Page 3 of A Lady of Means
The high ceilingsand windows of the Pembrooke London summerhouse and smell of fresh flowers made for a welcome retreat, and Moria needed a reprieve from her siblings.All their good-intentioned worrying and arguing had made it hard for her to hear her own thoughts.She threw herself into a mindless task: embroidering a swath of silk and linen for a gown for her nephew’s christening.
She didn’t hear her companion, Miss Bridget Kelley, part servant and part friend, as she entered the summerhouse and sat beside her.Moria didn’t look up.A piece of ironed white paper with achingly familiar penmanship entered her field of vision.Moria stilled.Willed herself not to show her hand.
“Doesthishave anything to do with your refusal of the lord and his…fickleness of character?”
Miss Kelley narrowed her eyes.Moria pasted on a bored smile.So Miss Kelley had been at the piano attempting to teach Moria’s nephew and her own ward to play the scales, but she had been eavesdropping on Moria’s conversation with her sister.
“What do you know?”
The other woman toyed with the envelope and seemed to choose her words.Moria wanted to snap the envelope from her hands, eager to hear his words.Even in the few times they’d met in secret, his voice was still so clear and deep in her mind.
Wherever I go, I fear you’ll follow me.In my thoughts, at least, my lady.
He hadn’t been telling the truth, had he?He was the one following her wherever she went, thoughts of him appearing without being conjured, like some phantom.
Miss Kelley clearing her throat brought Moria back to the present.“I suspect you’ve been carrying on a courtship with the sender of these letters,” she asserted, holding up the offending parchment.
“And if you’re wrong?”Moria hedged, only briefly looking up from her needlework.
Her every impulse screamed to hide, except for one.One strong, loud voice inside her that said,but why do you have to hidehim?
“But I’mright,” Miss Kelley said with a feline grin.
“What makes you so certain?”Moria threw down her needlework on the seat beside her.
“Call it…a woman’s intuition.”
Moria leaned around the other woman to call into the doorway, “Not now, Finn, she’s busy!”Miss Kelley, brow furrowed, turned toward the direction to find a doorway devoid of her five year old ward.
Moria capitalized on her distraction to slip the letter from the woman’s hands.When Miss Kelley turned around, Moria grinned, fanning herself with the envelope.“If you’ll excuse me, I’m going to my desk to answer this correspondence.”
Moria made to leave, but the other woman grabbed her skirt.
“Unhand me!You forget yourself, Miss Kelley.You would be wise to remember your place.”
“Snobbery doesn’t suit you, Moria,” she stepped closer to her charge, “I think you will need someone on your side to get what you want.You would be courting him out in the open if you were able to.”
The overwhelming urge to tell someone, the soft understanding in Miss Kelley’s eyes softened her resolve.The letter pressed against her chest, Moria sat back down.The other woman closed the door and then sat opposite her on a settee.
“He’s a captain in Her Majesty’s Army.We met at the coaching inn on the way to London for Noelle’s first season.”
The other woman’s eyes widened.“You’ve hidden this for an entire year?”
Moria nodded.Miss Kelley looked stunned, She shook her head.“That must have been…lonely.Not to be able to share any of what you were thinking or feeling with the rest of your family or your friends.Why didn’t you share this with them?”the other woman asked, gentleness in her voice the key to Moria’s vault.
Moria looked at the envelope in her hands, his sloping, neat hand as familiar as his face in her mind.“It was all mine for a moment.After over a year in mourning and a whole lifetime of sharing everything with them.After I returned from mourning in the country, and it seemed like society had just…moved on.And then Noelle was engaged.And I was being courted by a Duke, and the Earl of Drysdale.Everyone was singing my praises again….”She blew some air out of her mouth, “It never seemed like the right time.”
“But you care for him…or else you’d have broken it off.Are you aiming to keep your relationship a secret and wed someone else… The Earl of Drysdale, or the Duke of Andover, perhaps?”Moria’s companion picked some blooms out of a basket on the nearby table, arranging them in her hands and discarding some as she talked.
While it was done by ladies of means, marriages for alliance’s sake and then affairs conducted later in secret…Moria had known that kind of love before.Or she’d thought that’s what it was.But she saw the unconditional affection that both her sisters had achieved with their partners.She wanted love returned and shared in the open, in the light.Not the kind of adoration of being the darling of the ton, but a love that withstood her every flaw and had room for her failings.
I hear you, even when you’re saying nothing at all.
Maybe the man who’d written to her could be such a man.Moria pocketed the letter.
“That’s not what I want.I wantDevyn.I want to share him with my family…but I…” A single tear fell as Moria shook her head as if to bat away any further tears.“What if I can’t give up all the ground I’ve conquered?What if they all think I’m throwing my future away?”
Miss Kelley was beside her in a moment.Comforting hands traced patterns down her back.Moria saw a swath of red hair, a sparkle of green eyes and almost envisioned her mother she’d lost to the unfairness of disease.“When your brother and sister took me into their employ, there was no mention of steering you toward a match with a noble.Your brother’s words were: ‘men who love my sisters and would treat them with respect.’”
