So Therese was the author of those scathing satires all the while! Why did she do it? What could possibly have made her despise the Darlingtons so much that she would want to hurt them like that?
It had to have been for the money. But for that, she could have twisted Wesley around her little finger; he was clearly so enamored of her. Yet she hadn’t given him the least encouragement. Strange.
Filing the front page to the back, Nora began to read Therese’s last satire. As she scanned the handwritten piece, her eyes widened and her jaw went slack with surprise.
Anyone who has visited Faded Glory Manor lately has seen the depths to which the Worthless family has tumbled.
Just recently Lady Worthless was seen with her hair disheveled, her collar torn, rocking a bawling baby in her arms. “I’m too old for this!” she shouted as a door fell off its hinges. “I thought I could raise this baby as my own, but I’m simply too antiquated.” She pointed to a gilt-framed portrait of one of the Worthless ancestors—a soldier in a doublet and velvet tights—on the wall, dating back to the 1600s. “I’m almost as old as
Snobby came running in. “How is my little cutesie-bootsie today?” she asks, tickling the baby under the chin.
Lady Worthless shooed Snobby away. “Don’t even look at this baby. Someone might notice his resemblance to you and to a certain someone.”
Snobby looked away from her mother. “I can’t imagine what you might mean by that, Mother,” she said with mock sincerity.
“You understand full well what I mean,” Lady Worthless insisted.
“I assure you, I do not,” Snobby replied.
“Can I remind you of a few months back when your belly looked as if you’d swallowed a melon whole,” Lady Worthless retorted.
Snobby stuck a finger in either ear. “I can’t hear you!” she sung out.
Lady Worthless stamped her foot in frustration. “Oh! You make me so mad! You are just like your father!”
“My father?” Snobby gasped. “In what manner could I possibly resemble that blustering old coot?”
“Well, you both have a child that you won’t admit to!”
“Shh!!!!” Snobby hissed sharply. “What child won’t father admit is his? Doodles?”
Doodles rushed in. “I’m not father’s child?” she asked, aghast.
“Shh!” Lady Worthless and Snobby shushed her at once. “No, not you, Doodles, silly girl,” said Lady Worthless. “The nanny.”
“The nanny?!” Doodles and Snobby cried in one voice. “The nanny is a Worthless?”
“I’m afraid it’s true,” Lady Worthless admitted as she continued to bounce the baby. “Years ago Lord Worthless dallied with Nanny’s mother, who was a very young maid in the household. They sent her off to France and paid her never to return.”
“But she did return?” Doodles asked.
“The child grew up to be Nanny and she came back to claim her inheritance. She fooled us all by pretending to be poor.”
“But she is poor,” Snobby reminded her mother. “Everyone who works for us is poor because we pay them hardly anything.”
“I suppose that’s so,” Lady Worthless agreed as a slab of ceiling crashes to the floor at her feet.
“Are you telling us we have a poor relative?” Doodles asked in horror.
“Shh!” Lady Worthless said again. She lowers her voice. “That’s why your father wouldn’t admit to having a child by a maid. It’s so embarrassing to know poor people, let alone be so… familiar… with one.”
“But Mother, aren’t we poor now?” Snobby asked.
“Shh!” said Lady Worthless. “We are not poor. We’re impecunious.”
“What does that mean?” Doodles asked.
“Poor,” Snobby filled her in.
“No! No!” Lady Worthless objected. “We’re penniless but not poor. We still have the Worthless name, which is worth its weight in gold.”
“A name weighs nothing,” Doodles said.
“Exactly!” said Lady Worthless.
Snobby scratched her head in bewilderment. “So how does that make me like Father?”
“You dolt!” Lady Worthless cried. “You both have a child you won’t admit is yours.”
