"you don't have to marry anyone you don't fancy, Diana. The countess cannot force you. And you know you will always have a home here with Mama and me. Besides, you proved once before that you have a mind of your own. No one expected you to marry Ingram—ourselvesincluded— when you had so many gentlemen of rank and fortune dangling after you. But you did marry him, and I have to admit now that you made a good choice.A decent man, Ingram.Too bad he didn't look after himself better when he caught that chill."
Diana's eyes filled with tears, and Lady Winters looked reproachfully at her husband.
"You are right, Papa," Diana said, getting to her feet. "I do not have to accept any of the suitors my mother-in-law chooses for me. And perhaps she will change her mind. Or perhaps there will be no one eligible there. It is a family party, after all."
She crossed the room to kiss him on the cheek and turned to hug her mother. But the headache persisted as she climbed the stairs to her bed. And it was not helped by the concern of Bridget, who tiptoed about her room but forgot not to slam doors and drawers, and who whispered but forgot to stop doing so.
Diana sometimes thought that Bridget must have been born talking and not have stopped since. It was easy most of the time to be entertained and even amused by what the maid said, and it had become a habit to confide in her. But the whispering on this particular evening was more irritating than a repetition of the screeching in the pantry the day before would have been.
Bridget had come to the parsonage to cook for Teddy before his marriage. When he had brought his wife there, the girl had confided to Diana her lifelong ambition to be a lady's maid. Since her cooking left something to be desired, Diana had quickly promoted—or demoted—her to the position of her own personal maid and had done the cooking herself. Teddy could not afford to hire another servant, though his parents constantly pressed him to allow them to hire a whole contingent for him.
Diana refused Bridget's suggestion that she take some laudanum to help her sleep. She hated to take any medicine except when absolutely necessary.
"I have to be up early," she explained. "I don't want to have a thick head, Bridget."
"A thick head might be better than a sorehead, mum, Lord love you," Bridget whispered. "But there, youwasever stubborn. Wouldn't take a thing when the poor dear reverend passed on, you wouldn't, though everyone else about you was having the vapors and dosing up all week before the funeral."
' 'I wish I didn't have to go." Diana pressed a warm hand to her forehead and closed her eyes. "They are so very kind, Bridget.So very affectionate.And so very overbearing.They were never reconciled to the Reverend Ingram's taking a country parsonage when they had hoped for something much grander for him. Now they want to make it up to me. They want to arrange a splendid match for me. I don't
want another husband—not yet anyway. And when I do, I want to be free to choose him myself."
"But it is time you was enjoying yourself again, mum," Bridget whispered."You so young still and so pretty.And always so quiet and so dull at the parsonage. P'raps there will be somebody there for you, mum—some handsome gent what will sweep you off your feet."
Diana groaned. "Sometimes, Bridget," she said, "you are no help at all."
But she did want to marry again, she thought after her maid had finally tiptoed from the room and slammed the door firmly behind her. She was three-and-twenty and burning for some gaiety in her life. It was just that the feeling seemed so disloyal.
She had been exceedingly fond of Teddy. She had married him for all the wrong reasons—she had acknowledged that long ago, soon after their marriage. She had been so very young and naive when her parents had taken her to London for a Season, and quite alarmed by her own success. She had not known what to do with it. Fashionable gentlemen had terrified her. She had never known how to look at them, what to say to them, how to behave toward them. So she had frozen up and watched
in dismay as they became worshipful and even more ardent in their admiration.
Teddy had been different.Unworldly, unfashionable, bookish, unhandsome.She had felt very safe with him, very comfortable. And so she had accepted without hesitation his offer when it came.
It was not a good reason for marriage. But she had made it work. She had often been bored at the parsonage, and she had often looked at Teddy and wished he could be more romantic, more amorous, more—something. But he had been kind and affectionate and she had grown to love him. Not in the way she dreamed of loving a man, perhaps, but dreams were never reality anyway.
She had grown to love him dearly and had concentrated all her energies on making him comfortable. She had resolutely shut her mind to the boredom and tedium of her life.
Her world had been shattered by his untimely and quite unnecessary death. For a few months she had thought she would never stop crying. She had thought that the sun would never shine for her again, that nothing would ever happen again to give her the energy to live. Despite the invitation to make her home at Rotherham Hall, she had returned to her papa's house, taking Bridget with her, and had lived there
ever since.
If living were the right word.It had been a suspended life. She had worn black for Teddy inside and out. And somehow it had become a comfortable way of life. While part of her yearned for gaiety and a renewal of life, the other part clung to its cocoon. It was safer to remain inside it. It was less likely that she would have to experience again the pain of losing someone around whom her life had come to revolve.
But tomorrow she would be leaving for Rotherham Hall. She was to spend three weeks there with other members of the earl's family, celebrating his sixty-fifth birthday. It should have been safe. They were all family. But the countess had a strange definition of family. It consisted of far more than children and brothers and sisters, aunts, uncles, nephews, nieces, and cousins. People of quite remote connection
were considered family.
This house party was not safe at all. And the countess had openly admitted in a letter inviting—or summoning—Diana that she was going to find her a new husband.
It should have been laughable. After all, Diana had chosen her own first husband without any help from anyone at all, and had clung to her choice even when her parents had tried to talk her out of it. And she was three-and-twenty, a quite adult woman with a mind of her own.
But she knew the Countess of Rotherham. She was fond of her. How could she not be? Both the earl and the countess had doted on Teddy, and their love had extended to her when she had married him. But she knew that the countess was an incurable matchmaker. She had seen her in action on more than one occasion, but had never thought to be a victim herself one day. It was the countess's boast that she had never failed to bring together two people once her mind was set on a certain match. It was also her boast that not one of those marriages had ever turned out unhappily.
Diana had the feeling that her mother-in-law would be a formidable adversary.
And tomorrow it was all to begin. Out of her cocoon and into her mother-in-law's clutches.
Hence the headache.
