Margaret McPhee - Unmasking the Duke's Mistress

‘Oh, Arabella!’ Her mother clasped a hand to her mouth. ‘You cannot!’

‘I know it is a very great shock to you,’ she said in a calm reassuring voice that belied everything she was feeling. ‘And I am not proud of it.’ She was ashamed to the very core of her being, but she knew in order to make this bearable she must hide her true emotions from her mother. She must stand firm. Be strong. ‘But believe me when I tell you it is the best of the choices available. Do not seek to dissuade me from this, Mama, for my mind is quite made up.’

‘There was no workshop, was there?’ her mother asked in a deadened voice.

‘No.’ She saw the tremble in the old swollen hand that Mrs Tatton still clutched to her mouth and felt as bad as if she had just reached across and dealt her mother a physical blow.

‘And the gentleman?’

Arabella swallowed and averted her gaze. ‘It is best that he remains nameless for now.’ If her mother knew it was Dominic to whom she was selling herself there would be no force in heaven or on earth that could stop the awful cascade that would ensue.

‘Really?’ Mrs Tatton said in a hard voice that revealed to Arabella everything of her mother’s disillusionment and hurt. ‘And have you told him yet of Archie and of me?’

‘No,’ said Arabella quietly and her heart was racing and all of her fears rushed back as fast and frantic as a spring tide racing up a shore. ‘He need know nothing of either of you.’

‘It will be his house, Arabella. Do you not think he will notice an old woman and a child cluttering his path to his fancy piece?’ Mrs Tatton’s nostrils flared, revealing the extent of her distress.

Oh, indeed, Dominic would more than notice Archie in his path, Arabella thought grimly.

‘It will be a large house and he will not visit very often.’ She had been very careful in her negotiations with Dominic, forcing herself to think only of Archie’s safety and not the baseness of what she was doing, laying out her demands like the most callous of harlots. ‘All we need do is keep you both hidden from his sight when he does come.’ Words so simply spoken for her mother’s sake, but Arabella knew that they would have to be very careful indeed to hide the truth.

‘You think you are so clever, Arabella. You think you have it all planned out, do you not?’ Mrs Tatton said. ‘But what of the servants? It is the gentleman’s money that will pay their wages. They will be loyal to him. At the first opportunity they will be running to him behind your back, eager to spill your secrets. And he shall send Archie and me away.’

‘Do you think I would stay without you?’ she demanded. ‘It is true that it is his money that will pay the servants. But it is also true that if I dissolve our agreement, which I would most certainly do were they to tell him of your and Archie’s presence, then they shall be out of a job as much as me. I shall put it to them that it is in their interest, as much as mine, that we keep your presence secret from the gentleman.’

‘For men like him there are plenty more where you came from. Do not hold yourself so precious to him, Arabella,’ her mother warned.

The smile that slipped across Arabella’s face was bitter. ‘Oh, Mama, I know that I am not precious to him at all. Do not think that I would ever make that mistake.’ The word again went unspoken. ‘But he will take the house and the servants for me. And were I to leave, he would let them go again just as easily.’

‘Then we best pray that you are right, Archie and I.’ Mrs Tatton turned her face away but not before Arabella saw the shimmer of wetness upon her cheeks.

Mrs Tatton did not look round again, nor did she return to bed. She just stood there by the empty black fireplace, staring down on to the bare hearth. And when Arabella would have placed an arm of comfort around her mother’s shoulders, Mrs Tatton pulled away as if she could not bear the touch of so fallen a woman.

Arabella’s hand dropped back down to her side; inside of her the shame ate away a little more of her soul. She wondered what her mother’s reaction would be if she knew what the alternative had been. And she wondered how much worse her mother’s reaction would be if she ever learned that the man in question was Dominic Furneaux.

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