“After all,” her brother said. “We might not return until the end of July.”
July? Seven months in London? It seemed like such an endless stretch of time right now, but would it be long enough to find a wife for her brother?
And then the rush and the bother and the packing were done, and it was wondrous to be in London. It was all that her brother had promised her and more.
First, the town house. She had forgotten what a beautiful home it was. The sun-splashed cream-and-pink morning room with its striped wallpaper where her mother had done her correspondence. The elegant downstairs drawing room with its carved mahogany furniture and its still-life paintings of fruit and flowers she had pictured in her mind over the last dozen years. How good it was to see the tiny brushstroke details again for herself. And the small library across from the drawing room with deep leather wing chairs, just begging for one to sit down and get lost in a good book.
Her brother had been right to stay in town all these years. There were no bad feelings in this house. Instead, there were memories of playing in the small back garden, sitting in her mother’s lap in the morning room, running up the stairs to the nursery, chased by her brother, laughing merrily. After all, there is no lisp or stutter when you laugh.
In many ways, the London town house had always been more her mother’s house than her father’s. Perhaps that is why it felt so pleasant despite the ghost that ought to haunt the upstairs passageway.
And Lavinia was adapting well to town life. Caroline would slip out of the house with her at dawn. No ladies were up and about at that time. If seen, she would be mistaken for a servant and left alone. There had been a mild contretemps with the gardener over La using a bit of grass in the back garden at other times for her necessary functions, but Caroline had handled that easily. Her brother had made it clear she was the mistress here now, after all.
Edmund arranged for a modiste to call at the house to discuss her clothes. Yes, the modiste said, my lady could, of course, make do with the black mourning dresses she already had. But surely she might move to half-mourning now and get some dresses in gray or lavender? And in the latest fashion. And then, of course, they must plan for her Season, when she would be out of mourning entirely at the beginning of April.
Season? No, the modiste must have misunderstood. Caroline would have no Season. She would be thirty this month. But how to say that? She looked at her lady’s maid in desperation. Jones knew there was no need for ballgowns.
But Jones stayed as silent as her mistress.
The modiste went on. “Yes, I can see your reluctance, my lady. Your brother warned me you might be hesitant about new gowns with your father’s recent death. Well, the marquess has already paid for the dresses, so you might as well have some in colors you like.”
Caroline managed to point to some samples—this sedate sage for a day dress, this apple-green taffeta for a ball gown—and suffered her measurements to be taken.
“You are so tall, my lady. You will look elegant in anything,” the modiste said.
Caroline felt the pricking of tears in her eyes and had to turn away quickly. How soft she had become. So susceptible to compliments. Perhaps because she had heard so few for so long.
Good girl. So lovely. A baritone purr making her throb between her legs.
Shut up, she raged in her head, and after the modiste left, she dedicated herself to dusting all the perfectly clean trinkets from her girlhood which still sat on her dressing table. Then, shamefully, she opened the drawer where she had hidden Phineas’ shirt and looked at it and touched the weave of the linen with her fingertips.
The day after the appointment with the modiste, she went with her brother to an art exhibition at a gallery on Pall Mall.
“Is g-going to an exhibition p-p-proper?” she asked Edmund.
“Absolutely,” he said and assisted her into the carriage.
She knew every painting in Sudbury Manor intimately. She had spent hours looking at all of them. No, not all of them. Not the one of herself. She hated that one. That lie. That stupid dress, that overcurled and overdone hair, that smile. But all the rest of them she had memorized. The landscapes. The still-lifes. The portraits of the ancestors in their old-fashioned clothes and their square jaws like hers. What a pleasure it would be to see new paintings. She had already felt enormous delight in rediscovering the paintings of the town house.
Edmund was patient at the exhibition, standing behind her and holding his hat as she paused in front of each picture for long minutes, devouring them with her eyes.
There was a painting of a dark, storm-tossed sea, wreckage of a boat and human bodies afloat. She could not tear her gaze from it. She had never seen an ocean except in paintings, but with this picture she could feel the terrible power of the sea.
She knew Phineas had been in the Royal Navy when he was young, and he had faced the possibility of a tragedy like the one in this painting. A ship going down. And not just because of a storm but because the ship had been fired upon by the French. The vessel filling with water and then that water dragging him down into the deep. Horrible.
Horrible to think of him in harm’s way.
But why was she thinking of him at all?
After a long time, she went on to the next painting, a pretty picture of a blonde girl child, but her eyes kept going back to the shipwreck.
She and her brother spent two hours at the exhibition and she only looked at two dozen of the paintings. However, Edmund promised he would bring her back to the exhibition again.
“Or you might come with someone else,” he said.
Since she knew no one in London besides her brother, perhaps he had a person in mind?
“Your lady f-f-friend?” she asked hopefully.
