to be wary of what came next.
“You didn’t even hear my idea!” Bridget looked wounded. “It’s not rude or dangerous. I’m sure Cleo would allow it, if she were here.”
“And yet I can’t help but note you did not ask before she left.” Viola shook her head with a soft tsk. “What is it?”
Bridget brightened right out of her pretend hurt. “A play. To cheer Serena. It will be silly and make no sense at all and she’ll be so diverted. Please say we may put it on!”
That didn’t sound so dreadful . . . and yet it was Bridget, so Viola wasn’t reassured. “Which play?”
“Oh, I’m writing it,” was the cheerful reply. “Completely original. Nothing vulgar or inappropriate, I promise.”
For a moment she was shocked into silence. It wasn’t that Bridget wasn’t bright enough or creative enough to write a play, it was that Viola had never seen her sit still long enough to write a scene, let alone multiple acts. “How exciting,” she said, recovering. “May I read it?”
“Even better—you’ll be in it!” Bridget’s eyes glowed as she beamed back. “Everyone will be, except Mama if she’s going to be ill for a while, and Great-Aunt Sophronia. They’ll be our audience.”
Her heart settled into a normal rhythm again. If Bridget meant for her to have a part, she’d have to see the play, and could put a stop to any nonsense before it got out of hand. And if anyone could make Serena smile again, it would be Bridget. For all her madcap ways, the girl was irrepressible in her good humor and wit, with a knack for making people laugh even in their foulest tempers. And the duchess had said to encourage entertainments.
“It sounds like a fine idea,” she told Bridget.
“Thank you!” The girl clapped her hands and ran back into the house before Viola could say anything more, which was likely for the best.
A gust of wind made her shiver. She wrapped her arms around herself and cast one last look down the long oak-lined avenue; the ducal carriage was already gone from sight. Her gaze drifted upward. The clouds seemed to be growing thicker and grayer by the moment, and the air had a leaden stillness that promised snow.
Viola didn’t like storms.
Chapter 1
“How much farther is it?”
Wesley Morane, Earl of Winterton, inhaled slowly and then exhaled even more slowly. If he didn’t know better, he would think his nephew was still a child instead of a young man nearing his twenty-first birthday. “A few more miles, I expect.”
Justin scowled and slumped by the window. The weak light caught his fair hair and made him look as young and petulant as he was behaving. “Aren’t we nearly to Cornwall yet?”
It felt as though they had circled the globe in this carriage. Wes tried to keep his voice calm as he replied, “No.” He did not repeat an earlier mistake, of offering to show Justin their progress on the small but handsome leather-bound atlas of England he kept in the traveling chaise. That had not gone well, with Justin fixating on the distance left to travel instead of the beauty of the illustrated map of Dorset.
Several minutes of silence passed. Wes did not fool himself they would continue indefinitely. Time had already seemed to stretch and slow, much like the distance they had still to travel. At one point he wondered if the carriage and horses had become stuck in a vast mud slick, where the hooves and wheels were only churning in place, never making an inch of progress.
“I could have stayed in Hampshire,” Justin said abruptly. “Dorset is hideous in winter.”
So is Hampshire. Wes managed to keep himself from saying it aloud. He did not manage to keep from thinking about a few places that were not hideous in winter—the East Indies, for example. The winter of 1808 had been splendid there, sitting under thick palm fronds and learning about the spice trade from his father.
“I recall you agitating to leave Hampshire,” he said instead. “Your mother told me you were wild to be away.”
The boy’s mouth pulled sullenly. “Not this far away.”
That was what his mother had feared. Anne was Wes’s oldest sister, and she knew exactly what her son wanted, so newly grown to manhood and so abruptly possessed of his father’s title. Justin had barely finished university when his father died, leaving him the new Viscount Newton. Instead of the Grand Tour he had been promised upon completing his studies, Justin had