I do not think that I can stand another minute—no not another second—of being smothered in all these layers of hypocrisy! I would like to tear myself free! Thank God it is cooler in here…I was beginning to feel as if I could not breathe any longer. A few more minutes and I would have…”
Used to handling her charge, Harriet faced the challenging glower directed at her with a raised eyebrow. “My dear Alexa, don’t you think that you are by now a trifle past the age for childish tantrums? I was proud of the way in which you conducted yourself just now, and I’m sure you lived up to everything Sir John must have told the Governor and his wife about you. You’re not going to let down the people who believe in you from lack of self-control, I hope?”
For a moment Alexa seemed to stand there poised like a hummingbird caught in mid-flight, and perhaps even she did not know whether she was on the brink of rebelling or running away. But then, to Harriet’s relief, the rigid young shoulders seemed to slump, and the slender fingers that had already began to claw at the neck of the offending gown dropped away.
Not defeat, Harriet warned herself. With Alexa, born under the zodiacal sign of Leo, the lion, there would never be the concession of defeat, only an occasional retreat, perhaps. Putting aside her own weariness, Harriet came forward briskly, commanding a suddenly woebegone-looking Alexa to turn around.
“No need to tear a perfectly good dress, what with the price of fine materials these days. Here, I don’t suppose you want me to send for one of those chattering little maids, do you? So I’ll undo you myself, if you’ll hold still. And do try to remember, my dear, that losing your temper is the same thing as losing your head—or losing the advantage, if you were engaged in some kind of a contest. Do you imagine you’d be any good on a hunting trip if you stopped using your head and gave in to blind panic?”
“I…I suppose I never thought about all this in the same light,” Alexa confessed, with her head bent. And then, throwing it up almost defiantly, she said, “Keeping a cool head…A hunt—is that what I am supposed to be engaged in? But who is the quarry, Aunt Harriet? The eligible man I’m supposed to capture with my false, feminine wiles? Or I myself?”
There had been an edge of cynicism and perhaps even of desperation in Alexa’s voice that forced Harriet to answer with studied brusqueness. “My dear child, I hope I did not make you imagine, with all my sermonizing, that you are being abandoned to the wolves. You must not feel that you must immediately find yourself a husband, or think that this will be your only opportunity to meet eligible men. All I meant to say was that it is more than high time you thought of yourself as a beautiful and feminine young woman to whom men are bound to be attracted and not as a sister or a plucky comrade, as some of the young officers stationed upcountry seem to regard you! Oh, for heaven’s sake! I really can’t seem to recall now what I started out to explain to you in the first place. There, that takes care of your corset. And I’d have you know that I am many years older than you are and just as hot and sticky and tired!”
For once Alexa did not kick aside each garment, as it dropped around her ankles, with a smothered, under-the-breath military oath that Harriet always pretended not to hear. She had been standing as still as a statue, and just as silent except for a slight sigh of relief as the tightly laced corset was loosened. And now, to Harriet’s disquiet, Alexa actually bent down to retrieve each offending article, one by one, something that she, used to doting servants waiting on her from babyhood, had never deigned to do before.
Alexa’s voice sounded rather smothered for a moment until she straightened, still with her back turned to Harriet. “Well, I suppose that you did not want to make this journey any more than I did, Aunt Harry, especially with Freddy being sick and Mama all flustered, and nobody to help Papa out with the ledgers and to see that he eats enough. And I suppose that I have been spoiled and allowed to run wild, and…and have thought only of myself all this time without any sense of responsibility towards other people. While everyone else around me, like you, Aunt Harry…”
Alexa swung around abruptly with her untidy bundle of clothes clutched before her, a naked pagan goddess with the sheen of unshed tears making her widely spaced storm dark eyes appear even more brilliant under uncompromisingly straight dark brows. “We all take you for granted, don’t we? But what of you? Why didn’t you ever marry? Didn’t you want to, ever?”
Harriet had always taught Alexa to be honest, to tell the truth and take the consequences if she had to, no matter what the cost. And now, without making herself too much of a hypocrite, how could she give this child-woman standing before her anything less than a direct answer to a direct question?
Harriet heard herself say in an oddly stiff voice: “The man I imagined myself in love with fell in love with someone else and married her. And I…I could never settle for second best. I think that is enough for one afternoon. Even old memories can bring painful twinges, as you might discover for yourself some day.”
Her back, as she turned to walk through the archway that led to her own connecting room, was as uncompromisingly straight as Alexa’s had been earlier; and it was only after she had pulled the heavy curtain closed to shut her into privacy that Harriet permitted herself the rare luxury of flinging herself onto her bed fully clothed and giving way to tears.
Alexa could turn into a raging termagant at times, with her volatile temper that matched her lion’s mane of gold-threaded auburn hair; but she could never bear to see suffering or pain, much less cause it herself. And she sensed only too late that her thoughtless, prying questions had somehow hurt Aunt Harry. She would have given anything to take back her words if she could, as soon as she noticed how her aunt’s face had whitened and seemed to grow stiff all of a sudden. But Aunt Harry was a trooper, and of course she would feel that she had to answer honestly, even if it hurt.
Alexa kept staring at that firmly drawn curtain that had become a barrier keeping her out, keeping her from trying to comfort her aunt in order to assuage her own feelings of guilt. The tears that she too had stubbornly been holding back had begun sliding down her face in warm, wet rivulets, but Alexa did not try to wipe them away. She almost never shed tears, and then only in private. No telltale sobbing and sniffling to give herself away to other people. Tears were punishment, assuagement, relief from tensions. Let them come now. Tomorrow she would make Aunt Harry happy and proud of her—even if the effort killed her! Yes, she’d even let her hair be tortured into those ugly, fashionable ringlets, and she would flutter her fan and giggle and even bat her eyelashes, if that was what it took to take the stricken look off Aunt Harry’s face that had been put there by her thoughtlessness.
Like the sudden tropical cloudbursts that were so common in Ceylon—never lasting too long—Alexa’s torrential flow of tears soon dried up, leaving her feeling drained and weak, as if her legs could no longer hold her up. Dropping her bundled-up clothes where she had been standing, Alexa stretched like a cat, her arms over her head as far as they could reach and then behind her back and to either side until she heard the tiny cracking sounds along her spine and shoulders that always brought comfort when she was tired or tense. And now that she had made herself relax she had barely enough energy left to slide her body between cool cotton sheets and turn her face against the pillow before sinking into the soft nothingness of sleep.
When Harriet, who had not been able to escape into sleep, came in an hour or two later, she shook her head as she looked down at Alexa’s sleeping profile, still stained by the telltale trace of tears. Automatically she reached down and pulled the covers up over the girl’s nude shoulders while she thought to herself, How resilient the young are! When Alexa woke up she would be smiling and sunny-tempered, eager to make amends for everything. That mood would last for a day or two perhaps, and then who knew what might set her off next? The pity of it was that Alexa had almost begun to think of herself as a young boy, running free. Was she really ready yet to turn into a woman?
Fortunately for her own well-being, Harriet Howard was a woman not often given to introspection. Emotion, as she had often pointed out to Alexa, was all very well sometimes, but reason and practicality had to come uppermost. One did the best one could—without being completely heartless, of course—and one survived, somehow. She had taught herself these things, and had immersed herself in books that had broadened her tiny insular world into