“What is th-that?” If he wanted to accuse her of something, he’d have to do so outright. She wasn’t going to do his work for him.