“Having a spell, is she?” Kate pulled her gloves off carefully, since the leather was separating from its lining around the wrist. “Herself sent the footmen off to London to fetch a doctor,” Cherryderry said.

“Hello, Cherryderry,” she said, as their dear old butler opened the door. She stomped up the front steps girding her loins for battle, as her father himself would have said. It was fueled by humiliation, and despair, and the absolute certainty that her father must be turning in his grave. It was the self-loathing of someone who can’t quite bring herself to leave home and have done with it. It was being relegated to a chamber in the attic, with faded furnishings that advertised her relative worth in the household. It was the pitying glances she had from acquaintances who never met her at dinner anymore. so numerous that her stepmother and stepsister couldn’t find days enough in the year to wear them all. Anger was watching her father’s money be poured into new gowns and bonnets and frilly things. Anger was watching the crops wilt and the hedges overgrow because her stepmother begrudged the money needed to maintain the estate. Daltry-who had held that title for a matter of mere months-started ruling the roost, that Kate really learned the meaning of anger.Īnger was watching tenants on the estate be forced to pay double the rent or leave cottages where they’d lived their whole lives. But it wasn’t until he was gone, and the new Mrs. Before her father died seven years earlier, she found herself sometimes irritated with her new stepmother. It should be said that the condition wasn’t unfamiliar to her. M iss Katherine Daltry, known to almost all as Kate, got down from her horse seething with rage. Mariana Daltry her daughter, Victoria and Miss Katherine Daltry except the rats were making such a racket that no one in that chamber could hear anything. Swallow’s little shriek might have been heard all the way in the drawing room. Swallow, that I have! By the hand of Mrs. “It is from the plates,” Cherryderry told her. Those sharp noses, and the yapping at night, and-” “I know just what you’re saying,” he told her with an edge in his voice that she didn’t hear often.

“I can’t abide the way those little varmints chew up a pair of shoes when a body’s not looking,” she told the butler, a comfortable soul by the name of Mr. Swallow, the housekeeper, fretted about it regularly. They were out of control everybody said so. T his story begins with a carriage that was never a pumpkin, though it fled at midnight a godmother who lost track of her charge, though she had no magic wand and several so-called rats who secretly would have enjoyed wearing livery.Īnd, of course, there’s a girl too, though she didn’t know how to dance, nor did she want to marry a prince.

A Kiss at Midnight by Eloisa James