by Bree Wolf
“So?” his brother-in-law asked. “Do you see anything you like?”
Graham frowned. “I hope you are referring to the food.”
Winking, Edmond chuckled. “Do try and look a little at ease. This is a garden party, not your last meal before you meet the gallows in the morning.”
“I know.”
Edmond shook his head. “Are you certain? Your face seems to disagree.”
“I’d be much obliged if you would refrain from finding such joy in my misery,” Graham whispered, his eyes fixed on the horizon in the distance. How was it that some days seemed to never want to end? Sometimes he felt like the sun was doing its utmost to burn the life from him.
At his words, Edmond turned to look. “Because you seem to believe that misery is all there is.” Graham felt a hand settle on his shoulder as his friend turned to look at him. “You can’t live in the dark forever.”
Graham shrugged, shaking off his friend’s attempt at comfort. “I did not bring you here for your ill advice.”
Edmond grinned. “You did not bring me at all. I came.”
Graham shrugged.
Once again returning to his cheerful self, Edmond turned back to the spectacle in the gardens. “So, let’s find you a wife.”
Although he felt he ought to, Graham didn’t protest. The sooner the better. The sooner he found a new wife, the sooner he could return to the shadows.
As Edmond pointed out every young lady to pass before their eyes, Graham barely listened. He didn’t care how brilliantly their eyes shone or how golden their hair glistened in the sun. After all, he wasn’t really looking for a wife.
Giving his eyes free reign, he found himself drawn to the children and their easy laughter. Laughter untainted by loss. The laughter of youth and innocence. His tense muscles relaxed as he watched them, only to be reminded of the daughter he hadn’t seen since her mother’s passing.
As Georgiana’s face, conjured by the dark corners of his mind, appeared before him, he closed his eyes, trying to shake every thought of her. Considering why he had come to this festivity in the first place, he wasn’t surprised when his attempts were thwarted. Her deep blue eyes smiled at him as she threw her wild, golden curls back and flung herself into his arms. The knot in his stomach tightened, and he felt ill.
Opening his eyes, Graham found himself looking at a young woman behaving quite unladylike as she chased a group of children across the lawn. She was quite petite, barely taller than some of the older children, and her easy smile matched theirs every step of the way.
As the smile died on her lips, he turned to see an older man approach her from the terrace, a scowl on his face. Her father? He wondered. A muted conversation followed causing the young woman to drop her head and sink into herself. Her eyes rested on the ground and barely glanced up at the man clearly lecturing her. The smile that had only moments earlier illuminated her soft face had transformed into a serious and collected expression, darkening her eyes.
Graham watched the man walk away and re-join his lady when another young woman approached the one he had been observing. Clearly a confidant, she tried to raise her friend’s spirits, but to no avail. As they suddenly looked up, Graham averted his eyes. However, when he took another quick look, he met the petite one’s gaze for a second before she looked away.
Adding up all the many details he had been able to glimpse of her personality, Graham decided that today hadn’t been in vain after all. It had brought him a good step closer to choosing a wife.
Chapter Two - On Becoming a Governess
Still feeling his cold eyes linger on her, Rosabel shivered. “He seems to be most unpleasant,” she whispered, eyeing her cousin through lowered lashes. “Do you not agree?”
Ellie nodded. “There is something dark about him. Something…,” −she put a finger to her lip−” …I’m not sure. Maybe−”
“Elsbeth!” a whispered shout rang from down the lawn and made them turn around. As they exchanged quick remarks, faces somewhat tense, Lord and Lady Harlowe hastened toward them.
Abandoning her observational post, Ellie turned to her parents. “Yes, Mother. Father. What seems to be the matter?”
As Rosabel peeked around Ellie’s tall frame, she felt herself unwillingly shrink into the shadows. Wringing her hands, she dearly hoped that she had not given affront again. Her aunt and uncle, however, only seemed to have eyes for their eldest daughter, not even glancing in their niece’s direction, and Rosabel let go a breath she wasn’t aware she’d been holding.
“Elsbeth, now do not be too obvious about it,” Rosabel’s aunt whispered as her quick hands brushed down her daughter’s dress, flattening any ruffles there might be, “but do you see the two gentlemen standing up on the terrace?”
Without turning her head, Ellie shifted her eyes briefly to the two young men she and Rosabel had been observing not a minute ago. Eyes on her mother, she nodded. “What about them?”
Taking his daughter’s hand, Lord Harlowe said in hushed tones, “We were just informed that the one on the left with the blond hair is Edmond Dunsworth, Duke of Cromwell, while the one on the right with the dark hair is Graham Astor, Duke of Kensington.” His eyes glowed as though Christmas had come early this year.
Watching her aunt and uncle closely, Rosabel knew immediately that a new matchmaking scheme was afoot and that her cousin was the unfortunate victim. Unable to see Ellie’s face as her father pulled her forward while her mother rearranged an escaped lock of her hair, Rosabel took a deep breath, relieved at being overlooked once again. “Come, come,” she heard her aunt whisper, “put on your most dazzling smile. Viscount Davenport has promised to introduce us. Just think about it, a duchess. You could be a duchess.” As though floating on air, Lady Harlowe glided down the small hill, almost dragging her daughter behind her, eye on the targets standing on the terrace, unaware of their impending doom.
Clasping a hand over her mouth at such a thought, Rosabel chastised herself. Either one of them would be lucky to have her cousin for a wife. Having Lord and Lady Harlowe for parents-in-law, however, was a different matter.
***
“So? Are you betrothed?” Rosabel whispered after they’d arrived home, retreating to Ellie’s room for privacy.
Her cousin’s eyes flew open. “Of course not. Viscount Davenport merely introduced us.” She shrugged. “Who knows what will come of it?”
Sitting on the small divan, Rosabel fingered the hem of her sleeves. “Do you wish to be betrothed?”
“Certainly.” Observing her cousin through narrowed eyes, Ellie sat down beside her. “Not necessarily to one of them, but in general, yes of course.”
Again Rosabel felt her cousin’s gaze resting on her. She took a deep breath and met her eyes.
“Do you not wish to be betrothed?” Ellie asked, and Rosabel could see in her eyes that she was observing her carefully, trying to detect any hint that her words would not be truthful.
Rosabel shrugged. “I do not know.”
“Why? Do you wish to be a spinster?”
Knowing that her cousin’s words were not meant as an insult, she drew in a deep breath, hoping to find the right words to explain the turmoil going on in her heart. “I am not sure what I want. But marriage seems…undesirable.”
“Really? What makes you say that?”
Again running her fingers over the hem of her sleeve, Rosabel’s eyes turned inward. “My parents.”
Ellie frowned. “Because it ruined your mother? And by extension you?”
Rosabel shook her head. “No, what scares me is the love they shared…and lost.”
“How do you mean? I thought love was a desirable benefit in a marriage. Those who eventually come to love their spouse consider it a blessing. Would you not agree?”
“I’m not sure.” Eyes drifting out the window, Rosabel tried to remember the moment her life had changed. The moment her world had come crashing down around her. The moment everything was lost. The moment her moth
er had died.
After Rosabel had been born, her mother had miscarried a couple of times until finally she seemed to be able to carry another baby full term. Only mere weeks before the baby was due her mother had gone into labour. Days had passed. Days of pain and suffering. Rosabel, barely six at the time, had heard her mother’s pain and just as clearly seen the answering emotions on her father’s face. In the end the child had been stillborn, and her mother had died moments later.
That alone, losing her mother, a mother she had loved more than anyone in the world, would have made Rosabel hesitant about giving her heart to anyone. But what she didn’t know in that moment was that she was still falling, that she hadn’t hit rock bottom yet.
Madly in love with his wife ever since he’d first laid eyes on her, Rosabel’s father lost a piece of himself that day. And as it turned out, without that piece he could not go on.
In the beginning, after the initial shock and disbelief had worn off, he had tried. Rosabel remembered the effort she had sometimes detected on his face to be cheerful and to give her back her smile by finding his own. But it had all been a mask. He could never recover from the loss of his wife. Barely two years later, he had followed her to the grave. Pneumonia, the doctor had said. But in her heart, Rosabel had known that he had given up, that he had nothing that kept him in this life. Not even his daughter. She hadn’t been enough.
A love as all-consuming as theirs scared Rosabel. Giving yourself up to such pain seemed too great a risk. While at the same time, entering a marriage without love would be a betrayal of her parents and everything they’d gone through to be together.
Marriage just wasn’t an option, not for Rosabel. But if not marriage, what then?
***
Stepping down from the carriage that had taken them to Whitmore, Rosabel and Ellie scanned the small market place where merchants had set up stall after stall, offering a variety of sugary treats as much as exquisite fabrics. People bustled about, blocking their view, and Rosabel hastened to grab a hold of her younger cousins. “You must not run off,” she warned, looking from Beatrice to Lydia to Stephen, the youngest and only son of Lord Harlowe. “We would not want anyone to snatch you off and demand a ransom of your father for your return, now would we?” As she winked at them, the girls giggled while Stephen, at the ripe age of four, bowed his head with all the sincerity instilled in him by his father.
“Should we go over there first?” Ellie pointed across the square and past the water fountain to a stall that held the most brilliant colours. “Mother said I ought to find something fit for a duchess.” Her eyes twinkled.
“What if you do not become a duchess?” Rosabel asked, seeing the light-heartedness of her cousin’s comment.
Ellie shrugged. “Then at least I’ll have a pretty new dress.” She smiled and grabbed Rosabel by the arm, pulling her along. “Let’s go, you little rascals,” she called over her shoulder.
While Ellie spent the next hour browsing the stall she had indicated and had the merchant show her every roll of fabric he had brought, Rosabel kept a fixed eye on her younger cousins as they threw pebbles in the water fountain or played tag on the square. Every now and then she offered her opinion to Ellie on a particular colour or texture of a fabric, but other than that was left to her own devices.
Around her, people walked back and forth from stall to stall browsing, buying and bargaining, their voices a vibrant cacophony of life. There was no place as a busy market to gather gossip on one’s neighbours and learn new titbits here and there. Apparently, the future Viscountess Davenport had the largest dowry of any girl in the county, which was precisely why the Viscount had chosen her as his bride-to-be. No, on the contrary, another woman argued it was her beauty that had ensured her the match.
Slightly hushed voices, as though betraying a secret, whispered of a newcomer to the neighbourhood, taking up residence at Camden Hall. A tall, stately man with hair as dark as night and eyes as cold as the ice on a frozen winter’s lake. However, since he had a title−another argument broke out over whether he was a duke or an earl−those defects were easily overlooked. Rosabel disagreed; those eyes had followed her to her dreams the night before, and she had awoken in a cold sweat and an eerie sense of foreboding.
“Mrs. Garner is ailing,” a woman standing slightly off to the side by the next stall spoke. “The family will be looking for a replacement soon.”
“Are you certain?” the young woman standing shoulder to shoulder with her, surveying the stall’s display, asked. “This world sure is harsh. To be replaced like that.”
The older woman nodded. “Certainly. But what are the Comptons to do? They have three daughters. They need a governess.”
“True,” the younger woman agreed, turning her attention back to the display of fabrics before her. “It is just so sad.”
Although Rosabel felt for Mrs. Garner, her heart skipped a beat as her mind took the information she had just overheard and went one step further. If not marriage, then what? Could she be a governess? Rosabel wondered, once more ensuring that all three children were still playing safely by the water fountain. As Beatrice saw her looking, she waved.
Yes, Rosabel’s mind said. Why not? She loved children, and they adored her. Being a governess, nothing would be simpler. A smile spread over her face, but died abruptly as her uncle came to mind. Would he allow her? Would he consider her working as a further disgrace to the family?
After her father had joined her mother in death, Rosabel had come to live with her uncle’s family, but from the beginning she had felt unwelcome. She knew they had only taken her in because they considered it their duty; she was, after all, family. Unwelcome family, however. Both her aunt and uncle never missed an opportunity to remind her of her status. She was the black sheep of the family, and her dark hair only seemed to confirm that their opinion of her was correct. More than once Rosabel had looked at herself in the mirror, wondering if a lighter hair colour would have made a difference. But as so often, she shook her head at such a foolish thought. Knowing that it rooted in the deep desire to be accepted by her own kin, Rosabel thought of it no further.
A burden to her family, Rosabel often felt the need to repay them for their kindness, he kindness they showed by not sending her from their house. Always on her best behaviour, Rosabel never declined a request, never argued and never questioned her uncle’s authority. And yet, to this day he had never looked at her with an emotion akin to affection, nor had her aunt. Only her cousins were able to see past the scandal with a child’s carefree and forgiving spirit, and Rosabel loved them for it all the more.
So, if she became a governess, would her uncle be relieved to be rid of a responsibility he did not ask for in the first place?
***
Descending the stairs of his carriage, Graham found himself in hell. As crowded as the market place before him appeared, he couldn’t help but wonder how people could stomach it. One could scarcely set one foot before the other without brushing someone’s shoulder or stepping on someone’s shoes. Withdrawing to the less crowded side of a building situated behind the water fountain, Graham took a deep breath, already feeling the lump in his stomach harden. A scowl on his face, he looked at his friend. “Why on earth did you insist on coming here?”
Edmond shrugged, an impish smile playing on his features as he watched the children playing by the water fountain. “It’s a beautiful day, and you had to get out of the house.”
“Says who?”
“Graham, as much as you love your dusty, old books, they are not adequate company.”
Graham returned his gaze to the children, now throwing pebbles into the water.
They’d had this discussion many times. It never led anywhere. Edmond did not understand the comfort books could give, and Graham could not explain without raising their relationship to a level that he was not comfortable with. The heart had no purpose, not one he cared for at least. Again, for the millionth time, he wished he could tear it from his
chest and bury it with his wife.
Chasing after two girls, who shared many of his features, a little boy slipped when running through a small puddle and crashed to the ground. His little face distorted painfully, he began to howl, holding his knee. Instantly, a young woman rushed to his side, and Graham recognized her as the one he had been observing at the Davenport’s engagement celebration.
Gathering the boy up in her arms, she carried him to the water fountain where she sat down and rocked him back and forth. Cooing into his ear, her lips moved as though she was singing. Slowly the boy relaxed until his tears stopped. Peeling his hands from his leg, she checked his knee and then turned around to wash his skinned hands in the water fountain. She dried his hands on her dress, tenderly patting the fabric to the sore skin, then splashed some water on his face. The little boy shrieked, but laughter shook him a moment later and he threw his little arms around her. Again she hugged him tight, rocking from side to side.
“A handsome, young woman,” Edmond said, and Graham flinched, his friend’s voice ripping away the quiet peacefulness of the scene before him. “Is she not the one you observed at the party?”
Graham didn’t answer.
“She will make a beautiful duchess,” Edmond continued, his eyes carefully fixed on his friend’s face.
“That is of no importance to me.”
“I see.” Edmond’s gaze shifted to the young woman, leading the boy and the two girls he had chased after through the throng of people. Before long she vanished from sight. “If not her beauty has caught your eye, then what recommends her to you?”
Again Graham didn’t answer.
For a moment Edmond looked at him, and Graham tensed under his friend’s scrutiny. Finally, he said, “Georgiana will like her.”