Arabella wished as she had for the past two years that she had not stopped growing when she was still such an unimpressive height. She was perhaps a little too plump too, though she supposed it was rather unfair to herself to make comparisons between her own shape and Frances’. Mama was always careful to assure her that she was not plump, but merely well-rounded and short of stature. And she could not yet compare herself to Jemima, who was still as thin and shapeless as a rake and who frequently and loudly bewailed the fact that she would never be any different. But Jemima was already taller than she. And her hair was too thick, Arabella thought. It was quite a becoming shade of dark brown, as Mama kept pointing out soothingly, but it was very difficult to make it hold any style.
Arabella had no great craving to be a beauty. One in a family was blessing enough, she had concluded with great good sense more than a year before. And since she had not started to consider suitors and marriage until the viscount’s startling letter had arrived more than two weeks before, she had had no particular desire to be attractive to gentlemen. She had no great wish to be so even now. After all, the viscount was an older man who would not care for such things as a girl’s looks. He was marrying her out of kindness only. And she had no desire to attract his admiration. She would marry him because it was necessary to do so and because she would thereby be released from the nasty chore of finding herself a husband within the next few years.
But she did wish that she looked less childish. She was eighteen years old, fully a woman. And yet she looked like a child, younger even than Jemima, she sometimes thought in despair. She was small and plump—her mother’s protestations to the contrary never convinced her—and her round face accentuated by her thick hair did nothing to reveal to a stranger that she was a woman of mature years already. To a man of close to Papa’s age she was going to look like a veritable babe.
Arabella sighed. Perhaps she should have been more insistent when Mama had recommended the blue sash that she not wear it. It really did make her look as if she had just stepped out of the nursery.
“There, my love,” Lady Astor was saying to Frances, patting her shoulder, “you are showing great fortitude, as I knew you would. Put your handkerchief away; your eyes are quite dry again. His lordship will be here at any moment, and it would not do at all for him to see you cry, even though it is Bella he is to marry. He will think that you and Bella have quarreled over him, and that would not give him a favorable impression of our family.”
“Dear Bella,” Frances said, her voice quavering and her eyes looking suspiciously bright again. “His lordship will see immediately how dearly we all love you. He must see that we have not sacrificed you but that you have sacrificed yourself entirely of your own free will. Oh, I do hope he is not quite bald or white-haired or toothless.”
“Gracious, my love!” her mother exclaimed. “Papa was none of those things. Papa was quite a handsome figure of a man to his dying day.” She removed her own handkerchief from her pocket and dabbed at her eyes. “Bella, my love, I think it would be as well to remember not to swing your legs like that when his lordship arrives. It does not look quite ladylike.”
“Yes, Mama,” Arabella said, holding her legs still immediately. “Perhaps I should carry the stool over here to rest my feet on. Else I shall surely forget.”
The door to the sitting room opened with a sudden crash and a tall, thin young girl in muslin and wide pink sash remarkably like Arabella’s rushed into the room, auburn ringlets bouncing against the sides of her head. “Mama, he is come,” she said. “In a strange carriage. Two men. I think one is a servant. They are in the hallway even now. I came down from the schoolroom as you said I might even though Miss Roberts said I should wait until I was summoned. But if I had done that, Mama, you might have forgotten and I would not have seen his lordship meet Bella. He did not look a very old man from upstairs. He does not stoop.”
“Gracious, child!” her mother said. “The man is not old. Merely Papa’s age or close to it. Straighten your sash and sit down quietly. Quietly, mind! Young ladies still in the schoolroom are to be seen and not heard, remember. And don’t forget your curtsy in your eagerness to stare when his lordship is announced. Frances, my love, you are not about to cry again, are you? And, Bella, dear, don’t swing your legs. Jemima, before you sit down, carry the stool across to Bella, if you please.”
Viscount Astor felt almost instant relief after he had been announced and had made his entry into the drawing room of Parkland Manor. For one thing, Lady Astor displayed perfectly civilized manners as she crossed the room to greet him, hand extended, and curtsied as she welcomed him to his new home. And the three younger females behind her appeared suitably well-bred. Each had risen to her feet and was curtsying low to him.
His relief was mainly attributable, though, to the fact that he had seen his future bride during one sweeping glance around the room before focusing his attention on his hostess. And to say that he was relieved was perhaps an understatement. She was a beauty of the first order, with exquisite features and delicate blond coloring and a figure to satisfy even the most exacting male’s dreams.
Her two sisters were much younger and quite unremarkable. The report he had had of their ages must have erred.
“But there must be some mistake, my lord,” Lady Astor was saying. She was looking somewhat bewildered. “You cannot possibly be my late husband’s cousin whom I met many years ago. Why, you must have been in leading strings at the time.”
He bowed. “You must be referring to my father, ma’am,” he said. “It is sometimes confusing to share the same name as one’s father. My mother insisted on naming me Geoffrey after him. You were not informed, it seems, of the fact that my father passed away four years ago.”
“How distressing your loss must have been for you,” she said, clasping her hands against her bosom. “But of course I remember that your poor dear papa had a son. And you are now Lord Astor, sir. I am delighted to make your acquaintance and only sorry for the ancient quarrel that has kept our families apart for so many years. My girls are as eager as I to renew the family acquaintance. May I present my daughters to you, my lord?”
Lord Astor assured her that he would be honored. He bowed in turn to Miss Frances Wilson, Miss Arabella, and Miss Jemima. And finally he took a seat close to the beauty of the family. He was not disappointed at his closer scrutiny of her face and figure. She had beautiful, trusting blue eyes—when he glimpsed them. Most of the time she kept them modestly lowered. But even so there was a great deal to admire. Her dark eyelashes were thick and long and fanned her blushing cheeks most becomingly.
She did not speak a great deal. But who would demand conversation from a female who had so much to offer the eye instead? As he sipped his tea, Lord Astor could picture to himself already the sensation she would create when he presented her to society as his wife. He could imagine the pleasure he would derive from taking her to a fashionable modiste and decking her out in the latest styles and fabrics.
Lord Astor conversed almost exclusively with his hostess. She tried to include one of the younger girls in the conversation—the tiny one with the masses of dark hair who sat on the window seat swinging her legs whenever she spoke—but the viscount did not give the girl a great deal of his attention. Or the other one, in fact—the thin auburn-haired one who stared mutely at him throughout tea. He did wonder briefly, as he had several times during the past few weeks, whether he would be expected to take his wife’s mother and sisters back to London with him. But he suspected now that it would be unnecessary to do so. The two younger girls must be too young to make their come-outs yet.
He found, though, as he continued the conversation with Lady Astor, that he no longer cared greatly what good manners would compel him to do on the matter. So vast was his relief to find that after all he was to have a lovely and refined bride that he would have been prepared to drag along to London a dozen sisters if it had been necessary.
Lady Astor rose to her feet eventually and offered to escort him to his room—the master bedchamber, she was hasty to assure him—where he might wish to change from his traveling clothes before dinner.
He bowed to the beauty and her sisters and followed his hostess from the room, well-satisfied with his first hour at Parkland Manor. For the remainder of the day, he decided, he would confine his conversation to polite topics. Time enough tomorrow to have private talk with Lady Astor concerning his coming nuptials and the future of herself and her two remaining daughters.
Chapter 2
ARABELLA was sitting on the lawn north of the stables, playing with George, her collie. He was not allowed in the house because he gave Frances the sneezes. But he certainly did not suffer from lack of human love. Arabella spent every spare moment out-of-doors, and George could usually be seen loping along in her wake or dashing on ahead of her. Today, though, she was sitting, scratching his ears, ignoring his frequent invitations to get up and romp. She did not want to be seen from the house.
She had left Frances crying in her mother’s sitting room. Her sister had been unwilling or unable to say a word but had merely wilted gracefully onto a sofa and buried her face in her lace handkerchief. Mama, who had summoned Arabella to inform her that Lord Astor had requested a private audience later in the morning, suggested that perhaps Arabella should leave again. Perhaps Frances would speak to her mama alone.
But Arabella knew what had upset Frances. She was weeping even more bitterly than she had during the previous two weeks, knowing that the sacrifice Arabella had so cheerfully agreed to make had now turned into a bitter sacrifice indeed. Frances had guessed that the prospect of wedding the viscount was far more daunting to her sister now than it had been before, and her tender heart had set her to crying again.
Arabella had felt almost like crying herself since the afternoon before, except that she would not really know how to go about deriving any comfort from sobs and tears. From her limited experience with both, she would only make herself feel worse. Sobs caused a sore chest, tears a blocked nose. And both, of course, caused shiny red blotches on face and neck. No, she would not cry. And she would not complain or otherwise show her mother and sisters how insupportable her fate had now become. She could not burden them further with the knowledge that she now wished it were Frances who had been chosen as Viscount Astor’s bride.
How could she possibly marry Lord Astor? He was not at all the comfortable older man of her expectations. He was young—surely no more than ten years her senior at the most. And—worse—he was a handsome man. He was not tall, not very much above average height, in fact. But he was slim and graceful and had a manly, good-looking face and shining dark hair. Quite the sort of man who would turn female heads even in a large assembly of gentlemen.
And worst of all—oh, far worse than his youth or his good looks—he was a confident, experienced man of the world. At least, he had given every indication of being both during the afternoon and evening of the day before. He had conversed with Mama on a wide variety of topics and had told them a good deal about London and the Continent. And there was an air about him—Arabella could not put it into words exactly. There was something about him that suggested knowledge of the world and experience with its workings.
There was that way he had of looking at Frances, for example, as if he knew and appreciated her even from so slight an acquaintance and was confident that she must return his regard. And there was the way he had of not looking at herself. She did not even exist for him. She had very clearly been dismissed as an uninteresting child of no account. Although she had spoken ten times as much as Frances the day before, she would swear that he had not taken note of a word she had said or afforded her more than an occasional glance.
