Earl's Well That Ends Well (The Way to a Lord's Heart #5) - Jane Ashford Page 0,4

call on her, a woman alone in a part of London where he didn’t fit. He would be noticed; eyebrows would be raised. He had no wish to cause her difficulties. A thought occurred. Perhaps Mrs. Thorpe knew the señora? His friend seemed to be acquainted with nearly everyone in the theater world, no matter how tangential. That was it. At the first opportunity, he would find out. Mrs. Thorpe could even vouch for his character to the señora, since he seemed to require such bolstering. His brain shied away from asking whyever this should be the case.

“My lord?” asked Tom. The lad had walked on a few steps and now turned back with a quizzical expression.

He’d been standing in the middle of the street like a moonstruck calf. “Coming,” said Arthur and hastened to catch up.

Two

Teresa Alvarez de Granada tipped a handful of olives that she’d walked a good distance to purchase from a Levantine vendor into a shallow dish, discarding the twist of oily paper that had held them. She picked out one, closed her eyes, and bit down. The taste brought back the sunshine of her youth, the scent of lemons, the whisper of vine leaves stirring on an ancient pergola. Gone forever, but still remembered. She chewed memories. If only the good ones could be separated from the bad and kept like a casket of jewels to be taken out and admired at will.

Teresa spit out the olive pit and put it on the edge of the dish. Her eating habits were strange to many of the English. She didn’t much care for meat, certainly not the thick, bloody slabs of beef they enjoyed. A perfectly roasted chicken now and then perhaps. And she was fond of vegetables, both raw and cooked, which many of her new countrymen disdained as fodder for animals. Fortunately, she could make her own choices in this regard, as in all others now, gracias a Dios.

She looked around the front room of her tiny house. Her refuge was comprised of one fair-sized chamber downstairs with an extension behind for the kitchen and a place for her maidservant. A respectable woman couldn’t live all alone, here or anywhere. And she had become a respectable woman. Who would want to be solitary en verdad? She was no medieval hermit.

A little walled yard at the back contained the privy and a coal bin. She hoped to take up some of the cobbles in one corner for a small garden eventually.

A single bedchamber upstairs had slanted ceilings under the roof, two dormer windows, and space for little more than a bed and a wardrobe. But she owned the place; that was the important thing. And it was in good repair. The furnishings were scant but adequate and might be augmented in time. She’d managed a bit of color in the parti-colored shawl laid over the back of the drab settee and one of her own watercolors hung over the small hearth. She gazed at the sun-drenched landscape in the picture. She’d had ranks of rooms to wander through as a girl, before war came roaring over her land. If she’d known life would come down to this, she might have savored that space more.

Her home was far from the fashionable haunts where people like the Earl of Macklin attended glittering parties, Teresa thought. The tall nobleman young Tom had introduced would not find her here. He would disappear back into the ranks of English society. She’d glided through such opulent festivities in her time, long ago. She’d also had a surfeit of pain and terror—days when she had no money for food, when she had to cower in ruins to evade marching armies. She’d done things she despised. But she refused to be ashamed. She’d survived, as others had not. A plain, quiet life was just what she wanted now. It was such a magnificent luxury—that no one could give her orders or make demands.

Teresa turned away from the bitter recollection of some of those and glimpsed a flash in the mirror hanging beside the front door. Her earrings had caught the light and flung it back. She shook her head to admire the effect in the glass. Tiny sprays of emeralds glinted from chains of delicate gold filigree suspended from her earlobes. She had designed this pair herself, as she often did, and had them made, taking jewels that evoked old bad memories and turning them into something of her own, something she could