Arabella shrugged. “Arabella has more syllables.”
The stepfather in question, James Cavendish, the Duke of Middlewich, was just then coming into the room, and he was delighted by the news. “Shall I call you Lovelock then, like we had gone to school together?”
Arabella laughed. “No, Middlewich, you must call me what Mama does. Arabella. Besides, I won’t be a Lovelock forever.”
She saw her mother and her stepfather exchange looks.
Really, they had to get used to seeing her not as a child, but as a woman. She would be eighteen next year, plenty old enough to get married, to change her name.
And old enough to know that she wanted to change it to Mrs. Alasdair Andrews.
She had waited all summer for an invitation from her sister Harry or her brother-in-law Thomas, the Earl Drake, to visit them at their country estate Sommerleigh. She had written letters to both, hinting at her desire to visit.
She thought once at Sommerleigh, she might feign an illness. And then Dr. Alasdair Andrews, the local physician, would have to be sent for. She would wear her prettiest nightdress. She would have her golden hair down, around her shoulders and flowing down her back, because what lady wore hair pins to bed?
He would come and lay his head on her chest to listen to her heart—oh, the thrill she would feel to see the shiny waves of his auburn hair when he bent his head down, his ear and maybe even his cheek against her bosom. Would he know, by listening to her heart, how she felt about him?
And next his hands would touch her, all while he looked at her with his green eyes, with perhaps the left eye hidden by that single lock of dark-red hair that she had seen droop down when she had met him. That lock that he had pushed back while speaking to her. And oh, those beautiful, long, strong fingers pressing against her. Oh, where would her ailment be? Her stomach, she thought, some pain. And he would touch her stomach through her thin nightdress. A firm but gentle touch, she thought.
And then the thought of his devastating hands, perhaps under the nightdress, made her throb in a place that was quite a bit lower than her stomach.
But the invitation to summer at Sommerleigh never came.
Her mother, newly married herself, said of Harry and Thomas, “They are on their honeymoon, I should think they will not want visitors now.”
Honeymoon? What was her mother on about? Arabella’s sister Harry and her husband Thomas had been married for over a year! Really, these married people—Mary and David, her mother and Middlewich included—were so tiresome.
She had met Alasdair only once. In June. In the study of the bishop of London in St. Paul’s Cathedral. This was just after her time in Cornwall and Bath with her half sister Mary and her husband, David. Her mother had called her back to London to tell her that she, Catherine, was marrying the Duke of Middlewich. And that there was a baby on the way. In fact, the baby was coming very soon.
Arabella had accompanied Catherine and Middlewich to the cathedral to discuss their nuptial banns with the bishop. Of course, the required three weeks of banns had turned out to be much too long for the groom-to-be and he had applied to the Archbishop of Canterbury and paid for a special license since he was, after all, a duke now. Her mother and Middlewich were then able to have a lovely garden wedding the following week and Arabella wore her new rose-pink dress.
She had hoped the doctor might be invited to the wedding. Yes, in part so he could see how pretty she was but mostly so she could seehim, talk tohim, flirt withhim. But he was not invited. After all, he was Thomas and Harry’s friend, not her mother’s, not Middlewich’s. She tried very hard not to sulk on the wedding day and instead be happy for her mother and Middlewich.
But how would she ever see Alasdair again? The meeting at the cathedral had been entirely accidental. The doctor had accompanied her sister Harry to help clear up a misunderstanding between Harry and Harry’s husband Thomas that somehow involved the bishop. That was all Arabella was told. Arabella didn’t really understand that part, and her mother had declined to explain further, saying she thought it was likely a private matter. Arabella had later, after the wedding, applied to Middlewich on the question, and he had said that she had surely better ask Harry, the Countess Drake, about it herself.
But one didn’t really ask her sister Harry personal questions like that. The answer would be confusing and not at all accurate. Perhaps she might ask Thomas at some future time.
And anyway, the ostensible reason why they—all of them, Arabella, her mother Catherine, Middlewich, Harry, Thomas, Alasdair Andrews—were gathered at the cathedral was hardly the point.
The point, of course, was that it had been how she had come to meet Alasdair. It had been meant to be.
To think that she had almost not come with her mother and Middlewich, imagining it would be rather boring. And in truth, she was a little envious of her mother and her mother’s obvious infatuation with Middlewich. Not that Arabella harbored feelings for Middlewich. Actually, he seemed too young for Arabella but just right for her mother. How funny was that?
No, she just was jealous of love. In general. Mary, Harry, her mother. As always, she was last in everything. When was she going to meet him? The not-stupid man of her dreams?
And then she did.
She and Alasdair spoke together for ten minutes in total. Oh, how she cherished every single one of those minutes. She would lie in bed at night and carefully extract from her memory each exchange that had passed between them, turning them over in her mind, like an old miser polishing his gold coins.
The discussion of the weather. His answers to her questions about his burr. His lovely Scottish burr. And he mentioned his home village of Bailebrae, far in the north, in Caithness County. “The lowest and flattest of the Highlands,” he said. Then he asked her if she pursued mathematics like her sister Harry, the Countess Drake, and when she said she did not, he seemed relieved. He wanted to know more about her interests. She wanted to confess impulsively that at the moment she was chiefly interested inhim. But she had not. Instead, she mentioned her love for the works of Mr. Walter Scott. Oh, the doctor had not read any of his novels or poems? But he must. Arabella could give him many recommendations.
And, yes, before they had spoken, he had taken her hand and bowed low over it. He was not wearing gloves and that was when she had seen his hands. Oh, how she wished she had not been wearing gloves herself. But how glad she was that she had taken extra care with her dress and hair that day. Her mother was always saying that one might never know whom one might meet on an errand.
Yes, Arabella thought gleefully, one might never know. One might even meet one’s future husband. And when she had seen Alasdair’s dimples flash for the first time, she had known, for certain, that she had.
But the weeks of summer went by with no opportunity to travel to Sommerleigh, and she could think of no other way to meet Alasdair again. Arabella fretted and embroidered another tablecloth for her trousseau trunk and some things for her future new baby brother or sister as well.
Her mother’s confinement was to be in September. Yes, her mother and Middlewich had only been married for three months. And yes, she understood what that meant even before her mother spoke to her about it. She was not a child. After all, Mary had schooled Arabella on that beach in Cornwall. She understood what the baby meant about her mother. That her mother had laid down with Middlewich before the wedding. In fact—Arabella made a swift calculation—her mother had laid down with Middlewich during Christmas week when they had all been together with Harry and Thomas at Sommerleigh.
