Louisa and the Missing Heiress by Anna Maclean Page A

wealthy, we had noticed, promised considerable fees and often forgot to pay them later.
    “And the conversation went well enough. But I am alarmed at the superficial readings that are popular today,” he said, pulling at his suspenders and rocking on his heels. “Too many are reading the sensational trash published in today’s papers. Adulteries and murders and men competing for a faithless woman. . . .”
    I studied the floor with complete concentration to force down the blush rising to my cheeks, since my own story in progress, “The Rival Prima Donnas,” fell into that very category my father now so robustly condemned. If it were to be published, I would have to use a nom de plume. Oh, how that thrilled me! Flora, I quickly decided. In honor of The Flower Fables , which, if they were published, could be published under my real name. Yes, Flora Fairfield, authoress of “The Rival Prima Donnas”!
    “I must carefully consider what allusions I use,” Father said, lost in his own train of thought as he often was and not noticing that I, too, was daydreaming, “as most are lost completely, as a result of people reading trash. Would you believe that Iris Barfoy wasn’t familiar with Epicurus’s essay on the phenomenon of atmosphere?”
    Mother and I exchanged covert glances.
    “Shocking,” I agreed solemnly.
    “But we digress. I distinctly heard the words ‘poor child’ and inquired if a child of mine was in some distress.”
    “Not a child of yours, Father. But a child you have known. Dorothy Brownly is dead,” I said softly.
    “Ah. So soon. Is the child alive and well to console its bereaved father?” Father had assumed that since Dorothy had been a young and healthy woman, she had died while—or soon after—delivering a first child. Many young women did.
    “It wasn’t childbed fever, Father. Dorothy . . .” I had almost said drowned , but that no longer seemed the case. “Dorothy was found in the harbor.”
    Father frowned, making a perplexed face.
    “The harbor? Poor child, indeed. What measure of despair can drive people to self-destruction?” He scratched his chin. “It is the times,” he concluded. “The world has become heartless and depraved and the innocent suffer. Isn’t . . . wasn’t Dorothy the little girl who got herself entangled with that bounder Preston Wortham?”
    “Father, she married him.”
    “I see. And to think he once came calling on you. I have more than once had cause to thank the Creator for the common sense of my own offspring.”
    I could not suppress a smile of pleasure. “Father! I didn’t know you had even noticed! And to think you remembered such a trivial event!”
    “Of course I noticed. I remember the man sitting right there, in that chair.” He pointed into the parlor, at the brown velvet easy chair. “I didn’t like the looks of him. Like a peacock. Overdressed and probably the kind who never bothered to pay his tailor. As if tailors don’t have rent to pay, and children to feed . . .”
    I quickly perceived that the philosopher’s mind would soon digress into more familiar territory, the abuses perpetrated by the upper classes on the working classes, unless I could shepherd his thoughts back onto the subject at hand.
    “You needn’t have worried, Father,” I said. “At the time I had no great objection to Mr. Wortham, as I recall, except that I suspected that being his wife would be much too timeconsuming. All that brushing of hats and coats and pressing of trousers. But Dorothy had no such reservations, of course, being of an independent income that allows for maids and housekeepers.”
    “Poverty saved you, Louy,” Father said.
    “Just don’t say from a fate worse than death. Let’s perhaps simply conclude that Dorothy’s wealth was not always an advantage,” I said. “I will call on her mother tomorrow, and offer our condolences.”
    Father nodded. “I would come with you, as the head of our household, but I must complete this