Thanks to her, no less!
If she hadn’t espied Catherine in the streets of Vienna, and insisted that Julius seek her out, they wouldn’t have had their reunion and rekindled their love.
She’d played a role no less important than that ofCupid. Or Eros. Or the Fates. Or whoever was responsible for reuniting star-crossed lovers.
And what thanks did she receive for her troubles?
She was to dress up and dance attendance on Lady Emily Castlereagh, a most tedious lady, spend her days going shopping and trying on bonnets, and prepare herself for her own upcoming nuptials to the high and mighty Field Marshal Georg von Hartenberg.
Oh yes! While her brother was to delight in the most grand and romantic of courtships, of the kind the old medieval poets of yore sang about to the twanging of a mandolin, she, Evie, was to be bundled up and married off in the most traditional fashion: that of a cold and calculated arranged marriage.
To a man she’d never even met.
To a man who, in all likelihood, was a creaky old bat, as old as Methuselah, with the charm of a cod. Evie was normally not fastidious when it came to food, but she did detest fish, ever since she climbed on a barrel full of pickled eel when she was a child, and the lid had broken in, and she’d suddenly found thousands of dead eel eyes staring right at her. Not only that, but the cold, slithery, slimy feeling on her skin had given her a life’s worth of disgust for eating any creature that lived under the water. She wouldn’t even touch it with a foot-long pole. If James, the footman, hadn’t found her when he did, and fished her out of the barrel, she would’ve drowned in eel.
Here rests by God’s divine will
Lady Evangeline Stafford-Hill
Drowned in a barrel full ofeel…
She almost wishedfor that fate to have come to pass, if only to have such an extraordinarily lovely epitaph engraved upon her tombstone.
But back to Hartenberg.
The fact that her betrothed was a field marshal and dealt exclusively with wars, managing battles and shooting people, as well as getting shot at, too, a little—though surely that could not be anything of significance—and had probably personally seen the whites of Bonaparte’s eyes as the cannon balls zoomed past his ears on the very ground where she now trod, did not impress Evie one tiny bit. Never mind that he was decorated with medals and was commended as a war hero, and had personally walloped Bonaparte’s hide at Leipzig to ensure the Austrians reclaimed their honour.
Evie sniffed.
What use was winning that single battle when the Austrians had lost so many others to the Corsican over the years? Really, how was that anything to brag about? Now, if she’d been an Austrian field marshal, the history books might have recorded an entirely different kind of story…
But bringing it to the point: she’d truly had enough of war heroes.
She’d gone to the victory parades and supper parties at Apsley House in London to listen to Wellington ramble on and on about the Peninsular War, and that had not impressed her one bit.
For the rest of her life, she’d have a specimen just like Wellington sit at her own breakfast table, droning away in a similar manner, in a never-ending loop, for doddering old men invariably forgot they’d already told the story and tended to start telling it all over again once they finished. It would be very trying upon her patience, indeed.
In her copious experience of meeting fieldmarshals, Evie had come to the conclusion that they tended to be whiskered, white-haired old men, stiff as a board and serious as priests giving the last rites to criminals climbing the gallows.
In short: without as much as a single drop of humour.
She could possibly bear being married to a man so old, Evie reasoned, if he had the gout and couldn’t walk. There could be some advantage to that, even. He would sit about being old, while she could be busy tending to her own life. She could grit her teeth and bear that he was a war hero, even. She would pat his hand, patiently, as he counted his medals.
But if the man lacked a sense of humour…
If he failed to see the ridiculousness in life, was incapable of chuckling at a joke, appreciating a caricature or smiling at her antics…
Now that, by Jove! That would be unbearable. That she could not endure.
She would have to cry off the engagement on the spot.
Never mind her brother, who vowed their union was a matter of honour, a blood bond between the two families, above and beyond all differences, transcending politics, culture, language, and distance. He’d set up their union when she was still in the nursery. A childhood betrothal!
Every time Julius started on one of his reminiscences, “Back when Georg and I did this or that…” it was proof enough that her brother had betrothed her to an old fossil without even having the decency to ask for her permission. Her brother wasn’t the youngest, either, but he’d met this Hartenberg when he was but a schoolboy himself, on a Grand Tour. Hartenberg had been the eldest of the three, practically a grown man already back then.
Which, according to her mathematical skills, put him now on the far side of sixty.
She knew that women of her station were not allowed to choose the men they married. She’d long resigned herself to that fate. But she would be damned if she would step up to that marriage altar and see her bridegroom’s face for the first time.
