Heaven Sent by Alice Duncan Page B

“Please have Mrs.
Granger bring refreshments into the drawing room. Have somebody
fetch Becky and her nanny.” It was difficult for him to say Miss
Prophet’s name aloud. A small groan escaped him when he added,
“I’ll tackle Mrs. Bridgewater as soon as I put my coat
on.”
    “ Very good, sir.”
    Figgins left the room. It had always
amused Aubrey that Figgins looked as if he were floating, so
smoothly did he move. The man was so dashedly formal. Figgins’s
gait ceased to amuse him today, however. The promise of
encountering Anne’s least favorite aunt could smother anyone’s
enjoyment of life.
    Anne Harriott’s parents had been
wonderful people. It stood to reason that it had been so, since
Anne herself had been an angel. Their lives had been cut tragically
short, as had their daughter’s, although their deaths had been
incurred in an accident five years before Anne’s illness had
begun.
    And, no matter the reason for this
unusual visit, Aubrey was sure it augured a problem. Mrs.
Bridgewater, Mr. Harriott’s older sister, had missed the angelic
Harriott family leaning entirely. She was an overbearing moose of a
woman, and Aubrey didn’t like her. Worse, neither did Becky. The
poor child was always cowed in Mrs. Bridgewater’s presence. Well,
and why shouldn’t she be? Aubrey was pretty much cowed himself when
faced with the austere and disapproving Mrs. Bridgewater. Anne and
he had started calling her Mrs. Bilgewater in private, although
they never did so in front of Becky, fearing she might believe it
to be the woman’s real name.
    He stopped to take a deep breath
before he entered the drawing room. Old Bilgewater, he saw at once,
hadn’t bothered to sit, but stood before the fireplace, staring
with censure through her eyeglasses at the portrait of Anne hanging
above the mantel. Immediately, Aubrey’s ire rose. If the old bat
said one word about that portrait, Aubrey would give her a piece of
his mind that she wouldn’t easily digest.
    However, he owed it to Anne’s memory
to be courteous to any of her relations, at least at first, so he
said pleasantly, “Mrs. Bridgewater. What a nice surprise.” An
honest man, Aubrey nonetheless permitted himself the occasional
social lie.
    Mrs. Bridgewater turned in a regal
manner—probably due to her corset stays, Aubrey thought bitterly.
Her eyeglasses glittered, giving her an even more forbidding
appearance than she might have had without them. Aubrey had never
seen eyeglasses have that effect on anyone but Aunt Evelyn
Bilgewater.
    She appeared to sneer at him. “Oh.
There you are. I think you ought to remove this portrait, Aubrey.
It can’t be good for Rebecca to be reminded of her mother all the
time.”
    If human emotion could be registered
in terms of volcanic displays, Aubrey would have erupted. He didn’t
permit his fury to show, but merely said quietly, “Anne’s portrait
is precious to both Becky and me, Mrs. Bridgewater, and I won’t be
removing it any time soon.”
    The middle-aged matron snorted. “Well,
you’re a fool then.”
    Aubrey didn’t respond to this blatant
attempt to rile him. “Mrs. Granger is bringing us some
refreshments, Mrs. Bridgewater. Won’t you be seated? I’ve sent for
Becky.”
    “ I want to talk to you about
Rebecca, Aubrey.” She sat with a crisp crunch of black bombazine.
“That’s why I chose to take the arduous journey to this
end-of-the-world place today.”
    She reminded Aubrey a little of
Monster, the way her large body pooched out around the edges.
However, Monster, even when attacking his feet, possessed a better
nature than Bilgewater.
    Her words froze his blood. Not that
this human female buffalo could do anything with Becky without his
permission, but Aubrey didn’t fancy getting embroiled in a fight
with her. He said, “Oh?” and smiled benignly. Because he disliked
her and didn’t care for the way she belittled Santa Angelica, he
added, “Anne and I chose to live here in order to get away