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Chapter One
The bell above the dressmaker’s door chimed as it swung shut, sealing Sophia Hartwell inside a world of French muslin and faintly desperate ambition. Madame Brodeur’s establishment on Bond Street was the sort of place that smelled of lavender water and new money, its gilt mirrors arranged to flatter women into courage and, by extension, into parting with sums their husbands would find alarming. Sophia’s mother was already deep in conference with one of the assistants, turning a bolt of primrose silk back and forth in the light as though the correct angle might reveal some hidden virtue.
Sophia stood near the window and let her attention drift. She did not particularly need a new gown. She had several that would serve perfectly well for the opening weeks of the Season, and one evening dress of pale blue silk that Percival had admired with the specific warmth he reserved for things he considered reflections of his own taste. She had worn it twice. Both times she had felt less like a woman being admired and more like a painting being hung in a favorable light.
She was examining a display of ribbons with no intention of purchasing any when a voice cut clean across the fitting room.
“Sophia? Sophia Hartwell?”
She turned, and the years fell away like a shawl slipping from a shoulder.
Arabella Cavendish stood three paces away, taller than memory permitted and considerably more animated, her dark curls escaping their pins in a manner that suggested she had dressed in a hurry. She was wearing a walking dress of soft green that suited her coloring beautifully and fit her badly, the latter being precisely the sort of problem one visited Madame Brodeur to solve. Her face was bright with the uncomplicated delight of someone who had not yet learned to temper her enthusiasm for the benefit of a watching room.
“It is you,” Arabella said, taking both of Sophia’s hands without waiting for permission. “I can hardly believe it. I told Catherine this morning that London would be dreadful and I should rather have stayed at Ashfield with the sheep, and now here you are, and I take back every word of it.”
Sophia laughed. It was the sort of laugh that arrived before she could arrange it, unplanned and genuine, and it startled her slightly because she had not laughed like that in some time. “Arabella Cavendish. You have grown at least four inches since I last saw you.”
“Five,” Arabella corrected, with visible satisfaction. “And I have opinions now, which Catherine says is worse.”
“I should very much like to hear them.”
“Oh, you shall. I have opinions on everything. It is my sole accomplishment.” Arabella squeezed her hands and pulled her toward the window seat. “But first you must tell me everything. How long have you been in London? Are you well? You look wonderfully well. Catherine said I must not accost people in shops, but I do not think this qualifies as accosting. Do you?”
“Not at all,” Sophia said. “This qualifies as a rescue. My mother has been debating sleeve lengths for the better part of an hour.”
Arabella glanced at Sophia’s mother, who was still deep in conference with the assistant, and lowered her voice conspiratorially. “My sympathies. Catherine once spent an entire afternoon choosing between two shades of white that were, to my eye, indistinguishable. I nearly expired.”
They talked in the way of old acquaintances reunited: rapidly, warmly, with the ease of people who had liked each other before manners became a consideration. Arabella explained the situation with the breathless efficiency of someone who had more to say than time allowed.
“The whole household has come to London for the Season. Catherine’s son Henry is seven now and has opinions about horses that would put a cavalry officer to shame. Catherine herself is managing everything, as Catherine always does.”
“I remember her being formidable,” Sophia said.
“She has only grown more so. I believe she could organize a military campaign if someone would only ask her.” Arabella’s expression shifted, becoming briefly and touchingly earnest. “It is my first Season, Sophia. I am very nearly terrified, though if you tell anyone I said so I shall deny it absolutely. Catherine has given me three separate lectures on composure. I have forgotten all of them. She says I must learn to modulate my enthusiasm, which I believe is her way of saying I talk too much, but I do not see how one is meant to be enthusiastic in a modulated fashion. It seems a contradiction.”
“It is,” Sophia said. “And you must not let anyone convince you otherwise. The Season has quite enough modulated enthusiasm as it is.”
Arabella beamed. Then, as though remembering the best part, she leaned forward and said, “And Edmund is here too. He has been at Ashfield for nearly three years, you know, since Margaret’s passing. He is absolutely the same, which is to say he is entirely reliable and occasionally impossible to read.”
Sophia felt something shift in her chest at the name. A small interior rearrangement, like a book being returned to its proper shelf after years of sitting in the wrong place. Edmund Cavendish. She had not heard the name spoken aloud in a very long time, though she had thought of him occasionally, the way one thought of anyone who occupied a particular space in the architecture of one’s past with unusual precision.
“I am glad he is well,” Sophia said, and meant it with a simplicity that surprised her.
“He will be so pleased to hear you are in London. You were always his favorite person to argue with.” Arabella tilted her head, a knowing gesture Sophia remembered from the girl she had been at thirteen. “Are you here for the Season? You must call on us. You absolutely must. Catherine will insist, and I am insisting first, which means I win.”
“I shall call this week,” Sophia said. “You have my word.”
“Wonderful. I shall hold you to it most ruthlessly.” Arabella squeezed her hands once more, beamed with the full force of someone who had not yet been taught to ration her warmth, and swept back toward the assistant who was holding a length of ivory satin with the expression of a woman whose patience was a professional achievement.
After Arabella left, Sophia lingered at the dressmaker’s for longer than was necessary. Her mother’s discussion of sleeve lengths showed no sign of concluding before the turn of the century, and Sophia was content to stand near the window with the afternoon light slanting through the glass and think.
She was thinking about Ashfield. The old walled garden behind the house, where the espaliered pears grew flat against the warm stone and the gravel paths were always slightly overgrown because the head gardener preferred roses to tidiness. She remembered the way Edmund would spend an entire morning finding some obscure point of argument just to see if she could answer it, and the quiet satisfaction when she could. He had once devoted the better part of a rainy afternoon to the question of whether it was possible to train a cat, a position he held with absolute conviction and no supporting evidence, simply because he had noticed that Sophia was inclined to disagree with him and wanted to see how vigorously she would defend a point she had not been challenged on. That was Edmund. He did not test people to find their limits. He tested them to show them they had fewer limits than they supposed.
She was twelve the last time she stood in that garden. The summer she and Edmund had played forty-two games of chess. She had won nineteen of them. He had pretended to let her win exactly once, and she had caught him at it, and the expression on his face when she pointed it out had been the precise mixture of surprise and admiration that she would later recognize as the foundation of a genuine regard.
She remembered, too, the summer he dared her to climb the orchard wall. She had fallen and scraped both palms on the rough stone, and he had carried her on his back to the kitchen without being asked, his stride unhurried, his voice calm as he told the cook that Lady Sophia required a basin of warm water and possibly a biscuit and was to be treated as a wounded soldier. The cook had complied. Sophia had eaten her biscuit and submitted to having her palms cleaned and thought, with the fierce clarity of a twelve-year-old, that Edmund Cavendish was the most reliable person she had ever met.
She was twenty-four now. In the four years since she had come out into society, she had attended more balls than she could count, danced with more gentlemen than she could remember, and been courted by exactly one man she had agreed to marry. And in all that time, she had never once felt as immediately comfortable with anyone as she had felt with Edmund Cavendish, and how strange it was that a name she had not spoken in years could arrive in a fitting room on Bond Street and rearrange her thoughts so completely.
Her mother appeared at last, flushed with the triumph of having selected a silk that would be the envy of Lady Felton’s next card party.
“Did you find anything you liked, dear?” her mother asked, pulling on her gloves.
“Only a conversation,” Sophia said. “Arabella Cavendish is in London.”
“The Cavendish girl? How delightful. Her brother is an earl now, of course. A very respectable match, if one were looking.” Her mother gave her a pointed look. “Though I suppose you are not looking.”
“I am engaged, Mama.”
“Yes, dear. I have not forgotten.”
***
Sophia rode home in the carriage with her mother rather than walking, needing the quiet to think. Her mother was discussing the relative merits of pearl buttons versus covered ones, a subject she approached with the forensic intensity other women reserved for politics or religion, and Sophia was watching the park slide past the window without seeing it.
Until she did see something. And stopped breathing.
The carriage was turning along the edge of the park, where the path curved beneath a grove of elms in which the branches had not yet leafed fully enough to provide proper concealment. Lord Graystone’s carriage was pulled to the side of the path. Sophia recognized it immediately: the dark lacquer, the crest on the door, the matched bays he was so particular about. He was supposed to be at his club. He had told her so at breakfast, in the pleasant, unhurried tone he used when he was being specific about his plans, which she had only recently noticed he did whenever he did not wish to be looked for.
Beside the carriage, half hidden by the trees, Lord Graystone was in close conversation with a woman Sophia did not recognize; young, dark-haired, leaning toward him with an intimacy that did not belong to a public park. The carriage passed too quickly for Sophia to do anything but turn her head and watch the scene disappear behind them. It lasted perhaps four seconds.
Sophia turned her head forward. Her mother was still talking about buttons. The park rolled on beyond the glass as though nothing untoward was happening at all.
It was probably nothing. Lord Graystone knew a great many people, and there were a great many dark-haired women in London. The intimacy she thought she had seen might have been nothing more than a trick of angle and distance. She had no evidence of anything improper. She had only a fleeting image glimpsed through a carriage window and the quality of her own unease. She examined it carefully and confirmed that it was not jealousy. It was something colder and less definable. The first cold whisper of a suspicion she was not yet ready to name.
Her hands were not quite steady in her lap for the rest of the journey home. She folded them together and pressed them against the fabric of her dress saying nothing. When they arrived at the house she thanked the footman and went inside, climbing the stairs to her room and stood for a moment in front of her dressing table mirror, looking at her own face as though it might tell her something she did not already know.
It did not. She was composed. She was always composed.
That evening, Sophia sat at her writing desk with Lord Graystone’s latest letter open before her.
My dearest Sophia, it began, in the fluent, well-practiced hand she had once found charming and now, for reasons she could not entirely articulate, found merely practiced. The letter was warm. It was devoted. It was perfectly composed, every sentiment calibrated with the precision of a man who understood exactly how much tenderness was required and supplied it with the efficiency of someone filling an order. There was not a single word she could object to. Not a phrase that rang false. Not a sentiment that failed to meet the standard of what an attentive fiancé ought to express to the woman he intended to marry.
She read it twice, searching for a flaw she could not find.
She put the letter away in the writing case with the others and closed the lid. The click of the clasp was small and precise; a sound that belonged to a well-ordered life. She prepared for bed with her usual efficiency, dismissed her maid, and lay in the dark with her eyes open and her thoughts circling like birds that could not find a place to land.
The letter was faultless. Percival Cummings was faultless. The engagement was everything it ought to be. And yet something had shifted in the afternoon light of the park, something she could not put back, and she lay awake for a long time listening to the house settle around her and wondering whether the most dangerous lies were the ones that contained no words at all that were untrue.
OFFER: A BRAND NEW SERIES AND 2 FREEBIES FOR YOU!
Grab my new series, "Whispers of Regency Love", and get 2 FREE novels as a gift! Have a look here!
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