“Tabitha Elise, what are you doing!”
“Meeting yoursomeone special.” Tabitha wiggled her brows suggestively.
Graham’s cheeks turned cherry red, and the whole thing wasalmostworth it except that I wasin bedand Graham wasright there!
I touched my hair.Still in curling papers.
“Get out—!” we all said in tandem.
“—of Miss Lane’s roomat once!” Graham bellowed before stepping back and out of sight.
Tabitha looked heavenward and slid off my bed like honey pouring out of a pot. “I shall come again,” she whispered, taking her time to straighten herself. “I will speak to him about manners and courtship, and this time he’ll get it right. I think you and I shall be fast friends.”
Reeling with embarrassment, I watched her skip away.
Mariah closed and locked the door, then rushed to my side. “Are you all right? I’ve heard stories about that girl belowstairs.”
I touched my cheeks, my temples. “I should like to hear them. I cannot decide if she’s a jester or a menace.”
“Both.” Mariah pulled out a blue cotton day dress and rummaged around in my trunk as I slid from under my covers. “But most of all, she’s trouble, downstairs at least.”
Mariah helped me dress, telling me everything she’d learned about Tabitha’s waywardness, how she often stole treats from the kitchen and tracked in dirt and sand fromoutside. The worst, perhaps, was her hidden collection of dead sea creatures that the servants would find in the most awful of places.
“Their maid Harriet said she opened Miss Tabitha’s armoire and found a large rotting crab hidden on the bottom shelf.”
“Good heavens.” I half laughed, until the thought of how a rotting crab must have smelled sobered me.
After dressing, I took a quarter of an hour to write down the morning’s events in my notebook. The adamancy of that little girl, the stealth. Papa would have been mortified had I ever behaved that way as a child. We seldom had visitors when I was young. Papa had been an only child too, so our little family stayed small. Interacting with mother’s family proved too painful, so apart from an obligatory visit once or twice a year, he avoided them.
The more I wrote, the lighter I felt. That girl with her wide-toothed grin. Completely unaffected by life or the opinions of others. She seemed so comfortable in her own skin, so carefree and open with her thoughts. She did not, for one moment, change who she was, how she spoke, or what she said according to whom she was addressing.
Childhood ignorance, to be sure. But when did one outgrow the ability to speak freely, openly, without thought of what might be lost or gained in the exchange?
The more I thought on it, the more I adored that little girl, properly behaved or not. The more I felt a sense of protectiveness over her fierce, free spirit. I did not want her to grow wise to manipulation like her brother.
Speaking of whom ...
I sighed, stepping out onto the balcony of my room.Birds cawed from a distance, swooping down to the water and back up again. A person could get used to this view. I leaned forward on the balustrade where sunshine warmed the cool stone. I was excited to go down to the shore, be near the water and just ... sit. But I also felt a rising anxiety at spending the afternoon with Graham, who’d no doubt fill my ears with nonsense and ruin the entire outing. Best to get it over with. Perhaps I could sneak down another time alone.
I peeked my head around my bedroom door, finding the way empty and quiet and safe enough to depart through. But I’d no sooner stepped foot in the foyer, when—
“Oh, Miss Lane.” I turned to find Mrs. Everett at my right. Her cheeks were rosy, her whole demeanor flustered. She wrung her hands together. “Miss Lane, I am mortified to hear that my daughter Tabitha intruded on you this morning.”
“Please, think nothing of it,” I assured her. “Honestly, after I realized she wasn’t going to murder me in my bed, she was quite entertaining.”
“She is wild and cares far too little for the opinions of others,” Ginny said, following her mother out of the drawing room. “She was very excited to meet you.”
I raised a brow. “She seems to have quite the imagination.” I still hadn’t recovered from the poor girl’s misconstrued idea of who I was, and especially who I was to Graham.
His heavy footsteps carried from a room around the staircase. “Mother,” he said, breathless, as though he’d run back and forth a hundred times and still had not prepared himself for the day. He looked fresh out of a bath, and I wondered, if, when he’d come upon me with Tabitha, he’d been just out of bed as well. Heat flooded my cheeks. He fretted with both hiscravat and his damp, wavy hair as he stepped into the foyer, all musk and citrusy. “Ginny. Miss Lane.” His eye caught on my notebook and stayed there. He frowned, then bowed to the three of us, stern and serious. “A thousand apologies, Miss Lane—”
“Unnecessary,” I muttered, suddenly unable to meet his gaze. He’d seen me in mynightgown, with my hair still in curling papers! How would we get through this day, let alone five more, if every encounter was as tense and rigid as this one?
Graham frowned, holding his hands behind his back.
“Would you like to break your fast?” his mother asked me gently. “We’ve a small spread laid out in the dining room.”
“Or if you’re ready to explore Brighton’s coastline, we can leave now,” Graham said. He waited like a butler at attention.
