Page 1 of Lady Diana's Lost Lord
Chapter One
London, England
May, 1828
It was a fine day for a family row. They hadn’t had one for a good long time, and Diana had gotten rather accustomed to the even keel of life within her brother’s household. It was a fine change from the volatility that had marked most of her life thus far, and she was loath to disrupt it.
But some things were inevitable. She spread a thin layer of strawberry preserves over a bit of scone and said, “I believe I shall go visit Mama.”
“Absolutely out of the question.” Marcus hadn’t even dignified the statement with a glance up from his paper.
Diana ground her teeth together and said a swift prayer for patience. A futile endeavor, since her patience—what little there was left of it, anyway—had grown increasingly short in supply just lately. “Marcus, you have fundamentally misunderstood the nature of this conversation. I was not asking your permission. I was telling you my intentions.” She rounded on her sister-in-law instead. “Lydia, please. Talk some sense into him.”
“She’smywife,” Marcus said, with an absent flick of a page. “She’ll be talking sense intoyou.”
“How is it,” Lydia said testily, scowling over her breakfast plate, “that I somehow always end up betwixt the two of you?” She bit into a point of toast and said snidely, “I’ll be talking sense into neither of you, I think. You may have this one out yourselves.”
Diana was certain she was going to crack a molar. “Marcus, I’m a spinster. I think I have earned the right to go where I please.”
“You’re not a damned spinster! You’re—”
“Eight and twenty,” Diana interjected, adjusting her spectacles on the bridge of her nose; a nervous little motion she had long since given up attempting to quell. “On the shelf. So far on the shelf I might as well have beenremoved to the attic and left to rot. I amgoing, Marcus. I desperately require a bit of time away from”—London and its occupants, so full of their wretched, pitying stares—“everything. Just everything.”
“Diana,” Marcus said, setting his paper aside. “Weatherford will return one of these days. He’s got to. And when he does—”
Weatherford. Just the mention of the man made her fists clench at her sides. “Then what, Marcus? I should be expected to marry him? When in ten yearshe has not—” Not made a single appearance. Nor sent even so much as a note. She had weathered through Season after blasted Season, attracting no attention, receiving no offers because she was to all accounts already spoken for. Just wasting her life away in hours at a time, with nothing at all to show for it. It simply was not fair that men were permitted to do as they pleased, while women—
Women had to do whatmenpleased, even if that was nothing at all. Perhaps especially if that was nothing at all. She had been betrothed to Weatherford since childhood, and ever since she had been left to twiddle her thumbs in the faint hope that one day he might get around to actually marrying her.
“I suppose,” she said, “I’m meant to sit here and mind my manners and pray that someday Weatherford might deign to check his watch and recall that he has had an appointment with a reverend for some time now?”
Marcus blew out a breath. “If I had my way, I’d have dragged him back home years ago,” he said. “No one could say you have not been patient enough already. And if I knew where to find the man, I would do it now.”
“He does not intend to wed me,” Diana said. “We must all face that fact.” And she had lost the best years of her life waiting for a bridegroom who would never appear. “So there truly is no need for me to weather one more fruitless Season, when by all rights I ought to have given it all up ages and ages ago.”
“Diana—”
“You won’t sway me, Marcus, and I’m long past the age where you could compel me.”
“Damnation, I don’t want tocompelyou—I want you to be safe and happy. You won’t have the creature comforts to which you’re accustomed. Mother’s got hardly more than a cottage in Scotland.” A muscle pulled in his cheek, and a glint of worry came into his eyes. “And your dowry—”
She didn’t need it, and it had been given over to Weatherford’s father long ago besides. He had needed the funds to replenish his dwindling coffers, and he had been willing to sell his son in marriage in order to get them. Justas Diana’s father had been willing to purchase him, so that he could effectively wash his hands of his responsibility toward his young daughter’s future. “I received a bequest from Grandfather, same as you,” she said. Though not nearly as much. Butenough, she thought. Enough to keep her comfortably. Perhaps for the whole of her life, if she were frugal. If Marcus did not grow to resent hosting his maiden sister indefinitely in his home.
Marcus sighed, clearly conflicted, and turned his gaze toward his wife once more. They seemed to be carrying on a conversation entirely without words; a phenomenon that Diana had observed only amongst happily married couples, and which had grown remarkably tedious over the years.
‘Can you convince her otherwise?’Marcus seemed to be saying, the hint of a plea at the corners of his eyes.
‘I should say not,’ Lydia returned, with the slight narrowing of her lids and the sharp flutter of lashes. ‘You know your sister. She is remarkably stubborn.’
‘Probably,’ Marcus volleyed back, his expression shifting fractionally to that insipid calf-eyed look of the eternally devoted husband, ‘that isyourinfluence, my dear.’
And then it all devolved into maddening flirtation, which was quite a lot for a woman who hadn’t had even one damned suitor to stomach over breakfast. “For the love of God,” Diana muttered over her bacon. “Just occasionally I wish you weren’t quitesobesotted with one another. It’s nauseating.” And not a little jealousy-inducing to a spinster who had missed her chance for a romance like that. She didn’twantto be jealous; it was hardly a becoming thing for a woman to be. But she was nonetheless. Just the tiniest bit.
At length, Marcus cleared his throat, somehow pulling his attention from the lure of his beautiful wife, and said, “Well, if you cannot be convinced, then I suppose I shall have to allow it.”
Piqued at the high-handed response, Diana made a stabbing motion with the tines of her fork straight into the yolk of her egg. “Again, Marcus, since you seem to be selectively deaf, I was not asking your permission.”
Marcus continued as if she had not spoken. “You will write. Often.” He shook out his paper once again, though his gaze remained on her. Still there was that worry there in his eyes, and for just an instant Diana felt a stab of guilt.
