"What a nice man you are, sir. What might I call you? My name is Hortencia Coggins," it wasn't her birth name by any means. She used an alias these days. Her name was one that only the Carringtons could name if they even recognized her face after all these years. She was dying and there was no use hiding it when it was written in the way her body moved in a slow but almost painful grace. She would not try to pretend that she could be alive by the next morning. Her doctor had been clear that her time was closing in fast.

She had been ill from the same ailment that her own mother'd suffered and eventually succumed to at a much younger age than herself. She owed it to the girl who's name she'd been allowed to pick by Magnus just before he'd left her to die. She had also been reading the things written about the Carringtons throughout the years, she wasn't ignorant to the gross misdeeds their family had done throughout their tenre as richest family in Whitby. Pearl should have stayed with her but he'd done what they both thought, her more reluctantly, was for the best if the child were to have a chance at a happy and long life. She'd not known that she'd be fighting a long and draining illness, one that her daughter should be aware of possibly happening to her as well.

It was wrong that she did not know her own mother, too.

"I have purchased a house on the outskirts of town. It's a small and modest dwelling that I haven't seen yet. I am hoping for the best but expecting the worst. It wouldn't be horrible to have someone about who could possibly help me make it at least warm. I'll pay you if you need wages for your time. I do not have much to give." She was not going to tell him that there was money safe and sound with a solicitor who had directions already in place for when her time came.