But she did not want to think of that. Certainly not today.
And suddenly, out of nowhere, came a great stabbing of longing for her mother. It took her breath away and made her stomach churn. She dipped her head until her forehead rested on her knees and swallowed against a lump in her throat.
Her mother had been vibrantly beautiful and full of smiles and laughter and love. She had doted upon her children and had never engaged a nurse to look after them. She had wept inconsolably when Oliver went away to school at the age of twelve, when Dora was ten. Dora had had her undivided attention for the next two years until Agnes was born. Mama had loved them equally after that. She had cuddled and played endlessly and happily with the baby, as had Dora, and she had talked with her elder daughter, dreamed with her about the future, promised her a dazzling come-out Season and a handsome, rich, loving husband at the end of it. They had laughed over how handsome he would be and how wealthy and how charming and loving. Mama had endlessly brushed and styled Dora’s hair and made her pretty clothes and told her how lovely she was growing to be. She had taught Dora herself instead of hiring a governess, though she had insisted that Papa hire a good music teacher for her. She felt privileged and honored, she had once told Dora, to have been entrusted with such a musically gifted daughter. Her talent, Mama had often added, had certainly not come from her—or from Papa either.
When Dora turned seventeen, they had begun actively to plan the come-out Season she would have the following spring. Her music teacher was engaged for extra hours to give Dora dancing lessons, but the three of them had danced with one another between classes, Dora with her mother while one of them or both hummed the music until they were breathless and Agnes shrieked with laughter and clapped her hands. Then Mama, with Agnes’s little feet balanced on her own, would sing and dance and Dora practiced the steps alone with an imaginary partner until they all collapsed in a heap of laughter and exhaustion.
Had those days, those years, really been as happy and carefree as Dora remembered them? Probably not. Memory tended to be selective. She remembered her childhood and early girlhood as endlessly sunny days of love and laughter perhaps because of the great contrast with what had followed.
Dora had been allowed to attend the infamous assembly because she had reached the magic age of seventeen. She had been not quite a young lady but no longer a girl. She had been over the moon with excitement, almost sick with it, in fact. Little Agnes had been excited too, she remembered, as she watched her sister get ready, her chin propped on her hands at one side of the dressing table. She had told Dora that she looked like a princess and wondered if a prince would ride in during the evening on a white steed. They had both giggled over that.
By the middle of the evening, Dora had been flushed with the pleasure and triumph of her local debut. She had danced every set, even if one of them had been with the vicar, who was as unlike a prince as it was possible for a man to be, and she had known all the steps of the dances even without having to think about them. And then Papa had enacted his terrible scene, his voice growing louder as he accused Mama of cuckolding him with the handsome and much younger Sir Everard Havell, who was on one of his extended visits to relatives in the neighborhood. Before Papa had been coaxed outside by two of their neighbors to “get some fresh air,” he had informed the gathered assembly that he was going to turn Mama out and divorce her.
Dora had been so terribly mortified that she had hidden in a corner of the assembly rooms for the rest of the evening, resisting all attempts to coax her either into conversation or onto the dance floor. She had even told her best friend to go away and leave her alone. She had twisted her handkerchief so out of shape that even a heavy iron could never afterward make it look perfectly square. She would have died if she could have done so just by willing it. Her mother meanwhile had brazened it out, smiling and laughing and talking and dancing—and keeping her distance from Sir Everard—until the very end of the evening.
The whole ghastly situation might have blown over, hideously dreadful as it had been. Papa did not often drink to excess, but he was known for embarrassing himself and his family and neighbors when he did. Everyone would have pretended to forget, and life would have continued as usual.
But perhaps Mama had reached a breaking point that night. Perhaps she had been embarrassed and humiliated one time too many. Dora did not know. She had not attended any adult entertainments until that evening. Or perhaps the accusation was justified even if the public nature of Papa’s accusation was not. However it was, Dora’s mother had fled during the night, presumably with Sir Everard, since he too had disappeared by the following morning without taking leave of his relatives.
Mama had never come back, and she had never written to any of her children, even Oliver, who was at Oxford at the time. Papa had carried through with his threat even though the divorce had put a large dent in his own fortune and totally wiped out Mama’s dowry, which was to have been divided in two to augment what Dora and Agnes could expect from their father as dowries when they married. Soon after the divorce bill was passed in the House of Lords, word had come to them that Mama had married Sir Everard Havell. Mrs. Brough, a neighbor and longtime family friend—and now Papa’s wife—had brought the news. Mr. Brough had still been alive at the time, and he had received a letter from someone in London who had seen the notice in the morning papers.
Dora’s life had changed as abruptly and as totally after the night of that assembly as it had changed a month ago in Inglebrook, though in a quite different way. There was no come-out Season for her in London when she turned eighteen. Even if it could have been arranged with someone else to sponsor her, there was the terrible scandal to deter her as well as Papa’s comparative poverty. Besides, she would not have gone even if she could, just as she did not go to Harrogate a few years later when her aunt Shaw had urged her to come and promised to introduce her to society and some eligible gentlemen. She did not go because there was Agnes. Poor bewildered, unhappy little Agnes, who cried for her mother and could have only Dora instead.