Page 28 of A Lady of Means
“I daresay a woman of your conversational powers, with your heart for charity, could make an even better duchess than the dowager.”
“A conceding of the point, a compliment, and flowers on the same day.Why, your grace, if I were a sentimental woman, I might think you were declaring some intent.”
“My intent,” he leaned forward, the napkin resting on his thigh for his teacup and saucer fell between them.
“Allow me, Your Grace.”Moria made a great show of leaning to pick up the linen, replacing it on his thigh where her hands shouldn’t go even if it was the briefest and most testing of touches.His eyes fell to her breasts, then he cleared his throat and met her eyes.His green eyes held her for just a breath, she felt warmer than she had a moment before.
“My intent, now that my campaign in Parliament has been successful, is to find a wife this season.”
“A wife.”
“Not just a wife.An impressive match.Someone who proves those who judged me for my mother’s heritage, to be wrong.Someone worth making mine.”
Another man’s words entered her mind at the very same time:
This challenge sounds even more improbable by the moment, and I fear I’ve already lost.
* * *
With the Dukehaving declared his looming intent and made his goodbyes, Moria was left in the drawing room with only her embroidery hoop and her flowers for company.
But as is the way of large families and sought-after debutantes, this was short-lived.
“Sister,” Jasper entered, followed by a familiar young man.“You have a visitor.Were you expecting the reverend?”
Moria looked around him, her friend Llewyn Fortney gave her a conspiratorial smile from his vantage point across the room.
“The vicar has come to inquire about my salvation,” she said, taking his proffered flowers, noting the unusual inclusion of Jasmine that almost made her eyes go cloudy.“Flirtatious and vacuous debutantes such as myself require extensive effort to convert from our path of destruction.”
“Godspeed,” Jasper said to the man in his sitting room, and exited, twin hounds at his heels.
Moria crossed the room, placing the flowers in a vase over the mantle.“Is it just me, or are your eyes bluer than the last time I saw you?”
Brookevale’s fledgling vicar, a gentle, tender friend who had kept her secrets and sat vigil with all of them, Llewyn Fortney shook his head at her.
“And this beard of yours…” she narrowed her eyes.“Llewyn, you must be beating off the young women of Brookevale with your Bible.”
The man tilted his head back and laughed.“I’ve missed you, you madwoman.”
She swatted at his arm playfully.“Don’t go getting sentimental on me, vicar.”
She took a seat at the tea table and he followed suit.He motioned at the flowers in the sitting room that seemed to be multiplying.“It’s like Vauxhall Gardens in here.”
Moria refrained from asking what a country vicar knew about the infamous pleasure gardens and looked from him to the dozens of artfully arranged flowers, some large arrays of roses, some more exotic flowers, as the men of the ton had heard that she had a penchant for the more unique assortments.
“Oh yes, that,” she shrugged.“It’s just a normal Wednesday around here.”
Llewyn looked at her with knowing eyes.“I remember your partiality to Wednesdays.”
* * *
And suddenly Moriawas falling through time, into a sea of remembrances to one blustery day two winters past.Lady Moria had been nearly insensible with fever.In her delirium, she’d felt the calendar mocking her and her aversion to Tuesdays, as the worst events of her life had all happened on a Tuesday.Her father shipping off for what was supposed to be a mere nine months, the night that Marcus had died, the night she’d woken with her sheets slick with her own blood.But Wednesday?Wednesday appeared like a changing of the guard, unaware of what Tuesday had brought.
When she woke to see the date on the calendar, her heart rate had accelerated until she clutched her chest for air.She usually brought flowers to the mausoleum behind the parish church, not just for Marcus, but for the life they’d created and lost, for the life they’d never even started.It seemed such an inane and small thing to still consume her when her mother was also ill abed, but there it was.
Somehow, flowers were already waiting there at the mausoleum for the boy she’d loved, the child she’d lost.
She let out a small gasp that sounded more like a sob when she saw it.The small posy in her hand that she’d dug from the dregs of the garden paled in comparison to this display.It was vibrant and stark against the snow-covered ground, standing out just as Marcus always had.Tears burned at her eyelids, she wiped at them with her kid glove, kneeling next to the towering piece of marble.She grit her teeth as her knees hit the ground, the bitter snow cold against her limbs even through her many layers.
