LITMIR.BIZ

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EMMALINE DAUGHTRY sat in the gardens of Ashurst Hall on one of the first bright days of spring, completely and entirely alone.

      It was her twenty-eighth birthday.

      On her lap was the letter that had arrived in the morning post from her nieces, Lydia and Nicole. In order to keep to one sheet, thus saving on the postage, Lydia had written her rather formal, excruciatingly correct wishes in her finest copperplate. Nicole, being Nicole, had scribbled her good wishes upside down between Lydia’s lines, her usual exuberance evident in both her atrocious spelling and her latest affectation of marking all her i’s with small hearts.

      The twins were back with their mother, the thrice-widowed Helen Daughtry, at their small estate of Willowbrook, as Helen was once again between husbands and had remembered that she had daughters to fuss over in her own fashion.

      That would change in a few weeks, when Helen went tripping off to London for the Season, and Lydia and Nicole were once again shuttled back to Ashurst Hall “to bear their dearest spinster aunt their Comfort and Presence, as you must be So Devastatingly Lonely isolated in the back of beyond.” Or so Helen’s last letter, all but pinned to the twins’ luggage, had stated so cruelly. But all under the guise of being caring and compassionate.

      Lady Emmaline knew her late brother’s widow could be a kind person, in her own way. She simply wasn’t a kind person frequently.

      In that way, Helen had fit very well with the Daughtry family, who seemed to belong to another age, the more rough and tumble—and most definitely profane—age of two decades past. Marital fidelity was a joke to them, kindness considered a weakness and selfishness a near art form. Or else today’s Society had simply learned to hide their failings and vices better...

      Her morals had, however, been the only way her sister-in-law resembled the Daughtrys. Helen always said she’d married the wrong brother when she’d wed the second son, but even that marriage had been quite above her social station. Yet, ever resourceful, she’d made do with a husband who had tired of her within a few months, and built her own life, her own circle of London friends.

      When Emmaline’s brother Geoffrey had died, Helen had tricked herself out in crushingly expensive widow’s weeds, impatiently waited out a full month of mourning and then deposited her son, Rafael, and the twins on the doorstep of Ashurst Hall and returned to London and those friends. Over the years, the children had spent more time at Ashurst Hall than on their own estate, until Rafe had left to serve with Wellington.

      Emmaline had been as thrilled by these additions to the family as her only surviving brother had been appalled—which may have been one of the reasons Emmaline had been so delighted. After all, it wasn’t as if there was any love lost between Charlton and herself.

      Charlton and Geoffrey were so very much older than Emmaline, and males to her female, so it was not surprising that the three had never been especially close. And Emmaline could have accepted that. But Emmaline’s mother had departed this earth the same day her only daughter was born, and for that, Charlton and Geoffrey would never forgive her. Even their father, the Duke of Ashurst, had been no more than occasionally aware of his daughter’s existence. Not that he’d much cared for his sons, either. Emmaline always thought his children would have garnered more affection from their sire if they could run on four legs, go up on point when they spotted the fox and then lay at his feet at the banquet whilst he celebrated his latest glorious kill.

      And then Geoffrey had died, and their father had looked around and noticed that, by Jupiter, he was in danger of being outnumbered by petticoats. Charlton’s wife was enough to have twittering about Ashurst Hall, complaining that he came to dinner in his hunting clothes, or tossing fierce looks at him when he belched or scratched satisfyingly whenever the spirit moved him. It was time to marry off the one he could get rid of, by Jupiter!

      So Emmaline had been hauled off to London upon the occasion of her eighteenth birthday, where she was put under the supposedly watchful eye of Helen Daughtry. Which was the same as to say Emmaline was left to her own devices while Helen flirted outrageously with any man who happened to look at Emmaline in a matrimonial way.

      Not that Emmaline hadn’t had her chances during the Seasons she’d suffered through under Helen’s haphazard chaperonage. There had been at least a few gentlemen who hadn’t taken one look at Helen’s décolletage and deserted Emmaline as if she’d just told them she had contracted the plague. There had been Sir William Masterson, a widower with six children under the age of ten. He’d made no bones that he was looking for a woman to ride herd on his...well, on his herd. Lord Phillipson had loved her.

      Emmaline had been very aware of that fact from the way he had all but drooled on her shoe tops, but as his breath would fell an ox at ten paces, she’d felt she had to decline his proposal.

      There had been no third Season, as her father had died, and Emmaline had insisted on a full year of mourning (Helen had actually laughed when she’d heard that, which was, in fact, as she headed out the door on her way to London less than two hours after the duke had been put to bed for his eternal rest in the family mausoleum).

      Charlton, now the thirteenth duke, had given Emmaline one more chance the following Season, sending her off with a warning that an only passably pretty woman of three and twenty shouldn’t be so damned choosy and she’d better find some fool who’d come up to scratch because he was done paying through the nose for gowns and gloves and other fripperies.

      The Season hadn’t gone well. Emmaline sometimes wondered if she had deliberately sabotaged herself and her matrimonial hopes simply to spite the new duke.

      On the event of her twenty-fourth birthday, Charlton’s gift to her had been a half dozen white, embroidered spinster caps and the information that, while he and his sons George and Harold (their mama having succumbed to a putrid cold three years previously) would be going to London for the Season, she was to remain at home.

      Emmaline hadn’t protested. Indeed, at the time, she had been rather relieved. After all, in her many Seasons in London she had met, danced and spoken with nearly every eligible bachelor not risking his life on the Peninsula, and none of them had excited her in the least. She could find little attraction in men who cared more for the cut of their evening jacket than they did the notion that Bonaparte might somehow best Wellington and they’d all be speaking French. How on earth was she supposed to take any of these men seriously when none of them had been any better than her brother and nephews, some of them actually worse?

      But now the war was at last over and Bonaparte was on his way to a deserved exile, and the world could welcome home all its fine, brave soldiers...who to a man would surely be on the lookout for ladies much younger than Lady Emmaline.

      No, she was destined to remain forever on this estate, sitting in this same garden, season after season, year after year, birthday after birthday, waiting for her perfect lover who would never arrive. How she had tired of watching Charlton eat with his fingers at the dinner table, hearing George and Harold brag about their latest bouts of drinking and gambling, wretches that they were, not to mention listening in some fear to her brother threaten to send her off to their great-aunt in Scotland because he was weary of looking at her.

      Yes, having Rafael and Lydia and Nicole so often in residence these past years had been Emmaline’s main comfort, and she missed them sorely.

      She did not miss Charlton or his sons, who had left her alone without a kind word about her birthday, most probably because they’d forgotten the date. No, they’d gone off five days ago to play with George’s newest toy, a yacht he had won at the gaming tables. As if any of them knew the first thing about steering a boat, or whatever it was one did with a boat.

      Would it be terrible of her to hope that all three of them spent most of their voyage hanging over the side, sick as dogs and casting up their suppers into the Channel?

      Emmaline sighed, folding up the letter from her nieces as she tried to shake off her depressing thoughts. She wished her good friend Charlotte Seavers, who lived in Rose Cottage with her parents, right next door to Ashurst Hall, could share her birthday with her, but her mother was still not quite well. But, no, Emmaline wouldn’t think about

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