“Perhaps it is time that Lady Edith stepped from under her mother’s dragon wings,” she suggested. “All she needs is the support of a few friends to help her fly from the nest. I feel certain of it. Besides, there will be an ample number of marriageable gentlemen in attendance. If nothing else, you can put your matchmaking skills to use on her behalf.”
Clementine’s blue eyes lit up at the suggestion. “You must give me a list of all the suitable men. I’m certain I could find someone for her.”
Her friend was rather notorious for her matchmaking tendencies. The number of society marriages for which she was responsible continued to climb. And while Clementine remained unwed herself, Vivi knew she could not resist the chance to meddle in future courtships.
“There’s the spirit,” Vivi said. “We shall merely do our utmost to avoid Lady Featherstone.”
“Have you an abandoned, suitably Gothic hunting lodge we can lock her away in at Sherborne Manor?” Clementine asked hopefully.
Vivi chuckled, grateful for her friend’s presence and wit. Relieved to laugh. This—the sisterhood of her friends and the immense reward of a country house party that would become the talk of Society—was all she needed. Her foolish, unrequited love for Court had been extinguished by his absence. He could pack up his trunks and go back to Paris. Or better yet, some island in the middle of the sea, where he could promptly become stranded, never to dally with Parisian beauties ever again.
“I’m afraid not,” she told her friend, trying not to think of her husband or the rumored antics that had crushed her heart anew when the gossip had reached her.
Curse him. He had intruded on her thoughts once again.
Just as he was intruding on her sanctuary. When she had been dressing to leave for the train station, she had heard the telltale thumps and rustles of the servants settling him in to the chamber next door. Which reminded her. She was going to have to ask one of the footmen to nail boards over the door adjoining her chamber to Court’s. How to do so without causing untoward gossip?Hmm, she would have to think upon it.
Clementine sighed then. “Could we arrange for a highwayman to run away with heren routefrom the train station?”
Vivi shook her head, another much-needed laugh torn from her at her friend’s antics. “This isn’t the eighteenth century, dear.”
“Of course it isn’t.” Clementine gave her head a small, exaggerated toss that made the brunette wisps that had escaped her chignon in her travels bob. “If it were, we would all be wearing panniers and terrible wigs, and the gentlemen would go about in dreadful knee breeches and we’d be obligated to sigh over their manly calves. I cannot fathom how anyone survived that era. I once wore a wig for a masque ball, and I’ll never do it again. I was sweating a river by the time the night was over, and my head itched.”
“We are most fortunate,” Vivi agreed. “Although I’m not certain bustles were a fair trade for the panniers.”
“It is never a fair trade for women. We still don’t even have the vote,” Clementine grumbled.
“We are trying, however, which is what makes the work of the Lady’s Suffrage Society that much more important,” she asserted. “I’m a firm believer that if we are to advance our cause, we must win over the gentlemen in our lives first, and that is part of the reason I wished to hold this house party.”
The other reason was far more personal. Vivi hated being alone. Because when she was alone, she thought of Court, and when she thought of Court, the tiny broken fragments of her heart that still remained ached unbearably.
“Do you think Bradford will disapprove of your involvement?” Clementine asked.
Like so many things about her, Vivi’s involvement in the Lady’s Suffrage Society was a development that had occurred after Court had left. He knew nothing about it. The gentleman she had once believed him to be would have been proud of her efforts on behalf of women’s suffrage. But his actions had proven to her that she had never truly known him. And the austere stranger who had returned from his time abroad remained an even greater mystery to her.
“I don’t care if he does,” she said, and not without bitterness. “I don’t give a fig about what he thinks. I am my own woman, and I have been for the last year without him. I don’t need his approval. I never have.”
That was what she had been telling herself repeatedly ever since she had emptied a vase of flowers on him and left him standing in the great hall, shocked and dripping. She had hastened to the privacy of her chamber, abandoning her humiliatingly damp and soiled old dress for an elegant gold silk afternoon gown far more befitting of a duchess than the rags she had been wearing. Had she only known her errant husband would make a sudden return, she certainly would have been dressed to greet him. And she would have had a horse bucket at hand to dump on him instead of something as civilized as a vase.
“Huzzah, dearest friend. The Duke of Bradford can go for a swim in the Thames with leaden weights about his ankles after the deplorable manner in which he has treated you.” Clementine gave her arm a consoling pat. “Is he intending to remain for the house party, do you suppose?”
Determination made Vivi’s spine go straight. “Not if I can help it.”
CHAPTER4
His wife came charging into the room in a flurry of gold silk and outraged fire. She was breathtaking in her ire, the old, sodden skirts and endearing smear of dirt on her cheek of earlier nowhere to be found. Instead, she was every inch the regal duchess who had apparently taken Society by storm during the year of his travels. She bore no resemblance to the barefoot girl who had once raced after him and Percy in the meadow at her family’s country estate and who had effortlessly climbed apple trees by their sides.
“What are you doing in here?” she demanded coldly, stopping halfway across the chamber and pinning him with a glare that made her opinion of him desperately apparent.
He was no better than the horse dung in the street.
He held her gaze, thinking he had been foolish to hope he could return to her without the pain of the past interceding. Time had not erased the unpleasantness, nor could they undo what had already been done. And it was apparent that the Vivi who had begged him to stay was not the same woman as the icy goddess before him.
“I am doing what one does in a library,” he told her calmly.
In truth, he was touring his ancestral home, which had changed greatly while he had been away. There had been grumbling complaints from Mother in her letters, and yet Court hadn’t been prepared for the true extent of the transformation. Vivi’s hand was everywhere.
“Yes, but this ismylibrary,” she said pointedly. “And you are not welcome in it.”
