Verity glanced at the small gold watch broach pinned to her bodice. Then she studied the silent, expectant faces of the children. What was ten minutes in the grand scheme of things? Was this not precisely the sort of rigid thinking of her former governesses who had made her itch to put amphibians in their beds?
“Go on, then. You have almost uniformly been perfectly wonderful. I shall see you tomorrow, then. Oh, and”—she smiled—“whoever left this lovely welcoming gift for my first day”—she sent a pointed glance toward a carrot-topped boy in the third row before she withdrew an enormous lizard-like creature from a desk drawer using a handkerchief—“my mother once suggested to me that Great Crested Newts prefer ponds to governess’s beds. And I do believe they like desk drawers even less. So please return him to his watering hole if you will.” She placed the newt in a box on the desk as the boys laughed and made ready to leave. The guilty party sheepishly removed the animal on his way out with the rest of them.
Verity quickly gathered her affairs and the lesson plan that required a bit of revision, and was ready to leave when a sound alerted her to the entrance of a young boy of eight or nine. Tom, was it? He was a little too thin, and she already had a plan for tackling that problem.
“Your ladyship?” he asked shyly, sidling up to her desk.
“Yes?”
“Me brover John and—”
“
My
brother John,” she corrected.
“Pardon, ma’am, but John be
me
brover.”
She wanted to laugh, but could not muster the energy. “Yes?”
“Well, we be needed for hayin’ on the morrow. But John and me, we—”
“John and
I
.” She could not let it go.
He scratched his head. “Uh, well, I dunno what your ladyship and me brover did, but John and me wrote this for ye since ye seem so fond of them poems, ye do. Pardon me, yer ladyship.”
He placed a rumpled piece of paper on the old desk and dashed out the door, without taking his leave properly.
She picked up the paper.
Yer ladyship be so kind.
Yer ladyship be so smart.
Yer ladyship be so pretty.
Yer ladyship like funnin’.
Yer ladyship be a grate teacher.
Thank ye fer teachin’ us brats.
For some stupid reason her eyes welled. How maudlin she could be at times. It was not as if she hadn’t received gratitude from the less fortunate in the county. Why, she and her sisters had been delivering food baskets to the needy for as long as she could remember.
But this was different, she realized with sudden clarity.
This was helping the less fortunate build a potential better life for them in the future versus pure charity.
“Are you crying?”
Verity looked up to find Lady Mary Haverty in the doorway. The former smiled. “Yes, I fear I am.”
“But teachers aren’t allowed to cry.”
“I know. That’s why I highly doubt I’ll make it a week before I am either sacked or bundled up and placed in an asylum.”
Mary laughed, and once again Verity was reminded that there was literally not another lady on Earth who was as strikingly lovely as she, with her gleaming dark russet locks, and impossibly elegant face and form, without a single defect.
“What are you doing here—” They both began the same sentence and then stopped to laugh. Verity rushed forward finally to grasp the other lady in her arms. There was a lovely sort of relief when in the presence of a confidante after a drought of companionship.
Verity took a long look at Mary. “Let me gather my things, and then shall we go to Boxwood? Do please say you will come for a visit. A good long one.”
“Well, I am not too proud to admit it is precisely what I had hoped you might offer. You can imagine my surprise when I asked the smithy for confirmation that you were, indeed, at Boxwood as I had heard, but the man pointed to the schoolhouse.”
Verity smiled. “I suspect I am the last of my sisters you would expect to find in a schoolroom.”
Mary’s laugh was a thing of feminine beauty. She shook her head. “Absolutely!”
That was the thing about Mary. She might be brutally honest, but she was so witty and kindhearted that no lady of good character could not help but like her.
“So,” Verity began uncertainly, “I had thought you were ensconced in Scotland.” She dared not say more.
Mary’s chin rose a fraction of an inch. “I would be delighted to accept your invitation to stay on. Just a dab of a visit. I’m not too proud to admit I am in a most perplexing state.”
“Well, that makes two of us,” Verity said ruefully.
Not a quarter hour later it was all arranged. Mary’s affairs were sent on to the estate, while the ladies independently rode to Boxwood. They even raced the last furlong, which made Verity love Mary all the more. How could such grace and elegance also ride like a banshee? It simply was not fair.
Then again, was not life ever fair? How many times would she have to learn that lesson?
In a cozy study in front of a spare fire, meant only to chase the barest hint of coolness in the summer night’s air, the two ladies reconvened after Mary had taken a race victory lie down.
“So, are you ever going to tell me why you are not in Scotland, Mary?”
“Of course. But first you must tell me news of your brother and the other members of the royal entourage. Where are they? The
Morning Post
was filled with . . . with drivel.”
Verity bit her lip. “Well, the thing of it is . . .” And within a quarter hour Mary was apprised of the details of James’s catastrophic non-wedding morning. But Verity was just not ready to confide her own disaster-in-the-making.
“Well, I know it’s not correct of me to allow this,” Mary began. “But I think it was the unspoken thought of most of the ton that Candover’s wedding of the century would have been the greatest
mistake
of the century. Although I will admit, quite selfishly, that it works out very well for me.”
Verity stared at her. “Why?”
“All of London is so focused on the ruckus that the upper crust will be entirely uninterested in my sad story.”
Verity waited patiently.
“The MacGregor is dead.”
“
Dead
?”
“The day before I arrived.”
“Lord, Mary . . . Was he murdered?”
“You always had the most vivid imagination, dearest.” Mary shook her head. “Didn’t you used to weave the most fantastic stories about jungle cats mating with zebras when you were a child?”
“Cheetahs and panthers,” Verity replied with a sly look. “But they never mated. They merely flirted.”
“Indeed,” Mary added, nodding. “Quite provocative for a young lady.”
“But what of MacGregor? Oh, I’m so sorry, Mary. But we all understood him to be a virile man in his prime.”
“He succumbed to a sudden lung fever the day before I arrived for our wedding in the Highlands.”
“Oh, Mary.”
The great beauty glanced toward the lengthening shadows reflected from the window. “It’s all right, Verity. I’ve had a long carriage ride to reconcile myself to the fact. I believe he would have been a good husband, even if he was a stranger. But I seem to be walking under a cloud of ill luck. I was dreadfully sorry for his family, who adored him. I stayed for a week—for the burial, but no longer. I felt like an imposter in a house full of proper mourners. So now I’m eventually for London where I shall wear mourning gowns and decline invitations for the required period. It suits me perfectly, actually, as you can imagine.”
“I have a far better idea,” Verity began. “I’m positively begging you to remain here with me. You cannot go to Town. You know it would be unbearable for you. Lord and Lady Ha—” Verity stopped herself, horrified she had almost referred to Mary’s recent deep heartache.
“It’s all right, Verity. You can say the name.” Mary’s mouth formed a lovely smile but her emerald eyes did not show a hint of happiness.
“Lord and Lady Hadrien are in London, just returned from their honeymoon.”
“I had guessed,” Mary said stiffly, with that same determined smile. “But truly I am fully recovered, Verity.”
Her stunning friend’s visage spoke of the opposite.
“I refuse to be bitter. It’s very simple really. What I thought we had formed was not genuine after all. It was mere illusion, nothing more. I know I’m lucky. And far better off without him. Hadrien sold himself for a price.” She looked down at her hands pleated in her lap in front of her. “But eventually he will learn the cost. I pity him, really, Verity. I very much doubt he will find happiness as the lapdog of a very rich older lady. And her grand estate is far from the glittering lights of Town he prefers.”
After a long silence, Verity asked her softly, “I never knew precisely what happened. Hope and Faith didn’t breathe a word.”
“I shall tell you, then,” Mary continued, studying the hem of her simple black mourning gown. “Hadrien never formally announced our engagement as promised. Slowly, and painfully, but most assuredly, he disappeared from my life—still privately declaring his deep love for me on the rare occasion I would see him. I later heard rumors that all the while he was secretly corresponding with the widowed countess. You know the rest.”
“I wish there was a word worse than ‘devil’ for that is what he is. I do hope you never question yourself for he duped us all.” Verity reached for Mary’s hand and squeezed it gently with affection.
“Don’t worry, dearest, I refuse to become bitter, you see. And now I’ve had more than a week to take a decision and yet again a new path,” Mary said, the barest hint of a smile forming on her face finally.
“Indeed. What is your plan, pray tell?”
“We both of us are in need of husbands, are we not?”
“And why would you suggest I am in need of . . .” Mary Haverty was usually the most brilliant schemer but—
“A letter from Hope reached me before I left the Highlands. She wrote that she and your sisters were leaving for a house party at the Duke of Kress’s crumbling landmark in Cornwall—all ordered there by the Prince Regent. But she also noted cryptically that you alone returned to Derbyshire by direction of your brother. It made little sense to me. You and your sisters walk lock-step. And then I wondered”— Mary examined her closely—“why Abshire was not ordered south with the rest of the entourage, too. Surely this is some stupid misunderstanding. Your brother is more of a tyrant than my father used to be.”
“He’s on a fool’s errand, I assure you.”
Mary looked at her expectantly.
Verity hesitated.
“You’re not going to violate the golden rule of intimate friendship, Verity, are you? Because truly I’m not certain I will hold up under the strain of the guilt I might feel, attempting to wheedle information you do not want to impart.”
And with that, the veil of secrecy came crashing down, and for the first time in a very long time, Verity felt the relief of confiding that she had awakened to find Rory Lennox in her bed.
Mary looked at her transfixed. “But do you love him?”
“Of course not!”
Those sly green eyes, which were not at all spring pea in color, deduced otherwise. “How long have you been in love with him?”
Verity exhaled heavily. “Far before cheetahs began preying on panthers.”
Mary chuckled. “Does he know?”
“Of course not. Look, the truth of the matter is that while I might have had a
tendre
for him when I was much younger, then I grew up. And I have seen enough of life to know that an on-the-shelf spinster will not find happiness with a charming rake.”
“Thank the Lord you’re so sensible, Verity. More sensible than I.”
“All I know is that I cannot marry him. It would be unbearable to live the rest of my life beside a man who wed me against his will. And it’s beside the point. I decided long ago that I would most likely never marry. And much as James blusters on and on about marrying his sisters off and offering staggering dowries as inducement, he has already agreed to Hope and Faith’s request that they end their annual suffering through another Season. They are to remove to his estate in the Lake District this autumn.”
“Your feelings are perfectly reasonable,” Mary agreed.
Verity rushed from her seat and knelt on the hearth to accept the arms Mary offered. “Finally, someone who understands. I’m so tired of the false hope and encouragement offered by other females.”
“You misunderstand, Verity. Your sensibilities are understandable, but you might have to reconsider. I know you would not ever do anything to hurt the future chances of any of your sisters. If a breath of scandal floats to your corner, you know very well it might tarnish their eligibility even with their immense dowries. Since we are in similar but different situations, I believe we must do what I suggested. We must find proper husbands in very short order despite your previous vow. And I have devised a strategy that will ensure that we find gentlemen who will fulfill all our requirements—love not being one of them. In your case, we will find someone who will offer you the protection of his name but not
intimate
presence in your life, if that is what you truly wish.”
Verity sighed inwardly. She could not tell Mary Haverty why she had no desire to marry anyone in her lifetime. There was only one soul on earth who knew the most important reasons. Her brother.
But it was time to face facts. She should prepare for the worst. If gossip about that night in Carleton House began filtering into Derbyshire from Town, she should have a suitable gentleman willing to agree to a marriage of convenience—long on reserve and respect, and short on any sort of intimacy. Her dowry would go a long way as an enticement. And the search would be less awful if she did it with Mary. “You said you had a plan.”
“I do indeed.” Mary pulled a note from her black string reticule and unfolded it carefully. “It’s so simple and brilliant I should have employed this method my first season. Memorize this list of questions. When is the next large social event in the neighborhood?”
Verity accepted the proffered list but didn’t examine it. “Tomorrow night. The Talmadges’ ball to honor the arrival of Abshire. What have you in mind?”