“I need your help.” He held out his palms in supplication, walking toward her.
“Never. I reserve my help for the families men like you destroy. Now leave my land before I set the magistrate on you.” She let her cloak fall open and lifted her hand, directing her pistol at his heart. “Or I will kill you myself.”
“Would you send me away if you knew it meant my death?”
She looked deep in his eyes and cocked the trigger. “Yes.”
Chapter Two
Four months later
“He’s a handsome man, your betrothed,” Mrs. Burns announced for the thirtieth time, her voice a yellow-green linen. Sweet, but dim, the parson’s wife had been monitoring the carriage yard for the last hour. “And so generous. Look there: to every child, Lord Colin gives a bit of hard candy.”
Lady Emmeline, the bride, forced herself to sit patiently as Maggie, her maid, threaded a long string of pearls through her dark hair.
When Emmeline had accepted Mrs. Burns’s offer of help, she’d expected something more than a running catalogue of carriages, guests, and clothing. But Mrs. Burns’s patter helped distract Emmeline from the tight ball of anxiety in her belly, and for that Emmeline was grateful.
“Look at that carriage painted in gold, red, and green fleurs de lis,” Mrs. Burns exclaimed. “I’d fear for the highwaymen if I rode in that. Who would have such a thing?”
“That would be my cousin, Mrs. Cane.” Emmeline took care to sound neutral. New to the parish, Mrs. Burns and her husband had not yet been in town for one of Stella’s visits.
Mrs. Burns continued unfazed. “She’s stepping out of the carriage now. That dress must have twenty pounds of lace! You’d think she was meeting the queen.”
“She wishes to impress my fiancé’s brother, the Duke of Forster. They’ve never met.” Emmeline nodded to Maggie, who was holding out a spangled veil to cover Em’s hair and shoulders. “Remember to leave my face uncovered.”
“I know: you ‘are not a prize to be revealed at the altar.’” Maggie mimicked Em’s voice.
And I will not hide my scars. Em left the words unsaid. The word broken rose up in her memory, but she refused it.
“I remember your mother wearing this dress.” Maggie stepped back and studied her work, clearly pleased. “She’d be proud to see you wearing it all restyled and modern.”
Em felt tears well up, but blinked them away. Nodding to Maggie that she was no longer needed, Em rose carefully and stepped to the pier glass. She breathed in deeply and looked.
She focused first on her mother’s dress, a watered-silk round dress with a bodice lightly patterned in delicate embossed stripes. Its neckline curved from puff sleeve to puff sleeve, revealing gently mounded breasts. Delicate lace circled the base of each sleeve and the top of each long kid glove. The same narrow lace trimmed her décolletage and ran down the sides of her bosom. Though the top of the skirt fell in clean lines, the bottom blossomed into flounces of broad lace topped by silk bouquets of blush roses and orange blossoms. The mirror-Emmeline looked like a confection or a princess out of a child’s fairy tale.
Emmeline pulled back the spangled lace framing her dark hair and studied the scars that ran down her cheek and jaw. When she was a child, the thick red welts had drawn Stella’s ridicule. To avoid seeing them, she had learned to look in mirrors selectively—to examine a hat, a bodice, a shawl—but rarely to look herself fully in the face. But today, of all days, she needed to see herself whole.
In the mirror, beside Colin’s confection-princess, a new walking stick rested on the ottoman. A wedding gift from her fiancé, Lord Colin Somerville. Crafted of fine rosewood, the stick hid a core of sharp tempered steel. Emmeline might need the walking stick to support her when her leg failed or to protect her as she traveled her lands. But the lace-flounced woman in the mirror would carry a walking stick purely as an adornment.
Emmeline sighed. In everyday life, she wasn’t the sort of woman who dressed with such elegance or who wore so much lace. Or was she? Emmeline’s wardrobe for their wedding trip had been designed by London’s most-sought after modiste, Madame Elise. Colin, knowing Emmeline’s aversion to London, had brought Madame Elise from the city to Em’s estate. And now, in the estate office, a dozen trunks were packed tight with morning dresses, walking dresses, evening dresses, hats, gloves, petticoats, and chemises, all from the most recent fashion plates. Another of Colin’s gifts for their wedding trip.
But, wardrobe or not, Em had little desire to travel. She’d told Colin as much. She’d prefer to remain at home, watching the seasons turn from winter to spring and back again. Monitoring the cold earth’s temperature until it grew warm enough to nurture spring crops. Watching the trees’ bare branches transform from slight green bud to unfurled leaves. Listening to the songs of the migrating birds announcing their return to the forest and river. Other young ladies of rank had “seasons” in London: Em reveled in the seasons of her land.
But Colin needed to escape from England. He never said it, but she could see it in the way his eyes hooded with sorrow and regret when he thought she wasn’t looking. They were both haunted by memories and loss. Hers were old wounds, best left untouched. Colin’s wounds were fresh—and all her fault. “You won’t deny me the pleasure of meeting my father-in-law,” he’d said as he kissed her forehead. “We’ll be home for the first harvests, I promise.” She couldn’t refuse him: to the Continent they would go.
Even so, she felt unsettled. She studied her confection-princess-self in the mirror. She felt like the frog-prince in the Grimm brothers’ story, cursed to appear as a frog until the kiss of a princess transformed him back into his true shape. But in Emmeline’s case, the story was working in reverse. She might be a lady by rank, but her life, to this point at least, had been with the soil, her land, her people. She liked nothing better than to put on a working dress and walk her fields. A happy frog in her native mud.
But being Colin’s wife, wearing the clothes he’d bought her, traveling to her father as if she were a dutiful daughter—all those things turned her from a humble estate-frog into a lace-princess. Eventually, at least, she and Colin would return home, to her land, to her crops, and she would put on her old frog-clothes and return to work. Surely it would be that easy. Or would her old self, the one unafraid to dirty her hands in estate work, be lost to her? She held out her hands, imagining field dirt under her nails. Without thinking, frog-Emmeline touched her princess-self in the mirror, but she felt only cold glass, not another’s flesh. Could she be both the princess and the frog?
“Ah, look there.” Mrs. Burns, still staring out the window, broke into a titter, breaking Emmeline’s reverie. “Your cousin’s met the duke now. And that curtsy! I didn’t know a woman could curtsy that low and still stand up.” The parson’s wife paused. “Oh, dear me, I guess one can’t. She appears to be stuck.”
Emmeline left her troubled thoughts in the mirror to join Mrs. Burns at the window. Sure enough, her cousin Stella stood balanced mid-curtsy.
“That’s odd.” Mrs. Burns giggled. “Before she curtsied, her husband and a tall lad were right by her side. Where have they gone?”
Emmeline watched as Colin and the duke helped Stella to stand.
“She must be embarrassed, poor dear. She’s batting that fan fast enough to cool Hell.”
Emmeline said nothing. More likely, Stella had rehearsed that failed curtsy for hours, to gain more of the duke’s attention. The duke should likely check his pockets to see if they’d been picked.
“Ah, look, she’s fainted a bit onto the duke’s arm, and he’s having to escort her into the chapel.”
Emmeline smiled in spite of herself. She had no question that Aidan Somerville,