by Rose Lerner
He let out his breath. “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome. Let us share in joy and care.”
He felt inside his greatcoat and drew out her wedding ring, new polished. It caught the fading sun from the window, dazzling her. She tugged off her glove, and the ring was warm from his pocket when he slipped it on her finger.
“I’m so sorry about this morning,” he said. “I should have listened to you. I shouldn’t have presumed to make the decisions for both of us. I haven’t wanted to ask you for things because I really do need so much. It was easy to give you up. It was easier to behave like my father than to face myself as he sees me, the weak, clinging, clumsy adolescent whose hands shook when he watched me work. God, my hands are shaking now.”
He held them out, and to her shock it was true. She took them hard in hers, yanked his gloves off and kissed his fingers.
“I didn’t want to tell my mother that I wouldn’t be butler at Tassell Hall because I’ve counted on her all these years to tell me, No, your father’s wrong, you’re a good, clever boy.” His deep voice was shaking too, a slight, low tremor that made her heart tremble with it. “I didn’t—Christ, this is embarrassing. I didn’t want to admit that the job was beyond my capabilities. It was easier to be unkind to you than to face that. But there can be no reward without labor. So I’m putting my shoulder to the wheel.”
“I understand,” she said. “I do. It was easy for me to leave too. Easier to throw your ring in your face than tell you how hurt I was, how afraid, how much I didn’t want to live without you. Because if you still didn’t listen to me then—I’ve spent so much of my life trying to feel brave, trying to look brave, but I’ve never been brave. I’ve never wanted to risk anything. I’m afraid even to be happy because it will hurt too much to lose it. But I want to try with you. I want to be happy with you. I want to trust you. I want—”
Frustrated, sure her words weren’t explaining it, she dug her fingers into the front of her pelisse. “I want to put my heart in your hand,” she whispered.
He caught his breath. “Yes,” he said. “Give me your heart. Give me everything.”
For a moment it was almost more frightening than being left, because at least that was over and done. This was every day for the rest of her life, her heart wandering about in his pocket where she couldn’t keep her eye on it.
But she looked at his dependable face, at the lines smiling had cut in it, and she wanted to see them deepen and multiply until she and him were both old and there was a whole wrinkly history of happiness there. “I will. If you give me everything back.”
“It’s going to be ugly and discomfiting,” he warned her.
“It’s going to be beautiful too.”
He nodded. “My joy and my care. I swear it.”
* * *
John hired them a small private room at a nearby inn, Sukey’s stepmother having promised them the sheets there would be clean. “I think we’d ought to talk about things,” Sukey said, sitting on the edge of the bed. “What we want. What we’re going to do.”
John, having rather expected to fall into bed at once, was taken aback. He took a deep breath. Whatever she said, he would listen. They would talk it over and decide together. “Very well.”
“I think…” She flushed. “I think sometimes I want…to feel close to you. I want to feel as if you like me. And the best way I know how is to go to bed. But I ought to talk to you instead.”
It felt almost unseemly to see her with her bravado stripped away, no toss of the head or sly smile—only words trickling painfully out, one by one. How much more naked honesty was than nakedness. “I’d like that. I hope you know you always can talk to me, and that I always like you.”
She nodded uncertainly, and he wished for the millionth time that he never made her feel as if he didn’t like her.
“Sukey, can I ask you a question?”
“Of course.”
“Are you afraid of me?”
She blinked. “No. Is this more about how you’re like your father?”
Her easy answer should have reassured him. Maybe one day it would. “Partly. But whenever I speak sharply to one of the girls at the vicarage, you always try to protect them from me.”
She frowned. “Do I? I’m sure I don’t. I reckon I’m mostly worried one of them will say something they hadn’t ought. And I’ve never liked quarreling.”
He took a deep breath. That made sense. “I’ve worried too that you were hiding behind the other women. Molly brought in the new lists, and when I first wrote them, you let Mrs. Khaleel speak to me about my forgetting market day.”
She sighed. “I thought you said it was all right that Mrs. Khaleel was head of the female servants, not me.”
He had said that. He hadn’t thought of it in that light.
He remembered again how his mother used to try to manage his father, the whispered conversations and the pleading and the shouting. Sukey, on the other hand— He smiled. Sukey kept her own counsel, as was every woman’s right.
He didn’t need her to be his ambassador between him and the other staff. He didn’t want it. He could talk to them himself. To be honest, he probably should talk to them a bit more.
“Very well,” he said. “If that’s all it is.”
“You do want to go back to Lively St. Lemeston?”
“I do.” He sat beside her. “I like the vicarage, and our friends there. I’d rather not leave it. What about you?”
“I feel the same,” she said firmly. “I want—John, I want to be with you forever. Every day until death us do part. I want us to be old together like your parents. Is that what you want?”
He could feel his face light. Perhaps not just like my parents, he thought, but he didn’t say it. “Yes. I do.” He hesitated. “Sukey, I know you aren’t ready for this, but I want you to know that I’d like to have children with you. Sooner rather than later, if you’ll trust me to stay and bring them up with you. I’ve been turning it over and I’d rather not wait ten years like my parents did.”
She gave him a startled shove. “I don’t imagine you do, being so ancient.” She sat, considering it. John held his breath. “I reckon I’d like that. But let me think about it, will you?” She sighed. “It would be easier to manage babies if we stayed at Tassell Hall and I didn’t work.”
He almost said, We still can. But he didn’t want to, not even if it meant he could have a baby with her tomorrow. “Would you like to not work?” He couldn’t believe they hadn’t discussed it before.
She hesitated. “Maybe? I like having money of my own, though. And I don’t want it so much that I’d— You’re a servant. A servant isn’t like a banker or grocer, who takes his midday meal at home and spends every night with his wife. I’d rather work and really live with you than live a life of leisure in a cottage a little ways off and never see you. I don’t mind it, now I’m working in a nice home.”
He gave silent thanks. “In a few years, who knows? Maybe we’ll want to open our own boarding house. Or maybe Mr. Summers… Well, he can’t live forever.”
She nodded, looking sad. “Our own boarding house. Do you think you’d like that?”
“Maybe. Would you?”
Sukey’s mouth twisted thoughtfully. “I don’t know. It’s an awful risk. It’d be grand if we found nice lodgers, I expect. And we could have all the babies we wanted, with folk always around to help look after them. Do you think we could really afford it?”
“I have some money in the bank,” he said. And for the first time, he told her to the penny how much. “If we start putting money by now, if we decide to have children, we can choose for ourselves how to go about it.”
She smirked. “There’s only one way to go about having children, didn’t you know?”
He pulled her into his lap. “Theoretical knowledge is so different from practical. Pe
rhaps later we might run it through, so I’m prepared in the event.”
She smiled crookedly up at him. “John, I—I don’t know how to ask this, because your wages are so much greater than mine…”
“It’s our money,” he said firmly. “Our wages are fifty-two pounds per annum, excluding vails and Christmas boxes.”
“I want us to put money aside for my mother. An annuity, maybe.”
John was ashamed he hadn’t thought of it before. “Of course we can.”
She bounced up and kissed him. “Get out your little memorandum book, and we’ll make a plan.”
* * *
“Where are we going?” Sukey grumbled. “Haven’t I tramped about in the snow enough this week?”
“Just a little farther.” John’s lantern swung in his hand. “I want to show you one of my favorite things about Tassell Hall.”
Sukey didn’t really mind. With John at her side, the full moon shining on the snow was beautiful. He led her down something that, from how it wended through the trees, might be a path in summer.
Something pale and unearthly rose up ahead: a circle of columns topped with a stone ring. A proud statue in flowing draperies stood in the center, a curious helmet on her head. In one hand she carried an iron spear tipped with gold, and in the other a tiny, golden woman with outstretched wings.
There was magic in the white snow on white stone in the white light of the moon, snow drifting over the still figure’s helmet and breasts, snow piled about her shield and hiding her marble feet. Dark tree branches shot up overhead, nearly invisible against the sky.
“What is this place?”
“An imitation Greek temple built by the present Lord Tassell’s father,” John said. “I always loved it. There are other follies scattered about the grounds, but they’re gardeners’ sheds in disguise. This one is…useless, I suppose.”
His impractical side startled and charmed her every time. She snuggled closer, pointing at the statue. “Who’s she?”
“Pallas Athena, the Greek goddess of war. When I was very small there was a naked Venus, but Lady Tassell had her replaced.”
Sukey giggled. “Of course she did.”
John touched a finger to the tip of a tiny gilt wing. “I thought she was holding a fairy. Eventually I learned that this is Nike, a winged personification of victory. But I used to come here at night to see if I could catch the pharisees dancing.”
Sukey shuddered. “Be glad you never succeeded. They don’t like it.”
He drew her past the temple, to where the path dropped off steeply to a frozen lake. “I suppose people in Lively St. Lemeston bow to their first sight of the new moon?”
Sukey nodded.
“The underservants do it at the Hall. I always believed it extra lucky if I saw her first from this spot.”
Sukey drew in a deep breath of night air. “Did you know a girl can catch a glimpse of her future husband if she watches the first new moon of January rise?”
He shook his head.
“You have to sit across a stile and say a charm, and you couldn’t tell anyone you were going to do it.” Sukey looked up at the moon, serene and round-faced and whispering of love, and wondered why anyone thought she was chaste. “All my friends did it at one time or another, but I never did.”
He was silent, but she knew he was listening. He did always listen to her, in the end. He always would.
“I never played any of those games,” she said, not looking at him. “I never put nuts in the fire on Halloween to see how my affections would fare. I was afeared if I told anyone the names of the boys I liked, or even if I wrote them on a bit of paper—I might really have to marry them.”
He took her hand. “I love you.”
“I love you too. And I’m not afraid anymore. We’re going to be married forever, and I’m glad of it. Gladder than I’ve ever been of anything.” She climbed up on a picturesque rock, careful not to slip, and kissed him in full view of the moon and God.
He held her steady and kissed her back.
Epilogue
March 1813
“And you’re not angry?” Sukey asked her mother for the tenth time.
Mrs. Grimes sighed and patted her on the arm. “You’ll do as you like, I suppose. But don’t you dare take money from her!”
Sukey smiled. “I wouldn’t dream of it, Mum.” She clung tightly to John’s arm as he pushed their way through the crowd leaving church, the boys racing and shouting, excited because it was marbles season. They passed Molly, kissing her father on the cheek before he went back to the workhouse and she went off to Sunday school at the Quaker meetinghouse. There were Mrs. Khaleel and Thea on their way home to make Sunday dinner, and Larry holding a stack of papers and books for Mr. Summers and the new curate he’d found in London. (The curate was a shy and very young fellow who’d been allowed to move into the vicarage after a number of dire warnings as to the fate that would befall him if he dared take a fancy to any of the women servants, and who had so far proved entirely unobjectionable.) They passed Sukey’s friends and Mrs. Humphrey and her boarders and the farmers from the market.
Sukey had always felt pushed to the edges of things, slipping by unnoticed, as if she and her mother could be swallowed up by the earth with no one the wiser. But plenty of people greeted her as she went, and anyway here was most of the town in church, and the church needed the vicarage. And the vicarage needed John, and John needed her, so there you were.
John fetched them up just behind Aunt Kate. “Are you sure you want me here for this?”
She held tight to his arm. “Don’t you think of leaving me.” She tapped her aunt on the shoulder.
The woman turned and stood, perplexed.
“Maybe you don’t know who I am,” Sukey said, terribly glad of John tall and steady beside her. “But I—”
Aunt Kate broke out in a smile. “Of course I know who you are, Susan.”
“Everyone calls me Sukey now.” She straightened, twinkling back, because she supposed that was what Grimeses did when they felt nervesome. “I’ve been wanting to talk to you.”
Aunt Kate’s eyes misted over. “So have I. Every Sunday for fifteen years. Introduce me to your husband, won’t you?”
“Aunt Kate, this is John Toogood.” Gentleman’s Gentleman, she almost added, but he wasn’t anymore. He bowed over Aunt Kate’s hand, quietly growling something polite and making this as smooth and easy as he made everything else, and Sukey thought she’d get him new calling cards for Lady Day.
About the Author
Rose Lerner discovered Georgette Heyer when she was thirteen, and wrote her first historical romance a few years later. Her writing has improved since then, but her fascination with all things Regency hasn’t changed. When not reading, writing or researching, she enjoys cooking and marathoning TV shows. She lives in Seattle with her best friend.
If you’d like to know when her next book is available, you can sign up for her newsletter at www.roselerner.com, follow her on twitter at @RoseLerner or find her on Facebook at www.facebook.com/roselernerromance.
Visit her website at www.roselerner.com for free short reads, deleted scenes, historical research, and more about the world of Lively St. Lemeston. The first book in the series, Sweet Disorder, is about John and Sukey’s old bosses Nick and Phoebe Dymond, and the second, True Pretenses, is about Lydia Reeve and Ashford Cahill, whose banns Sukey hears read. (Spoiler: Ashford Cahill isn’t his real name!) More books are on their way.
Look for these titles by Rose Lerner
Now Available:
In For a Penny
A Lily Among Thorns
Lively St. Lemeston
Sweet Disorder
True Pretenses
Don’t miss the other titles in Rose Lerner’s Lively St. Lemeston Series!
Political intrigue could lea
ve his heart the last one standing…alone.
Lively St. Lemeston, Book 1
Nick Dymond enjoyed the rough-and-tumble military life until a bullet to the leg sent him home to his emotionally distant, politically obsessed family. For months, he’s lived alone with his depression, blockaded in his lodgings.
But with his younger brother desperate to win the local election, Nick has a new set of marching orders: dust off the legendary family charm and maneuver the beautiful Phoebe Sparks into a politically advantageous marriage.
One marriage was enough for Phoebe. Under her town’s by-laws, though, she owns a vote that only a husband can cast. Much as she would love to simply ignore the unappetizing matrimonial candidate pushed at her by the handsome earl’s son, she can’t. Her teenage sister is pregnant, and Phoebe’s last-ditch defense against her sister’s ruin is her vote—and her hand.
Nick and Phoebe soon realize the only match their hearts will accept is the one society will not allow. But as election intrigue turns dark, they’ll have to cast the cruelest vote of all: loyalty…or love.
Warning: Contains elections, confections, and a number of erections.
Never steal a heart unless you can afford to lose your own.
Lively St. Lemeston, Book 2
Through sheer force of will, Ash Cohen raised himself and his younger brother from the London slums to become the best of confidence men. He’s heartbroken to learn Rafe wants out of the life, but determined to grant his brother his wish.
It seems simple: find a lonely, wealthy woman. If he can get her to fall in love with Rafe, his brother will be set. There’s just one problem—Ash can’t take his eyes off her.
Heiress Lydia Reeve is immediately drawn to the kind, unassuming stranger who asks to tour her family’s portrait gallery. And if she married, she could use the money from her dowry for her philanthropic schemes. The attraction seems mutual and oh so serendipitous—until she realizes Ash is determined to matchmake for his younger brother.