July 3, 1819
Woodbury, England
Sleep was usually a fitful matter for Robert. As a child with six brothers, he often woke to frogs on his chest or a pig tied to his ankles just before its rump was slapped. Cambridge only served to up the stakes of such nighttime antics. In some ways, war was more peaceful with its hushed conversations and the rustle of tent flaps, but the periodic boom of canons and sputter of gunfire would cut through the night, shattering the illusion.
Last night had been a different affair. He’d woken to drenched sheets twisted across his legs. He had, on more than one occasion, bolted awake on a fevered dream. Despite this, he had awoken at dawn rested and at peace.
Today, he would ask Miss Alice Belle to be his wife.
There was still the matter of him apologizing for his ungentlemanly conduct, but it would be an apology for his behavior only, not for the outcome. For how could he be sorry that they had finally agreed upon their feelings, if not in words, then in action.
He rose from bed before the sun broke over the horizon and hurriedly dressed. This was an engagement, not war, but Robert felt the same stirring of anticipation in his gut as he did the morning of battle. He always rose early then, ahead of his men. Often the night before a battle would seem insurmountable, particularly when looking at the faces of the young men under his command. The quiet of dawn is where the possibility of victory lived.
He went downstairs. Breakfast had not yet been set in the sideboard, and upon seeing him, the staff immediately began to fuss.
“I shall take in a walk,” he said. “No need to rouse the cook.”
The butler, who had entered the room as he spoke, stopped in front of Robert, standing board-stiff, his heels tightly turned. “We have an urgent correspondence for you, Mr. Crawford. A messenger arrived only a moment ago. There was question of whether to wake you.”
“Show me the man.”
The worst of scenarios began to churn in his mind. Perhaps Alice had sobered and regretted their evening together, and she had fled and sent him a message to bid him farewell. She had claimed not to be inebriated during their kiss, but who was to say how the alcohol had affected her.
The staff had the messenger waiting for Robert at the kitchen table, as there was likely no room for extra guests, full as Woodbury was with visitors. Upon seeing him, Robert realized it could be no errand of Alice’s.
The messenger was a young boy, face streaked with dirt from his travels, his shirt untucked. “I come with news from Leeds,” the boy said, holding a white envelope in his outstretched hand.
He removed the letter and read it, his alarm growing as he read his sister’s account of his favorite niece’s health and how she asked for him. His eyes widened as he finished, and without a word, he hurried through the house and climbed the stairs two at a time. He went straight to wake Savage and Hughes, who quickly got ready to escort him to Leeds within the half hour in Savage’s carriage with the fastest team of bays in the country.
“You have a different look about you,” Savage said.
“I’ll have to take Savage’s word for it.” Hughes was curled up in the corner of the phaeton, his eyes twisted shut. The man could take a punch without blinking but his stomach was no match for the rocking carriage.
“I need something from you,” Robert said.
Savage sat up and even Hughes opened one eye.
Robert took a breath. He was not a man who easily asked for favors, but Alice was worth it. If he was to ask her hand in marriage, he could not rely on her father’s assessment of his character or earnestness. He had to rely on himself and all the resources at his disposal, Savage included.
“Name it,” Savage said.
“It involves your connection to a certain figure of royal descent.”
Savage sighed. “I’d hoped to save that favor for my own one day.”
* * *
Alice woke with her fingers to her lips.
The memories of the previous night swept over her in a wave. She closed her eyes and sank deeper into her mattress, tugging the sheets up to her chin.
What had she done?
What would he think?
She was both eager to rise and dreading it in equal parts. She’d behaved most wantonly and without provocation.
In reality, kissing him had been a release of years’ worth of pent-up frustration. Years of suitors who were too old, too young, too boring, or too sleepy—in one case—to take seriously. Years of realizing her father was circling closer and closer to selecting a potential husband for her without her approval and that the life she’d been imagining with Robert was passing her by.
What if Mr. Crawford rightfully assumed that she was amenable to a proposal after last night’s kiss and had spoken to her father while she’d been slumbering away?
That thought sent her bolting upright in bed. She was dressed before her lady’s maid could even make it into the room amid the ruckus. She tied back her hair in a knot and ran down to breakfast.
She saw, with relief, that her father was dining alone, and she took the seat across from him.
“You seem tired,” he said, observing her disheveled appearance.
“I am. I may return to bed,” she admitted. As soon as she was able to discuss the events of the night before with Robert.
His words echoed in her mind, as did his observation that if she wanted to be married, she would be married. She had to admit there was truth in it.
Alice did not know how to fail.
Therefore her failure was deliberate. Perhaps her father knew that, too.
Could she succeed now in what she wanted?
A shuffle of feet sounded across the floor. Alice looked up to see Dinah, who took her seat at the table without greeting them, a faraway expression in her eyes.
“Are you all right?” Alice asked.
“Hmm? What?” Dinah glanced up sharply, as if just seeing Alice for the first time.
“Are you all right?” Alice repeated.
“Yes, yes, quite all right.” Dinah picked up her fork and stabbed at her empty plate, then upon realizing there was no food on it, went to fill it from the sideboard.
“Whatever is the matter with her?” their father mumbled. It appeared that if anything could distract her father from the suitor problem, it would be Dinah behaving much like Bridget, as if her head were in the clouds.
Before they could discuss it further, though, others began to arrive, and soon the table was filled with Belles, as well as Abernathys, and they dined until the sideboard was empty.
“I shall have it refilled,” Alice said. “The other guests will want their breakfasts, too.”
“The other guests have all left,” Tom said. He dabbed at the crumbs that dotted his fuzzy moustache. “I was informed they departed early this morning at sunrise.”
There was a clattering of plates as the Belles all dropped their cutlery.
Alice’s heart dropped into her stomach. “All of them?” she asked. “Lord Savage, Mr. Hughes, and Mr. Crawford?”
“Yes, all,” Tom said.
Her father grunted his approval. “Business is always at hand. Good men. Not the sort to fritter away. I’ve let the day get too far ahead of me, too. Much to be done. Alice, would you attend me on a tour of Woodbury residents?”
She nodded, his voice sounding far away. Robert had left? Without a word? What did it mean? It was unlike him—it was unlike all the gentlemen, in fact—and the possible reason for it preoccupied her as she readied for town. Her lady’s maid had to dress her like a child, slipping her arms into their sleeves and buttoning her up to the chin when Alice was usually more than likely to slap her hand away to finish it herself.
It was this distanced demeanor that carried her through the carriage ride to town and her father’s visit with a farmer whose irrigation system was of interest. Her father was toying with the idea of growing food aboard his ships to decrease the number of supply stops required.
Alice took notes of their conversation. It was a good task, one that required that she focus solely on their words and not her wandering mind. Yet, how frustrating it was to find her future once again not in her hands. She must rely on her father, on Robert. If it were up to her . . .
But it wasn’t, was it?
“I fancy refreshment,” her father said when they piled back into the carriage. “There’s the establishment in town where we stayed our first visit to the Duke. I’ll have us stop there. Now don’t fuss about it, Alice. I know I had plenty yesterday, but I need a bit of hair of the dog.”
She’d been so in her head, she hadn’t even thought to admonish him as she usually did when he indulged before dinner. Instead, they discussed the visit with the farmer as they settled at an empty table in the back corner of the inn’s dining room. The lamps weren’t lit this far in and they were hidden, both of which were saving graces as a headache was blooming at her father’s temples from yesterday’s excess. Though, he was not the only one suffering the delights of the Belle birthday crush.
They could easily overhear the conversations in the din around them, and most of the inn’s guests, invited to the Belle bash or not, spoke of the party.
“Not one, but two harpists! Two!”
“I must have won twenty pounds at cards.”
“I lost. Fleeced by the Blasé one, you know.”
“That girl . . .”
“All the girls!”
“If not for the Abernathys . . .”
“A fine connection . . .”
“If not for their association with that family . . . Well, money can’t buy everything, you know. Clothes and education do not make a lady.”
Alice gripped her glass so hard it slipped from her fingers and shot across the table. Her father’s expression hardened. He stared at his drink, the stern slash of brows looming over the frames of his spectacles. A deep ragged breath hissed from his lips.
The sound shook a memory loose, and suddenly Alice could feel her mother’s hand clutching her fingers and pulling her along the cobblestone sidewalks as well-dressed ladies parted like the Red Sea around them. She had tripped and fallen into a woman who shrieked and belted her away. Alice had been sweaty when they arrived home, and her father had asked why they had rushed. Her mother hadn’t answered, and her father’s face had twisted into the very same expression currently on his face.
Only now she recognized it for what it was: shame.
“Their words don’t mean anything,” Alice said. “Not to me.”
Her father sighed. “I thought I raised you smarter, Alice. Society’s words mean everything. To you. To your sisters.”
And to her mother. That was the unspoken truth, always.
“You’re thinking about her,” her father said, his voice sad. He pushed aside the drink, forgotten. His figure shrunk into his chair. “Do share. So few of us have stories of her it seems a shame not to share them.”
She wasn’t sure what had brought on his melancholy mood. She didn’t want to share the memory of Society shunning them, so she plucked another memory, a good one. “Do you remember the year your father was ill? You wanted to take all us to visit, but Mother took sick.”
Alice had been three and a half years old and found herself home alone with her mother for the first time in her life. She had spent all her years sharing her mother with her father, or her mother’s friends, or the help, or her sisters, but on this one bright joyous day, with her father and sisters traveling to visit grandfather, she and her mother had been alone.
Her father smiled at the memory. “She said you were so worried that you followed behind her, telling her to take care down the stairs, take care not to eat too fast. She felt she received more mothering from you than she would have had if she’d joined me on the trip.”
“When she recovered, she suggested we picnic outside,” Alice remembered. “And I remember thinking that we never ate outside. We had never picnicked before. But the kitchen made us a lovely spread. Put extra butter on our sandwiches.”
They had gone to a picnic spot in Hyde Park. Her mother had winked at her as she tucked the straw basket under her arm. The walk to the park had been an easy one and should have taken only ten minutes, but her mother had let her stop to pick up rocks, to watch caterpillars cross in front of them, to catch butterflies. It was nearly an hour before they sat upon a red-and-white cloth beneath the boughs of a linden tree. There had been so much food one would have thought the entire family was present, and for the first time, she did not need to share. She had taken two handfuls of sandwiches, alternating bites between the left and the right.
“Mother warned me not to eat too fast. That I would give myself a stomachache. Of course she was gulping down chocolate-smeared bread as she said it.”
Her father let out a wrenching laugh.
“She said to me, ‘Don’t tell Papa. The picnic, the chocolate bread, will be our little secret.’”
He wiped at his eyes as she continued.
“I didn’t understand how we could even keep a secret from you. You were so smart that strangers would stop you on the street to tell you how smart you were. So smart that the livelihoods of thousands depended on you. How could we possibly keep anything from you?”
“You must have been in a tizzy.”
“I was. I asked Mother if she had any other secrets from you, if there were other things she didn’t tell you.”
He eyed her curiously, and she realized she never told him this story before, precisely because of her mother’s request. It had felt like a private thing.
He leaned forward, perched on the edge of his seat. “What did your mother say?”
“She said that there were things she didn’t tell you, but it wasn’t the same as keeping a secret. She didn’t have to tell you everything for you to know what she wanted or felt or needed because you already knew.”
He smiled, silent, but there was more to the story that Alice felt compelled to share.
“I asked mother how you knew everything. And she said love was how you knew. That thanks to love, you didn’t have to tell each other everything.”
* * *
A.,
I’m sorry I had to leave so suddenly. I received a message that my niece had taken ill and I had to return to my family immediately. I sincerely would like to continue the discussions we began prior to my departure.
Your servant in every way,
R.
R.,
I’m sorry to hear of your niece’s illness and hope she recovers speedily. We will soon return to London. Sera and Bridget have not been home since their departure last year for the Continent, and they are eager to return to the city, despite its being an unfashionable time of year. I will happily continue our discussion, if you are still inclined.
Your eager correspondent,
A.
* * *
A.,
My inclinations are stronger than ever.
R.