by Eloisa James
“More the fool he,” Otis said. “Blue velvet is au courant. I suppose that I could remain in the vicarage until I’m out of orders. It would give me a chance to follow through with some of the schemes I’ve put in motion in the parish. As long as someone else is doing the important parts.”
“I understand,” Devin said. “I’ll find a vicar to give Last Rites.”
“I actually don’t mind the rest of the job,” Otis continued. “The parish needs livening up. I’ve begun offering sherry after the service, which is very popular. Of course, I had to restock the wine cellar, or rather you did.”
“I don’t suppose you could wait to leave the church until after you conduct my wedding ceremony?”
Otis snorted. “You’ll do your vows in Westminster Abbey, with a flock of bishops parading around like French cooks wearing Christmas hats. I must say, my father is beside himself about the idea that you’re tying the knot. He had put your taking a bride in the same category as my being appointed a bishop: unlikely.”
“I know my duty,” Devin said. “I considered marrying one of the Duke of Lindow’s daughters two years ago, but I was in the middle of something, and I never found the time to meet her.”
“That the pi business?”
Dev nodded.
“Never understood why you waste time devising a scheme to compute something that’s already been computed.”
Devin didn’t figure out a way to compute pi to 123 digits for any good reason other than that numbers made him happy.
Luckily, Otis didn’t wait for an answer; no one else in the family had the faintest interest in mathematics. “There’s a couple more Wilde daughters on the market this year, and you can make up for lost time.”
“Do you know anything about them?” Devin asked.
“Of course I do. Hazel attended school with them. To call a spade a spade, they are my sister’s prime competition. As I understand it, one of them is exquisitely beautiful, lively, and intelligent.”
“Lady Joan,” Devin said. “I heard as much.”
“Illegitimate,” Otis said. “Father was a Prussian count. The second duchess ran off leaving the baby behind. The girl has the count’s yellow hair, by all accounts, and the Wildes are dark-haired. The other is the third duchess’s daughter by her first marriage. Astley, I think his name was.”
“I’ll take the Wilde,” Devin said.
Otis laughed. “‘Take her’? It must be nice to be a duke. Maybe I’ll offer you some competition. She is an heiress.”
“As I recall, Uncle Reggie gave you an estate.”
Otis waved his hand. “If I’m to live in the manner to which I aspire, I need a fortune. A large one. I likely won’t find the right woman for years. Father will simply have to accept that.”
In short, the heiress was a patent excuse for avoiding marriage for the next decade. Devin couldn’t blame his cousin. He wasn’t looking forward to it himself. But he’d promised himself two years ago that the next time a duke’s daughter came on the market, he’d get the business over with.
“I do think it’ll be better if I move here,” Otis said. “In a few weeks, after I fix things up with the bishop.”
“Will the bishop be surprised?”
“My expectation is that he’ll be as eager to kick me out the door as I am to leave. Hopefully, I’ll be out of the vicarage in time to supervise your courtship,” Otis said. “I already have some advice as regards your marital ambitions.”
“What?”
“You’ll have some competition for the Wilde girl.”
Wynter doubted that very much. He hadn’t been to a ball in years, but the last time he attended one, it reminded him of a Scottish stream when the trout were running. Young ladies playing the role of shining, wriggling trout.
“I’ve got the title and money, I’m not lame or scarred, I don’t drink to excess.”
“Viscount Greywick is looking for a wife,” Otis said. “He’ll be a duke someday. Word is he almost landed the last Wilde, so I suspect he’ll be on the lookout again. He’s younger than you, and to be brutally honest, he’s handsome to boot.”
As Devin understood it, there were an infinite number of Wilde offspring. Greywick could wait another year or two if need be. He shrugged.
“You might want to try to appear less . . . ducal,” Otis suggested.
Devin knew exactly what he was talking about, but his expressionless demeanor had saved his life many a time as a youth caught in the path of his father’s rage, and it was too late to try to imitate Otis’s cheerful smile.
“Lady Joan won’t marry me for who I am,” he pointed out. “She’ll marry me because the duchy of Wynter is older and wealthier than Greywick’s duchy.”
Otis laughed. “Perhaps Hazel has a shot at Greywick.”
“I wish her the best of luck,” Devin said politely.
Chapter Four
The next day
Viola didn’t sleep more than a few hours that night, and by breakfast she had come up with a three-part plan to win Mr. Marlowe’s hand and heart. She had to prove that she was worthy of his attention, bring him to London when the family moved there for the Season, and conquer her shyness.
That afternoon, the Pettigrews and Mr. Marlowe joined the duchess—whom they hadn’t met the previous day—for tea.
Viola was trying to figure out how to prove her worthiness when Barty fluttered down from his perch, stopped at her foot, and let out a gentle caw. He could manage short flights, as long as he didn’t overtax his wings.
“Oh, goodness me!” Miss Pettigrew squealed.
“This is Barty,” Viola said, slipping her hand under the crow’s round tummy and bringing him up to her knee. “He fell from the nest as a baby and now he lives with us.”
Barty cocked his head and looked at Miss Pettigrew. He opened his wings and cawed again.
“He is wishing you good afternoon,” Viola said.
Miss Pettigrew was clearly horrified. “I do not believe in animals sharing human habitation.”
“Insalubrious,” her mother confirmed, frowning at Barty.
Barty fluttered to the ground, picked up a piece of bright red paper that had escaped the maids’ notice, and hopped to Miss Pettigrew. He spread his wings again, bent his head, and laid it next to her slipper.
“It’s a present,” Viola explained.
“More likely payment. He tends to offer a gift before he pecks off a button, and yours are shiny,” Joan said, with a jaundiced air.
“Get that creature away from me,” Miss Pettigrew cried, shrinking back and slapping her hands over her bosom to protect her brass buttons. Her mother snatched up her saucer and held it like a shield.
Prism had been standing to the side supervising the dispersal of lemon cake. He stepped forward. “I shall take Master Barty,” he said. The butler was one of Barty’s favorite people, since Prism had spent hours feeding him as a baby, and he readily hopped to his arm.
“Thank you,” Viola said, as Prism walked away, his arm held high at a right angle, as if he were dancing a minuet.
“I never!” Miss Pettigrew said, dropping her hands from her bosom.
Aunt Knowe stepped in before Miss Pettigrew could elaborate on an opinion that was likely to prove universally unpopular.
“How are your plans for the parish progressing?” she asked Mr. Marlowe.
“I have suggestions about how you might encourage parishioners to attend services,” Viola said brightly.
Mrs. Pettigrew cast her a narrow glance. “Such matters are best left to the vicar.”
But Mr. Marlowe was more polite, and for the next five minutes, they had a lively exchange about ways to bring people to the church, ranging from a harvest dinner—“expensive and unnecessary,” sniffed Mrs. Pettigrew—to a Sunday school.
Mr. Marlowe was as delightful on closer acquaintance as he had appeared the day before. He was deeply kind and interested in the welfare of everyone in the parish. He listened respectfully to V
iola’s ideas, which was refreshing after Father Duddleston’s invariable refusal to consider anything new.
“Our friend Lady Caitlin Paget began a Sunday school in St. Wilfrid’s parish in London,” Viola told him. “At first she had a hard time convincing mothers to send their children. Now she has a schoolmaster in the afternoons as well.”
“I know Lady Caitlin, since I was a curate at St. Wilfrid’s,” Mr. Marlowe said, a smile lighting his eyes. “She is a remarkable young lady.”
As Mrs. Pettigrew launched into a monologue about the poor’s need to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, Viola began musing over her second problem. She couldn’t leave Mr. Marlowe in Cheshire while she went to London. The Season began in April, but the family would leave for London in early February; it would take at least two months for modistes to create a wardrobe proper for Viola’s and Joan’s debuts.
Mr. Marlowe was planning to marry Miss Pettigrew in only eight months. How would he ever choose Viola over Miss Pettigrew if they didn’t become better acquainted? He must come to London and be provided with opportunities for comparison.
Her shyness was a problem too. She couldn’t be a true partner to Mr. Marlowe if she trembled every time she encountered a male parishioner.
That night she recruited Joan to help with her shyness, using their upcoming debut as an excuse.
“Aunt Knowe says that once you’ve met enough young gentlemen, you’ll realize that they are mostly hopeless duffers, and not to be feared,” Joan reminded her.
Viola had heard this bit of wisdom many times. “What goes through your head when you meet someone for the first time?”
“Do you mean an eligible young man?”
“Yes.”
“I consider whether I find him appealing,” Joan said promptly. “I like a firm chin and dark eyebrows. I can’t abide sandy eyebrows. But looks are not everything. Does he have the faintest interest in what I have to say, or does he lecture me about his interests? Does he look like a gambler, a degenerate, or a fortune-hunter?”
“How would you know about the last?” Viola asked. She had a feeling she knew what a degenerate looked like, albeit a titled version, but she had no idea about fortune-hunters.
“Shifty eyes,” Joan said, narrowing her own. “Versus lascivious ones.” She goggled at Viola. “Like this. What do you think when you meet someone?”
“I—”
Joan waited, eyebrow raised.
“I wonder if they think I don’t belong among the Wildes,” Viola said in a rush.
Joan looked nonplussed. “Why do you think that?”
“I’m not really a Wilde.”
“No more am I,” Joan pointed out. Her mother had fled the country with a yellow-haired Prussian count, leaving her newborn (yellow-haired) baby behind. It was generally accepted by everyone in the family except for the duke that Joan didn’t have a drop of ducal blood in her.
“But you . . . you’re you.”
“I won’t make the obvious response,” Joan said, looking suddenly very like Aunt Knowe. “You are as much a Wilde as I am. As is Parth, who is adopted. As well as your mother’s other children, Erik, Artemisia, and Spartacus. All of us are Wildes, and that’s the end of it.”
“It’s not that simple,” Viola argued.
“Why?”
“You’re all beautiful, for one thing.”
“As are you,” Joan flashed back.
Viola sighed. She had insipid brown hair, a pointed chin, eyes of an ordinary shape and an unremarkable color, and a small nose. In fact, she was small everywhere except her bosom.
Her stepsiblings were the result of years of breeding, and like the best racehorses, they showed it. Every single one was the very portrait of an aristocrat, with almond-shaped eyes, winged eyebrows, and an alabaster complexion.
Putting Joan’s golden hair to the side, the older children had inherited the duke’s dark hair, and the younger children had Ophelia’s red hair. But all of them, including Joan, had finely wrought features that spoke to generations of noble birth.
It wasn’t merely a matter of appearances. Over years of observation, Viola had realized that Wildes instinctively took on the mannerisms that defined the aristocracy. Even Erik at age ten excelled in raising one mocking eyebrow.
Viola had spent a whole summer squinting in the mirror before she accepted that her eyebrows were incapable of moving separately.
“When I meet someone, I imagine what they are thinking about me,” she admitted. “Sometimes I can almost hear voices laughing about me not belonging among the duke’s children, so loudly that I feel seasick.”
Joan scowled. “You mustn’t listen to that foolishness. The next time you meet someone, you should hold up your chin and silently repeat over and over, ‘I’m a Wilde. I’m a Wilde!’ We are your family, Viola, and we love you. You came to us as a baby, remember? You’re as much a Wilde Child as I am.”
“That’s silly,” Viola said, laughing.
“No, it is not. What if I succumbed to that sort of thinking? If I believed the worst that is said about me, I wouldn’t dare to debut at all. As it is, you and I shall debut together, heads high.”
“I’m a Wilde,” Viola mumbled. “I feel like an idiot.”
“Please try it?” Joan asked. Her eyes were hopeful, and Viola couldn’t say no. Besides, she was desperate. She had to conquer her shyness in order to be a true partner to Mr. Marlowe.
In the next few weeks, she practiced thinking, I’m a Wilde when talking to the housekeeper, when taking the pony cart into Mobberley to drop in on Mr. Marlowe and see how the vicarage renovations were coming, even when talking to her older stepbrother North.
Joan stayed at her side, and every time Viola faltered, overcome by a stab of shyness, Joan would hiss, “Wilde Child!” The phrase was so absurd that it made Viola smile—and somehow survive the moment.
It helped.
Absurd, unlikely, ridiculous as it was, the phrase helped.
In early January, two parliamentary lords and a visiting ambassador from France joined the dining table. Normally, Viola would have eaten in her bedchamber, but instead, she walked into the room clutching Joan’s hand, Wilde Child beating over and over in her head.
One of the lords was sixty if he was a day, and Viola found herself discussing the nesting habits of gray herons with him. Before she knew it, she was talking to the other lord as well, even though he was a young man, and unmarried. She didn’t feel even a tinge of nausea. Why should she? She had a mission.
The next morning she confided to Mr. Marlowe about her terror of the upcoming Season, hoping that he would volunteer to accompany the family to London. Instead he patted her hand, looked deeply into her eyes, and assured her that Providence would provide.
That wasn’t particularly helpful.
At a family-only dinner that night, the conversation turned to the household’s imminent move to London; Lady Knowe had decided that the household should depart in January, rather than February.
Viola felt a pulse of terror at the thought, but: “I’m a Wilde,” she said to herself.
“I don’t intend to marry until my third Season,” Joan said. She waggled her eyebrows at the duke. “Any suitors who come your way . . . Reject them immediately, if you please. They needn’t propose to me in person; it won’t change my mind.”
“I agree,” Viola put in quickly.
“You can always live with me, Viola, if you don’t want to marry anyone,” Erik said. He peered at Viola owlishly. “There’s something different about you lately. I hadn’t noticed before, but you are pretty. I could marry you, if you don’t mind waiting.”
“That is a very kind offer,” Viola said, smiling at him.
“Erik is right,” Aunt Knowe said. “These last few weeks you’ve been less timid.”
Viola’s smile turned into a grin.
“What helped?” Aunt Knowe asked. The whole table gazed at her, and Viola froze. She couldn’t admit in front of the duke
that she hadn’t considered herself a true Wilde. He thought of himself as her father. He would be deeply hurt, and her mother would be terribly sad.
“It’s Mr. Marlowe,” Joan said, coming to the rescue. “He’s very, very calming. He’s made all the difference, hasn’t he, Viola?”
The sharp elbow in her side jolted Viola and she nodded. “Yes, he is. That is, he has. Made all the difference, that is.”
“Perhaps we should bring him to London with us,” Aunt Knowe said thoughtfully. “I think it would do him good to consult with older clergymen. He shared a plan to put on a cycle of plays depicting biblical events. I’m not sure that’s a good idea, but better to hear it from a more experienced cleric than from me.”
Viola twitched. Putting on plays drawn from the Bible had been her idea, but this clearly wasn’t the moment to confess, not when the second part of her plan was miraculously coming true.
Lady Knowe nodded, having made up her mind. “Mr. Marlowe must come with us. His fiancée is in London, after all.”
“I can’t bear the woman,” the duke said dispassionately. “I might let him go at the end of the year simply because of his future wife.”
“My pity stems from his future mother-in-law,” Ophelia said with a shiver. “I suppose it might be a good idea to bring him to London. Perhaps Mr. Marlowe will reconsider his marital plans.”
Viola could scarcely stop herself from throwing up her hands in celebration.
Providence was indeed watching the fall of every sparrow. Mr. Marlowe was right! Now he would be coming to London, so all she had to do was make him fall in love with her.
How hard could it be?
She’d watched her older stepbrothers fall in love over the last few years. As she saw it, men denied their own emotions until they snapped and then pursued their future bride with a single-minded tenacity.
She could already picture Mr. Marlowe’s blue eyes looking at her adoringly.
Chapter Five
The Duke of Lindow’s townhouse
A ball in honor of Lady Joan Wilde & Miss Viola Astley
