The Sensible Courtship

by Megan Daniel

  THE BEST LAID PLANS

  In one room of Hockleigh manor, innocent and trembling Miss Priscilla Pennington was being told by her mother that she must accept the proposal of the fearfully worldly Lord Richard Devlin.

  In another room, the gentle Mr. Caspar Maltby was wondering how he had summoned up the nerve to ask the frightfully beautiful Francesca Waringham to be his unblushing bride.

  Meanwhile, Lord Richard was opening the bedroom door of the shamelessly seductive Roxanna Gordon—and, in a forest cottage, Francesca was struggling in the arms of the handsome ruffian hired to dishonor her.

  Clearly the course of calculated love had led into a maze of unmentionable mischief. .. .

  THE

  SENSIBLE COURTSHIP

  THE

  SENSIBLE

  COURTSHIP

  By

  Megan Daniel

  1

  The steaming water of the bath swirled around the young man. He luxuriated in its warmth. He breathed in deep contentment, the water rippling over the hardened muscles of his broad chest and forming rivulets that ran down toward his flat stomach. He felt good.

  The comfortable room surrounded him like a cloak, bringing images of his childhood and adolescence. A thick feather mattress and goosedown pillows adorned the high four-posted bed. The fire before him threw cheerfully dancing shadows over the furniture, sturdy but graceful in carved oak. Near to hand sat a decanter of fine old brandy; a welcome pot of tea steeped nearby.

  The gentleman was relaxing from a long journey in the best room in the best inn that the city of York could offer. His face, a deeply bronzed and distinctly handsome face, erupted into a broad smile. His deep, throaty laugh rang out. It was good to be back in England.

  How many times in the past few years had there been no soothing bath at the end of the day, no hot water at all, in fact? And no good rich brandy, no feather bed, no tea. He had learned to love coffee, to need it even, the kind that was so black and strong you could almost chew it. But there was nothing quite like a good English cup of tea to let a man know that everything was right with the world.

  Odd to think he was actually home, that the rolling hillsides outside his window were populated with Englishmen. Not Indian savages, not French Creole gamblers, not drawling Americans. Just good plain Englishmen. It was odder still to think now that he had been away. Was it really only five days since he had stepped off the gangplank of Captain Witham’s neat little schooner, shipping timber out of Boston harbor, to find himself on the quays of Hull?

  He had accomplished quite a lot in those five short days, had begun the process of turning himself back into an Englishman worthy of the position he had long been destined to hold. In the yard below stood a shiny new sporting curricle, its seats sheathed in the softest of caramel-colored leather and its wheels picked out in red. It had carrried him from Hull to York, and tomorrow it would take him on to Hockleigh. A few days relaxing with George, his old school chum, was just what he needed to complete his transformation from backwoodsman into gentleman. Then it was on to London.

  Neatly laid out across the bed was a newly tailored suit of clothes: cream-colored pantaloons, well-cut dark blue coat of the best Bath cloth, snowy linen. Highly polished and well-fitted boots stood at attention nearby. He had scarce dared to hope he would find anything half so good in York. He hadn’t wanted to appear a bumpkin before his friend. When the new clothes had been delivered this morning, he had willingly set aside the poorly fitted broadcloth he had picked up in Boston. More clothes would arrive in the morning.

  He sank farther down into the water, watching the play of the firelight on the ceiling. A huge chocolate- colored servant handed him a glass of brandy and a lighted cheroot. He drank deeply from the one and inhaled deeply from the other, closed his eyes, and let his mind drift.

  The pungence of cigar smoke and the warmth of good brandy would forever remind him of his Uncle John. The big earthy, life-loving man with a scowl that could freeze icicles and an even bigger smile, had been the closest thing to a father the young gentleman had ever known. He had adored the old man, and it was from that great laughing bear that he had inherited his robust love of life.

  But rebellion stirs in the hearts of most of us when the fire of youth bums hottest. Uncle John had been a homebody. His horses, his snug house, and his well- tended acres had been his life. He always expected that they would fill the life of his nephew as well. So naturally the young man wanted no such thing. His soul was filled with adventure. Nothing would do for him but to see the world, to experience it in the flesh, to do it all.

  He smiled at the remembrance of his young eagerness. There was precious little he hadn’t done in the past five, years. No staid Grand Tour for him, “doing” die capitals of Europe. He had headed for India, Africa, even a brief stop in China—and that had entailed a hair-raising moment or two—before ending up in the vastness of the North American continent He had lived with Red Indians, hunted buffalo, broken wild horses, and eaten more than one thing he had never known existed before—and promptly put from his mind afterward.

  He took another pull on his brandy, letting the amber liquid roll over his tongue and feeling the warmth flow all the way to his stomach. He wondered idly who he. would have become had he been the dutiful nephew and followed his uncle’s wishes. When he had come down from Oxford five years ago, Uncle John had simply assumed that he would come home to Kent and burrow in, run the estate, settle down, with perhaps an occasional toddle up to London. He would marry and give the old man several great-nieces and nephews to dangle on his knee. He had always been fond of children, had Uncle John.

  A shadow of guilt passed the young man’s face. Now Uncle John was dead, and he’d never had a glimpse of those wished-for great-nieces and nephews. He should have had that, at least.

  But the young man had never before had the least desire to settle down, never the least doubt of his goals, to go, to see, to do.

  Then he remembered. There had been that one flicker of doubt, over five years ago now. There had been a girl. Funny, he had scarce known her at all. They had met only a few times. It was at some house party or other that he saw her last. He had already booked his passage to India, ready to sail in a few days’ time.

  But one smile from her had been enough to give him pause, to actually make him consider throwing over all his plans, his longtime dreams of adventure. Or at least putting them off for a time. He had come damned close to selling back that passage to India.

  He could still remember that smile. The memory of her face had faded, but the smile remained, vivid and warm. She had been so full of life. And there had been a kiss, a kiss such as he had never known before and never found again for all the amorous adventures—and they were not few—the ensuing years had offered up.

  It had been rather more than a kiss, actually, and the memory of it still had the power to stir him. They had been in some sort of summerhouse. Or, no, it had been a gazebo, by a lake. Where was it? Somewhere in Sussex, he thought. Or was it Kent? The banquettes in the gazebo had been covered in red damask, with a pineapple pattern, and the sun had glinted off the sheet of water and turned it the color of her eyes. Amber. Yes, she had had amber eyes.

  The kiss, which had started out so innocently, had quickly taken on an intensity, an urgency, which took them both by surprise and left them breathless.

  The young man looked down at his soapy hands floating over the soothing water. With mild surprise he realized they still recalled the shape, the warmth, the soft round firmness of her young breasts through the thin

  muslin of her summer dress. She had offered no resistance as his hands slid down from her shoulders to seek them. She had only kissed him all the more eage
rly. She had tasted of strawberries, he remembered. Yes, they had been picking strawberries. They had talked, very animatedly, matching ideas and wits; they had wandered off toward the gazebo; they had embraced.

  And then what had happened? His handsome face frowned in concentration. Oh, yes. Footsteps, and a whistled tune, off-key, and the local curate had wandered by. And she had run off.

  But what if they had not been interrupted? Odd, he mused. He hadn’t thought of that adolescent scene in years. Being back in England again must have brought her back to mind. He wondered whatever had become of her as he soaped his arms.

  She had been very like him, that girl. Too much so, in fact. She was impulsive and fiery, the brightest and most independent-minded woman he had ever known. And with far too liberal an education for her own good, as he recalled. But intriguing.

  She had stated quite clearly that she wanted the same things for her life that he wanted for his: adventure, romance, experience. Ridiculous, of course. How could a young girl go traipsing around the world on her own?

  She had also vowed that she would never give over control of her life to a man, as other women did. Well, she had been but seventeen, after all. By now she was probably settled down with a whole brood of children and a fat, contented husband, with no more such foolish, youthful dreams.

  Had he met her when he was a little older himself, a little more experienced, with some of the wanderlust burned out of his soul ... Well, just as well he hadn’t. She had been something special, that girl, but she certainly would not have made a comfortable wife. Passion was all very well. In fact, he planned to experience a great deal more of it before he was through. But in a wife, he was quite ready to settle for comfort. He had learned, through some rather uncomfortable years, that there was a lot to be said for it when all’s said and done.

  He finished his brandy and snuffed out his cheroot.

  * * *

  A nondescript little tune escaped the young woman’s lips as she soaked in the warm scented bath, a counterpoint to the tinkle of the water as it dribbled from her fingertips. The soap, the finest available, smelled of violets from Devonshire and made a rich, creamy lather as she eased it over her white skin, drawing large lazy circles across her shoulders and breasts.

  A busy little maid, a pert smile belying her air of industry, stirred up the coals, added more steaming water to the tub, poured in more of the scented oil, and began to scrub her mistress’s back.

  From the depths of the tub, the young woman let her large amber eyes survey the room. She was familiar with it, for she had visited at Hockleigh once before. Her closest friend was now mistress here. Also, the room was familiar in another sense. In its quality and elegance, it was a mirror of every room she had ever slept in. From where she lay in her bath, she could not see out the windows, now glowing with the last warm pinks and yellows of late afternoon. But she knew what sight would greet her eyes there. Lush, well-manicured lawns, perfectly tended gardens blooming with dahlias and marigolds and other late flowers, an ornamental sheet of water glinting golden in the setting sun.

  Hockleigh was one of the finest estates in Yorkshire. The young woman had spent her life on the finest estates of nearly every county in England.

  The gong of the dressing bell echoed in the hall outside her door, and the young lady gathered her warmed, relaxed muscles together. It was time she dressed.

  A poetic fly on the wall, watching such a maiden rise from her bath, might have been forgiven for likening her to Venus rising from the foam. She was divinely tall and magnificently formed, her full figure well rounded but with no trace of that pudginess which could all too soon turn to fat. Perhaps Diana might have been a more apt choice for the winged bard on the wall, however, for there was an athletic grace about her long limbs and the surety of her movements.

  She stepped from the tub and indulged in a long, languid stretch, her arms held high over her head. A pearl hairpin worked itself loose with the movement, and long silken hair cascaded down over her damp shoulders and across her body like a screen of spun gold.

  There was an autumn chill in the air beyond the long windows, but the cheerful coal fire and a brisk toweling from the pert maid soon dried her glowing skin. She wrapped herself in a silk wrapper the color of dried roses and sat down before the mirror.

  Carnations were set out in shallow bowls on either side of the mirror. That was thoughtful of Sarah, her hostess at Hockleigh, she mused, for Sarah knew them to be her favorite flowers. There were few things Sarah did not know about her, she realized, as she leaned to breathe in the spicy scent of the blooms.

  It had been so good to see her friend again this morning on her arrival at Hockleigh. Since Sarah’s marriage to the young Duke of Hockleigh a year ago, the two friends had seen little of each other. There had been one brief visit here at Hockleigh, a few encounters in Lon- - don. It would be lovely to make a prolonged visit. Of course, Sarah would be kept busy with a house full of guests, and her friend would be caught up in the hunting, but surely there would be some leisure for long chats over the teacups.

  It was strange that their friendship should be so close, for the two young women were different in nearly every way. Physically Sarah was opposed to her friend, being small and round and soft Sarah had grown up surrounded by brothers and sisters, cousins and aunts, while her friend, an only child, had been surrounded by governesses and tutors and her father’s radical friends. Sarah was often silly, seldom picked up a book, and was the most biddable, compliant, and conformable of wives. The tall golden-haired beauty staring out from the mirror was never silly, was very well read, and she knew that she was far, often too far, from biddable. And she was not a wife.

  Her father had brought her up and educated her according to the principles of Mary Wollstonecraft and Mr. Godwin, and she had taken those principles very much to heart. She had, at a very early age, made a solemn vow to become no man’s slave.

  Now, at the ripe age of three-and-twenty, she had still not changed her mind. She had never met a man who had given her the least cause to do so.

  A silver-handled brush was pulled gently but briskly through her long golden hair. The maid worked quickly, deft fingers braiding and piling and twisting, then plucking a mother-of-pearl hairpin from her mouth to secure the knot to her mistress’s head. The young woman began to rub a few drops of oil into the bath-warmed skin of her hands, strong, capable hands, but graceful too, with long tapered fingers and delicately rounded nails.

  Yes, she still believed in the theories of Mrs. Wollstonecraft. Why should not a woman be educated like a man, have a profession like a man, be offered the same rights and opportunities as a man? And then there was the question of “free love,” that most radical of ideas for which the powerful thinker and writer had been most ostracized.

  The young woman couldn’t help but smile at herself as she dusted the thinnest film of rice powder over her nose. She had once espoused the theory with great vigor herself. She imagined she still believed it in principle. But the only time in her life she had come close to acting on her beliefs, she had run away like a frightened rabbit.

  Looking back, she knew it was a good thing that she had run. For the young gentleman in question was the only man she had ever met who might have had the power to tame her independence, to cause her willingly to give up the freedom that was the most important thing in her life.

  She had never fully understood what had happened that day five years ago, despite her advanced education. She remembered a white trellis, the wall of some sort of garden house. There were cushions. Red damask cushions, in a pineapple pattern. The walls had been covered with honeysuckle vines; she could still recall their scent. And he smelled vaguely of clove, a spicy, very male scent.

  She didn’t remember just how the kiss had begun. But she remembered very well that she had no desire for it to end. It was virtually the only time in her life that she could remember feeling truly out of control of a situation. At the moment, she had not
minded a bit, though the idea terrified her a short while later. At the time, it had been far too delicious to mind.

  How different her life might have been had she not run away from him that day. And what was it that had pulled them apart? Oh, yes, the curate, taking a shortcut across the gardens and whistling a hymn. The girl smiled; she had always hated that hymn, long after she had forgotten why.

  She let her mind dwell on that scene in the gazebo; it was the first time in many years that she had done so. She was not, like so many of her contemporaries, completely ignorant of the facts of life and love. Her radical education had seen to that. She knew perfectly well what the logical outcome of that interlude in the honeysuckle-scented gazebo would have been.

  What she could not know was how it would have felt, for the simple reason that she had never, since that long- ago summer day, been the least bit tempted to find out. Oh, there had certainly been gentlemen who wished to tempt her. More than she cared to recall. But she had felt nothing for any of them beyond a mild friendship. None of their kisses had stirred her more than mildly. That did not seem enough, somehow.

  She was smiling now, a rather wry smile, at her own folly. She had gotten into innumerable scrapes in her day in her search for “adventures.” She refused to be confined by antiquated notions of what a young lady should be and should do. She had been setting tongues wagging ever since her come-out.

  But it had all seemed empty somehow, and of late she had begun to sink into a dreadful respectability. Despite her odd education, she realized that the deep-seated propriety of her age was as much a part of her as the more radical ideas of her tutors.