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one finger, or ink from writing letters? Would her grasp on the fan have been languid, tentative, or firm?
    I stared at the portrait with numb eyes, then moved to retrieve the discarded cloth and covered the painting up again. When I turned around my father was watching me with folded arms and the same satisfied expression.
    “All this time,” I said, “you let me believe that you loved her—so much that you had no love left for me. But if you’d had any love for her you would never have used her portrait to try to hurt me.”
    His smile split in half, into a wolfish grin of gleaming white. “Brava, my girl. Very good.”
    “Why, then? If she meant nothing to you, then why do you hold her death against me still? What have you lost?”
    “You spoke of jewels, earlier. For years I have been waiting for you to ask to wear your mother’s jewels. It would have been a natural request from anyone less timorous, not to say spineless. The fact is that your mother’s jewels, and everything else she possessed of value, were merely lent her. She owned no property; she left no inheritance.” His voice was losing its restraint and beginning to take on an edge of remembered fury and resentment. “Her family pulled the wool over my eyes beautifully. A modest dowry, and her allowance, were all I ever got. She would never inherit anything, nor I through her; her father was too cautious. If I had known when I married her that the family money would be tied up…”
    The numbness was receding. A white tide of anger was rising in its place, and I even thought I could hear its roaring in my ears. “That is what you’ve mourned all these years?” I said, not caring if I was interrupting. “Money? How can you dare to blame me, when it was your gullibility and greed that led to your disappointment?”
    The look he leveled at me would have made me quail at any other time. “You stupid girl, when she died, her allowance died with her. All that magnificent income, and a place in society, destroyed by a colicky brat. Do you think her family cared after that if I had enough money to live on? Do you think they continued to sponsor me in society, to give me entrée into the class I’d married into? In one blow I was robbed of wife, money, position.” His voice had dropped to a vicious whisper. “Now do you understand why I hate you?”
    I was shaking, but not with fear or grief. I had always assumed that, even in his contempt for me, he had never spoken less than the truth. Now I saw in one searing glimpse how he had manipulated me by fostering such an assumption. The one thing about him that had seemed to draw us together—his feeling for my mother—was perhaps the most irreconcilable gulf, and he had used my sympathy, had nurtured it as he seemed to reject it.
    “I can well understand,” I said, and my voice trembled. “If there is one thing you have taught me to understand, it is hate. I have always feared you—for all you think me a fool, I am too intelligent not to fear you—but I have never hated you until now. Now I know that I hate you.”
    I turned, fumbling away from him out of the reach of the lamplight, and as I felt my way to the door I heard him laugh. It was the sound of delight, of gratification, and of triumph.
    “So I have succeeded in teaching you something,” he said, his voice almost purring in its deep contentment. “You have inherited something from me after all—the capacity for hate. That will be your legacy.”
    I stumbled out of the attic, but his laughter followed, a soft delighted crooning that sickened me. I flung myself headlong down the stairs to escape it, to lock myself in my room and huddle on my bed until daybreak, to tell myself again and again that I had not become what he wanted to make of me, that my newborn hatred did not brand me his creature and his kin—his daughter.

Chapter Three
    Next morning I departed for Ellsmere.
    Looking back much later, I would realize how little prepared I