When Emmaline’s brother Geoffrey had died, Helen had tricked herself out in crushingly expensive widow’s weeds, impatiently waited out a full month of mourning and then deposited her son, Rafael, and the twins on the doorstep of Ashurst Hall and returned to London and those friends. Over the years, the children had spent more time at Ashurst Hall than on their own estate, until Rafe had left to serve with Wellington.
Emmaline had been as thrilled by these additions to the family as her only surviving brother had been appalled—which may have been one of the reasons Emmaline had been so delighted. After all, it wasn’t as if there was any love lost between Charlton and herself.
Charlton and Geoffrey were so very much older than Emmaline, and males to her female, so it was not surprising that the three had never been especially close. And Emmaline could have accepted that. But Emmaline’s mother had departed this earth the same day her only daughter was born, and for that, Charlton and Geoffrey would never forgive her. Even their father, the Duke of Ashurst, had been no more than occasionally aware of his daughter’s existence. Not that he’d much cared for his sons, either. Emmaline always thought his children would have garnered more affection from their sire if they could run on four legs, go up on point when they spotted the fox and then lay at his feet at the banquet whilst he celebrated his latest glorious kill.
And then Geoffrey had died, and their father had looked around and noticed that, by Jupiter, he was in danger of being outnumbered by petticoats. Charlton’s wife was enough to have twittering about Ashurst Hall, complaining that he came to dinner in his hunting clothes, or tossing fierce looks at him when he belched or scratched satisfyingly whenever the spirit moved him. It was time to marry off the one he could get rid of, by Jupiter!
So Emmaline had been hauled off to London upon the occasion of her eighteenth birthday, where she was put under the supposedly watchful eye of Helen Daughtry. Which is the same as to say Emmaline was left to her own devices while Helen flirted outrageously with any man who happened to look at Emmaline in a matrimonial way.
Not that Emmaline hadn’t had her chances during the Seasons she’d suffered through under Helen’s haphazard chaperonage. There had been at least a few gentlemen who hadn’t taken one look at Helen’s décolletage and deserted Emmaline as if she’d just told them she had contracted the plague. There had been Sir William Masterson, a widower with six children under the age of ten. He’d made no bones that he was looking for a woman to ride herd on his…well, on his herd. Lord Phillipson had loved her; Emmaline had been very aware of that fact from the way he had all but drooled on her shoe tops, but as his breath would fell an ox at ten paces, she’d felt she had to decline his proposal.
There had been no third Season, as her father had died, and Emmaline had insisted on a full year of mourning (Helen had actually laughed when she’d heard that, which was, in fact, as she headed out the door on her way to London less than two hours after the duke had been put to bed for his eternal rest i
n the family mausoleum).
Charlton, now the thirteenth duke, had given Emmaline one more chance the following Season, sending her off with a warning that an only passably pretty woman of three and twenty shouldn’t be so damned choosy and she’d better find some fool who’d come up to scratch because he was done paying through the nose for gowns and gloves and other fripperies.
The Season hadn’t gone well. Emmaline sometimes wondered if she had deliberately sabotaged herself and her matrimonial hopes simply to spite the new duke.
On the event of her twenty-fourth birthday, Charlton’s gift to her had been a half dozen white, embroidered spinster caps and the information that, while he and his sons George and Harold (their mama having succumbed to a putrid cold three years previously) would be going to London for the Season, she was to remain at home.
Emmaline hadn’t protested. Indeed, at the time, she had been rather relieved. After all, in her many Seasons in London she had met, danced and spoken with nearly every eligible bachelor not risking his life on the Peninsula, and none of them had excited her in the least. She could find little attraction in men who cared more for the cut of their evening jacket than they did the notion that Bonaparte might somehow best Wellington and they’d all be speaking French. How on earth was she supposed to take any of these men seriously when none of them had been any better than her brother and nephews, some of them actually worse?
But now the war was at last over and Bonaparte was on his way to a deserved exile, and the world could welcome home all its fine, brave soldiers…who to a man would surely be on the lookout for ladies much younger than Lady Emmaline.
No, she was destined to remain forever on this estate, sitting in this same garden, season after season, year after year, birthday after birthday, waiting for her perfect lover who would never arrive. How she had tired of watching Charlton eat with his fingers at the dinner table, hearing George and Harold brag about their latest bouts of drinking and gambling, wretches that they were, not to mention listening in some fear to her brother threaten to send her off to their great-aunt in Scotland because he was weary of looking at her.
Yes, having Rafael and Lydia and Nicole so often in residence these past years had been Emmaline’s main comfort, and she missed them sorely.
She did not miss Charlton or his sons, who had left her alone without a kind word about her birthday, most probably because they’d forgotten the date. No, they’d gone off five days ago to play with George’s newest toy, a yacht he had won at the gaming tables. As if any of them knew the first thing about steering a boat, or whatever it was one did with a boat.
Would it be terrible of her to hope that all three of them spent most of their voyage hanging over the side, sick as dogs and casting up their suppers into the Channel?
Emmaline sighed, folding up the letter from her nieces as she tried to shake off her depressing thoughts. She wished her good friend Charlotte Seavers, who lived in Rose Cottage with her parents, right next door to Ashurst Hall, could share her birthday with her, but her mother was still not quite well. But, no, Emmaline wouldn’t think about that particular sadness tonight, either.
Cook had promised her a special treat for supper, and she really should go change out of her simple sprigged muslin gown and into something more festive. She didn’t wish to disappoint the servants, who she knew had been busily polishing silver especially for what would be a solitary meal in the cavernous dining room, followed by a quiet evening of reading and an early bedtime.
Perhaps she should reconsider those caps Charlton had given her along with the warning that she was only living under his roof because of his kind and generous nature. She considered this idea for a full three seconds before declaring to the flowers and the trees: “The devil I will. With or without my family, I’m going to celebrate my birthday. By Jupiter.”
And then, after surprising herself with her outburst, Emmaline quickly bit her lips between her teeth as she heard the sound of firm, purposeful footsteps approaching along the brick path. How wonderful. Now she was talking to herself, a very spinsterlike thing to do, and someone may have heard her.
She turned her head at the sound of her name. “Yes. Here I am,” she said, knowing she did not recognize the male voice that had called to her.
The gentleman who appeared momentarily was a complete stranger to her, for she surely would have remembered such a tall, darkly handsome man as this if she had ever seen him.
“Lady Emmaline?”
“Yes…um, yes, I am she,” Emmaline said, feeling rather shaken by the sight of the man’s coal-black hair and blazingly blue eyes. As her own eyes were a very ordinary brown and her hair so typically English blond, she had always had an attraction to dark hair and blue eyes. Indeed, she had secretly envied young Nicole her ebony curls and nearly violet eyes, knowing that when she and the differently beautiful Lydia came of age and headed to Mayfair, their suitors would probably have to be beaten away with stout sticks.
“Please pardon the intrusion, ma’am. Your butler told me I would find you here.”
Belatedly, Emmaline held out her hand to the man, her hopefully subtle inspection unnoticed by him. She recognized his uniform as belonging to the Royal Navy. And on my birthday, too—what a lovely present.
She mentally slapped herself for her frivolous thoughts, probably old-maid thoughts, or those more often entertained by someone like Helen. Then again, Emmaline reminded herself, she was not exactly a debutante, was she? “Captain?”
“Alastair. Captain John Alastair, ma’am,” he said after only a slight hesitation, taking her hand in his and bowing over it before releasing her and rising to his full height once more. “I’ve brought news. If we might step inside, ma’am? And do you have other family in residence at the moment?”
Goodness, what a glorious uniform, right down to the bicorne hat he had tucked up under his arm. Now this was a man worth meeting. Stop that! she warned her inner self, who was certainly not behaving as a spinster should. But, my, he was so handsome…