Never Tell a Soul, Damon Priest

4. the lady with the gaslight

The storm started that afternoon, and so did Harry's punishment.

Damon came home and found out that his sister, Simone, and his brother, Price, together with their cousins Lydia and Gale, had gotten themselves in trouble during church service. As he found out after his interesting and baffling encounter with Miss Geneva Withers, the four troublemakers were found eavesdropping outside the chapel door by Harry and quite a few other churchgoers.

As Harry, the future Earl of Abberton, summoned each person inside his study for a sermon, Damon decided to disappear into the current earl's room.

Their grandfather, Abraham Stratford, was seventy-eight. He was not young enough to deal with the petty crimes his grandchildren committed, but he was not old enough either to lose his hearing.

"I heard what happened," the old man said from his bed.

Damon went straight to a drawer to gather the old cards. Settling in a chair next to the bed, he started shuffling as the man waited. "Of course, you did, old man."

"I heard the Withers girl made Roxie and Freda cry."

There was no question that the two youngest Stratfords were the old man's favorites as Price and Gale would often claim, but Damon liked to think that it was not the case. When their parents died in a tragic shipwreck, leaving all Stratford grandchildren orphaned, the earl knew who to focus on. While everyone grieved after realizing their parents were never coming back, Roxie and Freda were too young to understand. Still barely walking, they cried for their mothers. They could not yet understand words even if the older children tried to tell them.

"The only language they know is one without words," their grandfather told them. And so, he did just that. He embraced the pair, held their hands as they learned to walk, laughed with them, and in some rare moments, cried with them. When everyone else was in so much pain to deal with two babies, the earl stepped in, giving as much as he could to everyone, but always more to Roxie and Freda.

"It was the first," Damon said. "That they cried, I mean." He threw cards for him and the old man.

"What did the Withers girl do?"

"I never found out," he said, laying the rest of the cards face-down over the man's chest.

"Should the correct question be: What did the girls do?" his grandfather asked, arranging his cards.

Damon chuckled. "I believe, in this case, it should be: What did Miss Geneva think the girls do?"

The old man looked at him for a few seconds. "A misunderstanding."

Damon absently nodded, his mind drifting back to that morning. Geneva Withers seemed... not herself. She was always the prim and proper kind. Damon had seen her about, of course. Who would not notice? She was always strutting around Abberton with three old ladies. In a crowd like that, she was certain to stand out. Young, black hair, perfect posture, and beautiful. It was curious she was not yet married. Surely, with her looks, she could interest someone.

But as Harry once said during his rare foxed state, the men in Abberton were plagued by foolishness and blindness. He said those words after their friend, Arabella Poppet, was left in the altar on her wedding day.

However, Arabella Poppet was different from Geneva Withers. Arabella was easy to be with, while Geneva Withers seemed like the type to think too highly of herself. She had friends, but they had gray hair and were as old as her great-aunts. And although she went to social gatherings, she was always with the older Withers, who were regarded with respect due to their old name and status in Abberton. For years, Damon thought the woman took after her aunts.