Page 1 of Lady Mary's May Day Mischief
Chapter 1
No. 21, Queen Square
Bath, England
Lady Mary Trentham-Little-Finch bent over her garden box and cursed the letter that crinkled in her garden apron pocket. She needed no reminders of her latest failure.
She jabbed her trowel into the damp soil. She would count her assets.
Not that letter she’d gotten this morning. Along with the newspaper that bore the announcement of Esme Harvey’s engagement and coming wedding. Or that other page that told of the Princess of Wales’ marriage next week to a German prince. Both reminded her of her failure.
Curse it. What had happened to her matchmaking abilities? Fizzled, like a damp fire.
She saw men for what they were. Women, too. What they needed in a spouse.
Yes, Esme was getting married. Not to the man Mary had encouraged to court her, but to another whom her friend, Lady Fiona Chastain favored. Esme was the fifth of Mary’s friends to marry in as many years. All of them near the time of this annual May Day Frolic Esme’s parents hosted. But Esme was also the second to find a different man more appealing than the one Mary had proposed.
And yes, there was that other irritant.
With the back of her hand, she wiped away telltale moisture from her cheek.
Everyone was getting married. Finding love and companionship.
“Do not say the obvious,” she warned herself about her own state of affairs. “There are benefits to spinsterhood.”
She pushed up her floppy garden hat with her forearm. “First—very liberating, too, if I say so myself—a woman who need not flirt with any creature in trousers need not attire herself slavishly in the latest fashion. That saves money, a useful relief to the strains on one’s limited monthly income.”
She sank her trowel into the fine loam of her seedling box. True, too, few liked her taste in clothes. Save her parrot, Caesar.
Then there was that other benefit. Spinsterhood also saved a person endless hours of preening one’s feathers to attract a man whom one did not necessarily know well enough to accompany to the altar. “Or to bed. And that, Mama said, should be a race to the bedroom.”
A third benefit…
She considered her little green sprouts of celery, kale and cauliflower. Frowning at how small they were this year, she peered upward at the ice blue April sky. “Is there another asset to being an unmarried lady?”
Yes, of course. Tedious attempts to enchant a prospective groom meant that one was free to state raw truths.
She approved of that. Bending to her work, she carved a straight line in her soil with her hand trowel. But stopped again.
Calling a spade a spade—she chuckled at that—had often gotten her into trouble. Despite popular opinion, in her nearly twenty-five years, she’d held her tongue on many occasions. Largely to please her mother. Or her father. Or their friends. But now…
Now that both her parents were gone, and those loved ones who remained wereherfriends who understood her foibles, was she not free of the thankless obligation to be charming and witty and wise and ever so politic?
She had focused on her one grand ability to find husbands for her friends. Until she failed with that match of two years ago. And the one she’d learned of this morning.
The announcement she’d read in the Bath newspaper over breakfast had brought a tear to her eye. She never cried. But her cumulative losses overtook her and a few tears had wet down her toast. Soggy toast was not tasty. But she had reason to shed a tear or two. The loss of her parents, affectionate and kind. Her brother, studious and smart, gone at Badajoz. Her best friend, gone nearly ten years now to school and the wars, a ghost who’d managed a regular correspondence. Written from battlefields, splattered with the rain and mud of struggle and death. And then…after he’d come home two years ago after his own father died, he’d found solace in her company. Kissed her. Often. Then Napoleon returned to Paris from Elba. He’d returned to his duties. Since then, Blake Lindsey, Captain Lindsey of the Royal Engineers and a recently minted baron, had stopped writing. She knew not why. Years of his letters that sat upstairs in her trunk, tied together in fraying pink ribbons, revealed no reasons her dearest friend no longer wished to communicate.
She jabbed her trowel into the dark earth.
Oh! She hated grievances she could not cure. She liked growth, excitement, spring flowers and shoots of kale and cabbage.
But reading the news of weddings this morning had caught her unawares and stabbed her with grief.
Not because she hadn’t chosen Northington for Esme. Not because she wanted Northington for herself. For goodness sake, he was her distant cousin!
Not because she hated Esme, either. Esme might be peculiar, yet she had charms none of which were worthy of ridicule.
But because…
