“Yes, Your Grace. I dearly hope Mrs. Blair is well.” Viola bowed her head. If Mrs. Blair’s child was born too early, he might not survive.
The other woman smiled wistfully. “I wish we were taking you with us. I don’t know what I shall do without you.” She sighed. “I wish we didn’t need to go at all yet.”
The duke approached with her cloak. “We must go, Cleo,” he said again. The duchess nodded, and Wessex folded the cloak tenderly around her shoulders.
Viola followed as they went out to the coach. Footmen rushed before them with hot bricks for the carriage floor. Geoffrey, his muffler pulled up almost to his hat brim, swung into the saddle of a gray gelding. The horses shook their traces as the duke and duchess climbed into the carriage.
“Good-bye,” called the duchess, waving as a footman closed the door. The duke touched the brim of his hat, and the coachman lifted the whip and started the horses.
Viola waved back, hunching her shoulders against the cold. Running footsteps sounded behind her, and then Bridget Cavendish was beside her, swinging one arm exuberantly in the air. “Good-bye,” she cried. “Give our love to Blair and to Helen!” The carriage rolled on, past the oaks.
Bridget lowered her arm. “I hope Helen has the baby safely.”
“Yes,” said Viola softly. “I hope so too.”
“With Cleo there, I’m sure she will.” Bridget turned to her, and Viola finally focused on her long enough to see the gleam in her eyes. Oh no. “Cousin Viola . . .”
“No,” said Viola immediately. Her late husband had been one of Bridget’s distant cousins, and Viola was therefore only a relation by marriage, but when the girl called her “cousin,” Viola had learned to be wary of what came next.
“You didn’t even hear my idea!” Bridget looked wounded. “It’s not rude or dangerous. I’m sure Cleo would allow it, if she were here.”
“And yet I can’t help but note you did not ask before she left.” Viola shook her head with a soft tsk. “What is it?”
Bridget brightened right out of her pretend hurt. “A play. To cheer Serena. It will be silly and make no sense at all and she’ll be so diverted. Please say we may put it on!”
That didn’t sound so dreadful . . . and yet it was Bridget, so Viola wasn’t reassured. “Which play?”
“Oh, I’m writing it,” was the cheerful reply. “Completely original. Nothing vulgar or inappropriate, I promise.”
For a moment she was shocked into silence. It wasn’t that Bridget wasn’t bright enough or creative enough to write a play, it was that Viola had never seen her sit still long enough to write a scene, let alone multiple acts. “How exciting,” she said, recovering. “May I read it?”
“Even better—you’ll be in it!” Bridget’s eyes glowed as she beamed back. “Everyone will be, except Mama if she’s going to be ill for a while, and Great-Aunt Sophronia. They’ll be our audience.”
Her heart settled into a normal rhythm again. If Bridget meant for her to have a part, she’d have to see the play, and could put a stop to any nonsense before it got out of hand. And if anyone could make Serena smile again, it would be Bridget. For all her madcap ways, the girl was irrepressible in her good humor and wit, with a knack for making people laugh even in their foulest tempers. And the duchess had said to encourage entertainments.
“It sounds like a fine idea,” she told Bridget.
“Thank you!” The girl clapped her hands and ran back into the house before Viola could say anything more, which was likely for the best.
A gust of wind made her shiver. She wrapped her arms around herself and cast one last look down the long oak-lined avenue; the ducal carriage was already gone from sight. Her gaze drifted upward. The clouds seemed to be growing thicker and grayer by the moment, and the air had a leaden stillness that promised snow.
Viola didn’t like storms.
Chapter 1
“How much farther is it?”
Wesley Morane, Earl of Winterton, inhaled slowly and then exhaled even more slowly. If he didn’t know better, he would think his nephew was still a child instead of a young man nearing his twenty-first birthday. “A few more miles, I expect.”
Justin scowled and slumped by the window. The weak light caught his fair hair and made him look as young and petulant as he was behaving. “Aren’t we nearly to Cornwall yet?”
It felt as though they had circled the globe in this carriage. Wes tried to keep his voice calm as he replied, “No.” He did not repeat an earlier mistake, of offering to show Justin their progress on the small but handsome leather-bound atlas of England he kept in the traveling chaise. That had not gone well, with Justin fixating on the distance left to travel instead of the beauty of the illustrated map of Dorset.
Several minutes of silence passed. Wes did not fool himself they would continue indefinitely. Time had already seemed to stretch and slow, much like the distance they had still to travel. At one point he wondered if the carriage and horses had become stuck in a vast mud slick, where the hooves and wheels were only churning in place, never making an inch of progress.
“I could have stayed in Hampshire,” Justin said abruptly. “Dorset is hideous in winter.”
So is Hampshire. Wes managed to keep himself from saying it aloud. He did not manage to keep from thinking about a few places that were not hideous in winter—the East Indies, for example. The winter of 1808 had been splendid there, sitting under thick palm fronds and learning about the spice trade from his father.
“I recall you agitating to leave Hampshire,” he said instead. “Your mother told me you were wild to be away.”
The boy’s mouth pulled sullenly. “Not this far away.”
That was what his mother had feared. Anne was Wes’s oldest sister, and she knew exactly what her son wanted, so newly grown to manhood and so abruptly possessed of his father’s title. Justin had barely finished university when his father died, leaving him the new Viscount Newton. Instead of the Grand Tour he had been promised upon completing his studies, Justin had gone home to New Cross House to console his mother and sisters and lay his father to rest.
But mourning soon grew tiresome for a young man of high spirits and energy. If he couldn’t sow his wild oats in Italy or Spain, Justin was determined to sow them somewhere. He fell in with a crowd of young dandies who spent their time racing carriages, dicing, and drinking at the local pub. When the local miller called on Anne to complain of young Lord Newton’s attentions to his daughter, Anne wrote to Wes and commanded him to take charge of his nephew before the boy was hopelessly debauched.
He’d gone at once; he had to. Anne might be a decade older than he, but he was still the head of the family. Privately he didn’t think Justin was in as bad a way as Anne claimed, but his sister was grieving her husband, and rationality had never been her strong suit anyway. It seemed obvious to Wes that the best course was to separate the restless son and anxious mother.
On impulse he decided Justin should come with him to Kingstag Castle in Dorset. Wes had his eye on a particular old atlas, and he strongly suspected the duke had recently acquired it. The only way to be certain was to see it himself, and his sister’s demand that he deal with his nephew provided all the excuse Wes needed to set off for Dorset at once. Not only would it give Anne a respite from worrying about Justin, he reasoned, it would remove the boy from the miller’s daughter as well as his wastrel friends for a fortnight, and allow Wes a chance to influence his nephew for the better.