by Alice Kirks
“That is a very sensible question, Bridget,” Deborah responded, “for I do not know how you would be aware of this otherwise.” Deborah clasped her hands together and put them in her lap, looking more and more serious by the second. In fact, Deborah was speaking about this so sincerely that it made Bridget want to laugh. Actually, everything about this conversation made Bridget want to laugh, but she did her very best to control herself.
“From what I know,” Deborah expressed, “there are two ways that Annabella could have been... encouraged to feel like that.” Deborah smoothed out her dress against her legs, and Bridget could tell that while she was doing a wonderful job of explaining things on the outside, she was mortified on the inside. “The first is if Francis were to rub a small collection of nerve endings right near where you or I would relieve ourselves from.”
Bridget’s eyes widened. “There is something near there that brings a woman... pleasure?” she asked hesitantly.
Deborah nodded. “There certainly is! I cannot remember the name of it right now, but if you ask me later, I am sure that I’ll have remembered it,” she said thoughtfully. “The other,” Deborah continued, getting back to the explanation at hand, “is if Francis rubs himself against a certain part inside of Annabella.” Deborah laughed to herself, and then said, “Mama did not explain much more than that, but we laughed because she just said, ‘You will know it when you feel it.’”
Bridget laughed, relieved to hear of the casual way in which her mother had explained to her sister the specifics of making love. “That sounds just like Mama,” Bridget said happily, and Deborah nodded in agreement.
“I really wish that Mama was here to explain all of this to you, for I know that she would have done a far better job than I am doing right now!” Deborah said, putting her head in her hands suddenly.
Bridget hurriedly got out of bed and came to kneel in front of her sister. “Deborah, do not say that about yourself!” Bridget cried. “You have done a marvellous job, and I know that Mother would be ever so proud of you for taking on this... rather uncomfortable task!”
Deborah brought her face up from her hands and smiled weakly at her sister. “Do you really think so?” she asked.
Bridget nodded emphatically. “Absolutely! I can just imagine her sitting up there in heaven talking with Grandmamma, saying, ‘Look at my two little women, helping each other to traverse the muddy waters of... making love!’”
Both women burst out laughing, and it finally seemed as though Deborah believed her when she said that she was doing a wonderful job. “Well, thank you, Bridgie,” Deborah said, “and I am glad that my strange explanation seems to have helped!”
“Oh, very much!” Bridget said happily, returning to the bed to sit on the edge of it.
“And should you and a certain someone ever become engaged, you will now be prepared to understand what is happening to your body!”
Bridget recoiled slightly. “I do not think that I shall be getting engaged any time soon, but thank you, sister,” Bridget responded.
Deborah laughed, but then once she saw that Bridget was not joking she looked concerned. “Why do you think that you won’t be getting engaged any time soon? Are you still worried that the relationship between you and Lord Geoffrey won’t work out?” she asked.
Bridget thought for a moment, and then nodded. “If he continues to treat me the way that he treated me the other night,” she explained, “then I shall swear him off. I do not need a husband who treats me like I am a child.”
Deborah nodded proudly. “I think that is a very sensible conclusion to have come to, sister,” she said. “But I shall keep my fingers crossed that whatever came over Lord Geoffrey the other night has left him, and that the two of you are able to work things out.” Deborah paused, and then added, with a smirk on her face, “The two of you truly are made for each other, I believe.”
Bridget looked at her sister strangely. “What makes you say that?” Bridget asked. She crawled out from under the covers, swung her feet over the side of the bed and put on her bedroom slippers. As she and Deborah continued talking, Bridget got dressed for the day in a teal gown with a white spencer and curled her hair.
“How could I not?” Deborah said, laughing. “You’ve always dreamed of being swept off your feet by a handsome rake, and now you’ve met a dashing nobleman who has captured your heart... and he’s turned out to be an intruder! How much more perfect could it be?”
Bridget looked haughtily towards her sister. “My dreams of being whisked away by someone like that are behind me, sister,” she said to Deborah as she smoothed out her gown. “If Lord Geoffrey wants a woman who has put her ‘girlish fantasies’ behind her, then that is what he shall get!”
There was a pause, and then both girls laughed uproariously. “Thank goodness you’re joking!” Deborah said, relieved. “I was worried that I was going to have to give you the ‘do not change simply for the sake of a man’ speech!”
Bridget smiled and fiddled with her hair. “Not to worry, Deborah. Not even the great Lord Geoffrey could make me change myself for him,” she said confidently. She continued to struggle with her hair until Deborah finally walked up behind her.
“Here,” Deborah said helpfully, “allow me.” With a few steps that seemed effortless to Deborah, she did Bridget’s hair up in a pleasant style and curled the hairs that fell down in front of her face.
Bridget stared at her sister in the mirror on her dressing table and said, “How did you do that? How were you blessed with such talent that you did that so quickly?”
Deborah chuckled and shook her head. “I told you when you were younger - if you just had a little more patience with your hair, you would be able to do all of the hairstyles that I do!” Deborah explained gently. “But instead, you get frustrated with your locks, and then you give up so easily. I cannot understand why you have not taken more time to learn about your own hair.”
Bridget sighed. “Yes, yes, I know, I have heard all of this before,” she said, rising from her dressing table and pulling on the spencer that lay on her bed. “So instead of both of us beating our heads against the wall with another conversation about how truly terrible I am with hair, how about I encourage you off to bed so that you can get the rest that you were robbed of last night?”
Deborah stepped away from her sister, and crossed to the other side of the bed to return Bridget’s book to its place on her bedside table. “I suppose that I should go to sleep now,” Deborah admitted, “but I do not think that you could say I was ‘robbed’ of my sleep last night.” Bridget’s sister came back over to the side of the room that Bridget was on and looked at her seriously. “I caused my sleep’s demise!” With that, the sisters embraced, Deborah went off to her room to rest and Bridget started her day.
Chapter 28
After she had eaten breakfast, Bridget retired to the parlour and returned to the needlework that she had been completing the day that Lord Miles had come to visit. Just the thought of that awful day sent a shiver down Bridget’s spine. She pushed the memory away, and did her best to focus on the task at hand.
The problem was, however, that the needlework she was doing included a quote about love. It read: “The course of true love never did run smooth.” It was, of course, from A Midsummer Night’s Dream by Shakespeare. Bridget had chosen the quote long before any of this business with Lord Geoffrey had started, but as she worked on it today she found herself ruminating upon its true meaning.
If the course of love was rough, then what she and Lord Geoffrey had certainly must have been true love. While Bridget had always dreamed of her love being a great adventure, she had never considered the impact that adventure would have on her emotions or her loved ones. And she did not want to call what she had been through with Lord Geoffrey an ‘adventure’, for she imagined that word to contain within it some sort of fun. There had been almost no fun when it came to her and Lord Geoffrey’s relationship.
But perhaps this was the type
of adventure everyone had when they were falling in love? That couldn’t be, Bridget thought, for Mama and Papa had nothing like this happen when they were courting.
Could it have been, then, that perhaps all of Bridget’s longing to have a life like the one in her books had brought all of this about? Was this what a real life version of what happened in her stories was like? If it was, then Bridget did not want any part of it.
As she continued smoothly moving the needle in and out of the fabric, the motion began to relax Bridget. Perhaps there was some truth to what Lord Geoffrey had said to her the other night... but only in parts of it.
Maybe what Bridget could take away from what Lord Geoffrey had said was not that she should continue to seek a life of excitement and joy, but that she should find the adventure in her everyday life. Maybe part of how she could overcome the troubles that had befallen her over the last few weeks was to see it as a part of something more exciting that just had not come to fruition yet.
With that realisation, Bridget felt much calmer. She vowed that the next time she and Lord Geoffrey spoke, she would tell him of her theory of what he had meant, and hopefully he would agree. She knew that he couldn’t have had such a change of heart that he would really think that a woman like Bridget was being ‘childish’.
Having set her mind at ease Bridget spent the next hour sitting in contented silence, working away on her needlepoint. She was only interrupted when her father entered the room and said, “Bridget, dear, could I speak with you for a few moments?”
Bridget looked up from her work and nodded. “Of course, Father,” she said happily. “Please, come sit with me.”
Lord Alymer came and sat down in the chair in front of his daughter, looking stressed. Bridget furrowed her brow when she looked at him and asked, “Is there something that is bothering you, Papa?”
Lord Alymer ran his hands along his thighs and tried to give his daughter a reassuring smile. “Not bothering me, dearest, but there is something that has been weighing on my mind for the last few days.”
Bridget put down her needlework and looked at her father seriously. “Does it have to do with Lord Geoffrey?” she asked intuitively.
Lord Alymer looked up at her, surprised, but then nodded. “It most certainly does. But before I begin, I thought I would allow you to inform me of what sort of relationship you’ve been having with him. I am sure that there are things that I do not know about, so before I say my piece, I want to hear what you had to say about him,” Lord Alymer said gently.
Bridget was pleasantly surprised by her father’s demeanour. After the way he had treated her in front of Lord Miles and the other morning when he came back from the jail, Bridget was very happy to see that he seemed to be turning over a new leaf in their relationship together. She was hesitant to tell him much about she and Lord Geoffrey, but if he was showing her the respect that she deserved in this conversation, she supposed that she could do the same.
“Well...” Bridget began, “as you know, Lord Geoffrey has become... important to me.” Bridget was finding it hard to discover the right words to describe her and Geoffrey’s relationship. She knew that she did not want to say outright that they were courting, for she was not sure that they were anymore. And besides, there were certain things that a girl did tell her father, and others that she kept to herself.
“I had come to that conclusion, yes,” Lord Alymer encouraged her.
“And before it came to light that he was the intruder who I saw in the night, I thought that he might become... even more important to me,” Bridget stalled. She didn’t dare tell her father what her true feelings for Lord Geoffrey had been, and so she tried to skirt around them. “But now that he has revealed himself to be who he truly is... I am not certain of what our relationship will hold.” Bridget paused and played with a small thread that was dangling from her needlework. “However,” she continued, “I do know that in spite of these new developments... I do not wish to break off my relationship with him.”
Bridget looked up at her father finally, and saw that he looked quite thoughtful and serious. There wasn’t any of his usual anger or rage hidden within his eyes, and Bridget was proud of him for that. He clasped his hands together on his lap and looked out of the window for a few moments.
Bridget’s heart began to beat a little faster; she worried what her father would say when he finally turned back to her. Would he drop his calm facade and fly off the handle at her? Would he surprise everyone and say that he gave his blessing for them to court? Or, would he do the most likely thing and calmly tell her that he did not think that Lord Geoffrey was worthy of her?
Eventually, Lord Alymer looked back at his daughter. He took in a deep breath, put his hands on the arms of the chair and looked sadly towards Bridget. “Bridget, I have thought long and hard about how I have wanted to say this to you,” Lord Alymer said. “And no matter how many times I have gone over it in my head, there is always something wrong with it. I spent much of last night thinking about what your mother would do if she was in my shoes, but I fear that I have not incorporated as much of your mother’s understanding into my words as I would have liked.”
Bridget leaned forward and put her hand on her father’s knee. “It is alright, Papa. I am grateful that you took so much time to think about how you would say what you wanted to say, and that you consulted your knowledge of Mama’s wise words,” Bridget said to him kindly. Both Bridget and Lord Alymer had a little chuckle thinking about Bridget’s mother. Then, Bridget continued, “But if there is something weighing on your mind, you should tell me what it is, and then we can work through it together. I promise you that I will not leave this room until we are both resolved in this matter.”
Lord Alymer nodded appreciatively, and then said, “Thank you, daughter. I shall tell you what I need to say, then.” Lord Alymer sat up straighter in his chair and smoothed out his hair. “After learning about all of the nonsense that Lord Geoffrey, Lord Miles and Henry Partridge have got into over the past month, I cannot in good conscience tell you that I believe it is a good idea to go forward with your relationship with Lord Geoffrey,” Lord Alymer explained.
Bridget nodded sadly and said, “I had a feeling that you were going to say that, and before we go any further, I must tell you that I have had my doubts about him, too.”
Lord Alymer looked bewildered. “You have? I would have thought that presenting that to you would have created a great argument between us.”
Bridget shook her head. “Certainly not,” she said. “You must know that I have always had enough sense to know when a man is not good for me.”
Lord Alymer smiled, somewhat relieved. “I am glad to hear that,” he responded. “Have your doubts lead you to think that you should drop your relationship with him as well, though?”
Bridget pursed her lips thoughtfully, and then said, “No, they haven’t.”
Lord Alymer’s relief disappeared from his face. “But Bridget,” he responded, “your good sense must have told you that these boys have acted foolishly almost non-stop for the past four weeks. And over these four weeks their father has died, which has seemed to leave little impact on the two sons.”
Bridget cocked her head to the side. “What do you mean by that, Papa?” she asked.
Lord Alymer sighed. “I was thinking that when I pass away,” Lord Alymer explained, “while I hope that it is not too much of an emotional burden on you and your sister, I also hope that you are saddened by it. Neither Lord Geoffrey nor Lord Miles has shown a great deal of sadness about their father’s death.”
“I believe that is because we have only seen the men when they are in public,” Bridget presented her idea gently. “I think that Lord Philip’s death had affected them far more than they are letting on, but that they do not show much sorrow in public so as to keep a good face forward.”
Lord Alymer nodded along with Bridget acceptingly. “I suppose you might be right,” he said, “and I had not thought of that. I suppose tha
t some of Lord Geoffrey’s brusqueness surrounding his father’s death was borne from him having to take over his father’s position so quickly. There must be a great deal of work for him to handle at the moment.”
“I think so,” Bridget replied. “But I do see what you are saying about the boys acting foolishly. I will admit that when we were on the horseback ride together, I did say that I thought the rake who had stolen into our house was handsome because I thought the intruder was Lord Geoffrey. I wanted to let him know of some of my feelings for him without telling him directly.”
