Her mother pressed her lips together. “Well… yes, you do that, Darling.” She stood abruptly and took out her silk handkerchief, pressing it to her eyes. “Goodness, it is smoky in here. My eyes are stinging. I shall have to speak with the butler about the chimneys—it is becoming quite ridiculous. Why, you might mistake our home for a Southwark hovel, where they have tin buckets for fireplaces!”
Hardly, Mama.No one could mistake a grand manor for a slum, though perhaps fine ladies and poor ladies were not so different in the very heart of them. Maybe, rich and poor alike longed for that elusive, four-letter word. Love. Maybe, all women without it lamented the absence of it in their lives, regardless of where they hailed from.
“Did you love someone like that, Mama?” Arabella tried one last time.
Her mother held her gaze for a long while, eyes shining with the waver of the firelight and the tears she was fighting to keep back. “Yes, Darling,” she said on the crest of a heavy sigh. It seemed like she would stop there, giving a vague answer to the question Arabella had always longed to ask. But then, with a sad smile, she added, “Your father, as I said.”
They both knew it was a lie, but Arabella had learned when to hold her tongue. Moreover, it looked like her mother might burst into tears, and Arabella did not know what she would do if such a rare thing took place. Her mother was a paragon of stony-faced endurance, as all good Society wives were. Seeing such a staunch figure break might shatter the very foundation upon which their stiff, distant relationship was built.
“Goodnight, Arabella.” Her mother walked back to the library door, turning on the threshold. “Do not read for too long in such low light or you will be blind by the time you are thirty.”
Arabella nodded. “I will not be too much longer, Mama.”
“Very good.” Her mother looked like she was about to leave, but she turned back again. “You are a good daughter, Darling. I do not say that often enough. Seeing you accept your betrothal… Not all daughters would behave as you did. I know of several who have screamed and cried and been locked in their chambers until the day of the wedding. I am… grateful that is not your fate.”
Arabella’s heart lurched, for there was no mistaking the glimmer of painful memory in her mother’s eyes. “I know of several who have…” vividly translated to, “I know that I…” Arabella could not bear to imagine it. Nor did she know what to say. In the end, her mother ensured she did not have to say anything, as she turned on her heel and left.
Slowly, Arabella returned to her spot by the fireplace, and opened her book. The heat from the blaze was stifling, combined with the humidity of the July night, prompting beads of sweat to trickle down the sides of her face. She did not care, for she preferred the firelight to the sooty, anemic glow of lanterns or candles. Such things required bending her pages to direct the miserly light over the words, while the firelight generously washed its illumination over the entire book.
She had come to the part where a young maiden of royal descent encountered a woodsman in the forest. Closing her eyes, for she knew the passages intimately, she pictured herself in the maiden’s place and Lord Powell as the woodsman, chopping logs with his powerful arms, his shirt loose to reveal a scandalously bare chest.
“You shouldn’t be alone out here, Miss. There are wolves in the forest, and they don’t care if you’re man, woman, or child. They’ll gobble you up all the same,” Lord Powell’s woodsman warned, pausing to wipe sweat from his brow with his forearm, his sleeves rolled up.
“I have lost my way, sir,” Arabella imagined herself replying, pulling her cloak tighter about herself to hide the exquisite silk of her palace gown.
Lord Powell brought his axe down into a sawn stump, making Arabella’s maiden jump in fright, for he was as rugged and dangerous as he was deliciously handsome. Unlike the maiden in the book, she could not take her eyes off the envisioned muscle of his bare chest, sculpted by the labors of his daily toil.
“Why have you lost your way?” he asked. “Where have you come from?”
Arabella glanced shyly away. “I have fled my home, sir. My mother and father wanted to marry me to a terrible man. A cruel man from a distant land. I cannot return there, sir, but I will surely die if I remain here in these woods, if they are as dangerous as you say.”
“What if I’m the danger?” Lord Powell walked across the misty glade, his stride powerful and swift. She knew he would near her within seconds, and her heart began to pound, wondering if she ought to run toward him or away from him. Of course, Arabella knew how the story went, but she was making changes as she pleased.
“I do not fear you, sir,” her maiden replied.
Lord Powell smiled. “How can you be so trusting of someone you don’t know? I might be a wolf in disguise.” He stopped perilously close to her. “I can tell you don’t know much of the world, Miss. There’s an innocence to you.”
“Take pity on me, sir. I do not know where to go.”
Lord Powell took hold of her gloveless hand and lifted it to his lips. Arabella imagined the warm softness of the kiss, fanning herself as the heat seared in her actual cheeks. But as Lord Powell peered up at her, his lips still pressed to her bare skin, Arabella’s eyes flew open, and she hastily chased the daydream away. For it had not been Lord Powell who looked up at her. Instead, she’d been met with Henry’s eyes, Henry’s handsome face, and the sweat-slicked contours of Henry’s exposed chest.
Rolling over onto her back, Arabella glared up at the molded ceiling, following the twisting coils of vines and counting the grapes that clung to double-handled amphorae.
“Do not do that again,” she muttered crossly, furious with Henry for invading her private daydream. Of course, he could not actually be blamed, but it was easier to believe that he had trespassed without her consent. Why else would she be imagining him in such shocking detail?
Perhaps Mama is right… I may need to reduce my time within these novels. Clearly, they are muddling my mind.
To prove the point, Arabella flipped back over and closed the book, before getting up and slotting it back into its place on the bookshelves.
She jabbed a finger at the spine. “That was mean! I trusted you.”
Of course, the novel did not reply.
Somewhat rattled by the vivid vision, which seemed to be lingering rather annoyingly in the back of her mind and making the top of her hand tingle as if there really had been lips upon it, she decided she needed to take an evening stroll to shake off the unpleasantness. It was more than warm enough, though her parents would rail at her if they discovered she had slipped out alone.
I do not have the energy to call for Cassie. Besides, she is drawing me a bath and I would not want to disturb her.
Glancing at the library door, which was ajar, she decided to chance it. Heading for the French doors which opened out on the back terrace, she had a foot out onto the flagstones when a creak made her freeze, like a robber caught in the act. Had her mother returned, deciding that she would, indeed, toss Arabella’s beloved books into the fire?
