Page 44 of Lady Beast's Bridegroom
Later that morning, Arial waved Peter off from the front step. She had filled several baskets with treats and little gifts and foods that might attempt reluctant appetites. Another had medicines—a bottle of lemon and honey cordial for sore throats, a bottle of calendula ointment to soothe rashes.
It was all she could do, except wait and worry.
*
“Perhaps I shouldgo home to Greenmount,” Arial said to John when he called that afternoon. He had received a note from Peter and had come to offer himself as a replacement escort for any events she wished to attend while she remained in London.
“I can escort you to Greenmount, if you wish,” John offered.
Clara narrowed her eyes as she looked up at the ceiling. “What would we need to cancel?” It was a rhetorical question. Clara had proven herself a superb secretary, the memory and eye for detail that had been an asset to her as governess and then companion coming into their own in her new role.
“The most important thing is our dinner party to solicit donations for retraining ex-soldiers,” she concluded.
Arial grimaced. The cause was important to Peter and John. They both employed as many ex-soldiers as they could, and John had also sent many to work for Deerhaven. Such men had often joined the army with no skills or trade beyond that of laborer. Others could no longer return to their former work because of the injuries they had suffered. Training them in a new skill gave them back their pride and allowed them a future. The charity Arial and her friends were helping to set up aimed to extend thatwork beyond the small number that Peter and John had been able to help directly.
“The dinner party is in six days,” she acknowledged. “We must stay for that. John, do you think Deerhaven would host in Peter’s place?”
John shook his head. “My brother is taking Cordelia home. Her doctor and the midwife think she might be having twins. If so, they are likely to arrive early, and Deerhaven doesn’t want his wife confined on the road, or here in London just as the hot weather starts. He is just tidying up a few loose ends, and they leave the day after tomorrow.”
Arial made a mental note that she must call on Lady Deerhaven with her best wishes. She was not surprised at John’s news. Last time she had seen the marchioness, Lady Deerhaven had looked huge, even in the fashionable gown designed by an expert modiste to disguise her condition.
“Perhaps you could do it, Captain Forsythe,” Clara suggested.
It would be unusual for a bachelor to host a party where the hostess was a married woman, but everyone knew that Peter and John were the best of friends, and that the dinner was to raise money for their project. “Yes, John, would you?”
John did not answer immediately, doubtless having the same hesitations as Arial, but after a moment he agreed.
“What else?” Arial asked Clara. “Can we leave London after the dinner party?”
Clara lifted a hand and began checking events off on her fingers.
Several were before the dinner party, and Arial let John know the ones to which she needed an escort. A few days later was a garden party she thought she should attend. It would be her friend Regina Paddimore’s first entertainment since she came out of her blacks, and Regina had been preparing for it for months. “Planning it has been the most fun I’ve had allyear,” she had told her friends. “I must admit to being anxious, though.” A garden party. Arial could manage that.
“Clara, we will cancel anything else after the garden party,” Arial said. “Please give me a list of the hostesses to whom I should write a personal note.”
“Then,” John said, “I will hold myself ready to escort you to Greenmount late next week.”
“Ten days,” Arial agreed, “Unless the girls are well enough for me to go to Three Oaks.”
*
In the earlyhours of the next morning, Arial lay awake thinking about her marriage. She found it hard to sleep without Peter beside her. It had been so from the first. When he took a quick trip to Three Oaks. When he retreated to his own room during her monthly inconvenience. She would toss and turn, unable to get comfortable, her mind wandering restlessly from one topic to another.
She had not expected to miss him so on that first night they spent apart. Almost, she had begged him to stay with her the following night. She talked herself out of it. She would be wise not to forget that theirs was a marriage of convenience. Peter’s physical desire for her, and hers for him, was a bonus. She could not ask him to sleep next to her, primed for action, as it were, when she was not available to give him relief.
It crossed her mind several times to ask him how he felt about sleeping in her bed without marital congress. She could not form the words. She was too afraid he would reject her—or worse, agree politely, and force himself into something that he disliked.
Her marriage had turned out exactly as she feared. She had fallen in love with her beautiful, kind, clever husband. That was not part of the bargain, and she could never let him know.
*
At Three Oaks,Miss Pettigrew had confined the girls to the schoolroom floor, and banned any maids or footman who had not had the measles. Viv was rather grumpy about not being allowed out of bed. She was also running a fever, covered in an extremely itchy rash, and bothered by a persistent cough. Still, Peter thought that the time to worry about her would be when she stopped complaining.
He was already worried about Rose. Her fever was higher, her rash was worse, she complained that the light hurt her eyes, and she lay listless between bouts of coughing that racked the body that was still too thin despite several months of adequate food.
Miss Pettigrew offered the opinion that she had put her energy into growing several inches once she was properly fed and had little left to fight the illness.
Having checked on the girls, Peter went to wash and change, and found his housekeeper had celebrated the removal of his stepmother by having all of his things moved into the master suite, which Flora Ransome had claimed as her own when his father died. The room had been redecorated the way she liked it. The servants had taken down her fussy floral drapes and replaced them the plain deep blue curtains he remembered from his childhood, but the pink and gilt of the wallpaper and the white paint over the oak paneling still offended his eye.
