Lady Violet Finds a Bridegroom, page 1
Lady Violet Finds a Bridegroom
The Lady Violet Mysteries—Book Three
Grace Burrowes
Grace Burrowes Publishing
Lady Violet Finds a Bridegroom
Copyright © 2021 by Grace Burrowes
All rights reserved.
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* * *
Cover image: Cracked Light Studio
Cover design: Wax Creative, Inc.
Contents
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
To my dear readers
Lady Violet Enjoys a Frolic—Excerpt
Dedication
This series is dedicated to
my nephew, Jackson.
Chapter One
The time had come for me to have my way with Monsieur Hugh St. Sevier.
The gentleman was willing, of that I had only a scintilla of doubt. I was even more convinced that St. Sevier was a gentleman and that he would make an excellent partner for my first venture into the privileges and freedoms a discreet widow was entitled to.
I reached these conclusions as St. Sevier again served as my escort, this time on a journey that would take us the length of England and into central Scotland. St. Sevier professed a desire to see more of his adopted country, and though many widows traveled without a male companion, I did not yet feel sufficiently independent to undertake that challenge.
My decision to dip a naked toe into the waters of dalliance had come over me slowly, in the course of a long winter spent in London. Entertainments in the coldest months are few in the capital, particularly because Parliament, since Waterloo, had not been opening until well after the Yuletide holidays.
In the previous year, I had been all but dragooned into attending a summer house party and then a gathering at my family seat on the occasion of my brother Felix’s nuptials. St. Sevier had joined me on those travels and on the adventures I’d encountered when away from my home. The house party had been victimized by a series of thefts. Felix’s bride had been abducted prior to the nuptials.
Both puzzles had been solved to my satisfaction, and those excursions had shaken me free of a lingering malaise. After observing two years of mourning for my late husband, I had grown so familiar with the habit of solitude that venturing forth had become an ordeal to be dreaded. St. Sevier, a physician, had coaxed me into leaving Town, and the changes of air had done me good.
As I’d partaken of country vistas, good books, and the occasional horseback ride, I’d shaken off the torpor of grief—a troubled marriage is a more complicated loss than a happy one, in my opinion—and taken stock of my life.
The inventory I found consisted of a smothering portion of boredom, duty, routine, and loneliness. That last item had been difficult to identify, in part because I had so long claimed ownership of it—or it had claimed ownership of me. As the only girl and youngest of five children, I had been isolated by my gender and my age. My mother had died when I was yet a child, and that further nudged me to the edges of the family circle.
I had become engaged at the age of seventeen to Frederick Belmaine, a handsome, wealthy, bon vivant who had appeared to be my every girlish fantasy come true—by the time my father had finished singing Freddie’s praises.
Papa, whom the world knows as Sylvanus, Earl of Derwent, has a talent for embroidering heavily on the facts. After my wedding breakfast, Freddie had offered me a chaste kiss on the cheek and nipped off ostensibly to bid farewell to his friends at the club.
He had, in fact, popped around to his mistress’s, there to enlist her sympathy for the tribulations he would endure as a new husband. Freddie had not been intentionally cruel, which had made marriage to him all the more bewildering and painful for a girl raised without meaningful female guidance.
Freddie had died five years after speaking the vows he’d broken the day he’d uttered them, the cause of death food poisoning, as far as anybody would tell me. He had expired at his favorite brothel, in the arms of a woman whom I subsequently came to know and even like.
He was a better husband in death than he had been in life. I was quite well fixed and had no need to remarry. I was also somewhat more worldly than many young widows, for Freddie had delighted in educating me out of my sheltered upbringing. Had I provided him with children, he would doubtless have encouraged me to pursue any number of liaisons with his indulgent blessing.
Thoughts of my marriage could still provoke me to anger, but not to the grinding rage I’d felt in the early years of wifehood. I had reconciled myself to the hope that in time Freddie would have put away his extramarital pleasures, and I would have forgiven him his errant ways.
That theory offered comfort and allowed me to instead focus on the notion that I was but six-and-twenty years old, and while I had no wish to remarry, neither did I wish to become a nun. I had no wish to become a mother without benefit of matrimony either, and St. Sevier, as a physician, would be well versed in methods for preventing conception.
With my grand theory of dalliance firmly in hand, I packed up my trunks, endured the grumbling of my maid, Lucy, and climbed into my traveling coach. I sent Lucy ahead with my luggage and a handsome young footman, while I took for myself the pleasure of St. Sevier’s company.
That he did not kill me before we’d reached Peterborough was a testament to his great patience and reserves of chivalry. That I did not kill him resulted from the failure of an English gentlewoman’s education to teach young ladies the effective use of violence.
Peterborough sits eighty-five miles from London on the Great North Road. On dry roads in summer, with sound teams at every change, that distance can easily be covered in one long day. Post coaches, which also ran through the night, could do twice the distance in a twenty-four-hour period.
St. Sevier and I were traveling in spring, however. The roads up from London were muddy, two different horses from two different teams had gone lame, and our vehicle was my very own commodious—and thus lumbering—traveling coach.
On our third day, I was determined that we’d make better time. I gave John Coachman the office to make haste where he could safely do so, and we were off. The resulting rhythmic jostling inside the coach meant St. Sevier did not even try to read his newspaper.
“Tell me about the bride,” he said, putting said newspaper into the slot fashioned to hold it on the side of the coach. “I don’t believe you mentioned her to me before receiving her invitation.”
“Fanetta MacPherson was a schoolmate at Miss Harmon’s Academy. We both loved books and thus spent many an hour in the school’s library. She was a true scholar, while I was…”
What? Waiting to grow up and marry, as all gently bred English girls were supposed to do?
“While you were genuinely curious,” St. Sevier said. “She is Scottish?”
“She’s half Scottish. Her English mother was raised in the Borders and married a Scotsman, though he unfortunately passed away while Fanny was still young. I would have thought Fanny long-married, but I gather she hasn’t had much opportunity to meet suitable parties in her step-father’s social ambit. Her mother was ill for some time before she passed away, and Fanny was her companion and caretaker.”
Fanny would have been an excellent choice in those roles. She had the most melodious voice, and her narration improved everything from poetry, to plays, to Walter Scott’s grand romances. That she lived so distant from the entertainments of Drury Lane was a grave injustice to her literary nature.
“And now,” St. Sevier said, “this woman whom you haven’t seen for more than eight years invites you north, and you—who have been the next thing to a recluse—are packed and on your way. I must ask myself why.”
He was asking me why, and doing it from the opposite bench. I was a widow, and proprieties such as never sharing a bench with a man outside my family or my family’s close friends were no longer required of me. I had earned my freedom in one of the two ways generally available to a genteel lady.
The first path to freedom was to cast my good name to the wind; the second was to bury a husband.
There was a third way, though, which required heaps of discretion and more than a little cunning. I suspected most women of good breeding eventually stumbled onto that third path, and their lives were a good deal happier for it. They tippled, they took lovers, they gambled at cards, they smoked the occasional pipe of opium or hashish to settle their nerves.
But they did not get caught. If I was to embark on my first postmarital liaison, I did not want to get caught either, and St. Sevier’s discretion was equal to that challenge.
“I am attending Fanny’s nuptials because she did not merely invite me to travel north, she demanded that I come.” Had begge
“You will miss most of the spring Season in London,” St. Sevier said. “Does that bother you?”
“Not in the least.” The coach hit a smooth patch of road, and I let go of the strap I’d been holding. “The last thing I want to spend my time on is a lot of pointless social gatherings where I dodge the overtures of my late husband’s friends.”
“They importune you directly? Englishmen are so clumsy.”
While Frenchmen could be so dense. Hugh St. Sevier had been my escort of choice over the winter, and no matter how much I pretended to lean on his proffered arm, or how often I invited him in for a late-night cup of tea, he was never anything but perfectly correct with me.
And that bothered me. He’d kissed me a time or two when we’d been off on our adventures outside of Town, but since we’d returned from my brother’s wedding, Hugh might have numbered among London’s confirmed bachelors.
While I, increasingly, felt inclined to spread my wings, as it were.
“Those louts don’t even importune me,” I replied. “Some of them simply assume I’m willing and…” I waved my hand in a circle. “I had to stomp on Timothy Carstairs’s foot to get him to withdraw his hands and his lips from my person.”
“Carstairs is the pretty blond fellow with the sweet mouth?”
“The same.”
“He likes to swive men,” St. Sevier said. “I do not say how I know this, but it is a fact. He assaults you to prove his masculinity, or to at least create enough rumor to obscure his preferences. I care not what manner of assignations he makes with consenting partners, but I will thrash him for you if you like.”
Hugh was ever gallant, even if he did fail to notice my direct overtures. “Thank you, no. The less fuss made the better. Carstairs at least apologized. Henry Newell wasn’t half so gracious.”
“That one.” St. Sevier’s features reflected quintessential Gallic disdain. “He believes because God favored him with blond curls, that women should fall at his feet, despite his weak chin and big ears. He is stupid, which he cannot help, but he should be thrashed for arrogance.”
St. Sevier was correct: Henry Newell was neither good-looking nor clever. St. Sevier, however, was a handsome devil, with chestnut hair, doe-brown eyes, and enough height and muscle that even without a charming French accent, he would have been a coveted addition to any hostess’s guest list. His accent, I noticed, intensified when he was in the grip of strong emotion, and he preferred to curse in his native tongue.
What language would he use in bed?
“Violet, did you spend your social evenings in my company simply to ward off Mayfair’s horde of Henry Nincompoops?”
And sometimes, St. Sevier was quite perceptive. “I did not remain at your side entirely to thwart the louts.” This was as close to an invitation to be frank as St. Sevier had given me in the past six months. I cast around for a subtle, witty lure, or one that at least wasn’t silly.
“I like you, Hugh.” Not the cleverest observation I’d ever made. “I like you and…”
He cocked his head. “And?”
“And I like you.” A blush crept up my neck and suffused my cheeks. I did not tell him that his kisses stood out in my memory like perfect holidays, or that I speculated about his appearance without clothing, or that I enjoyed touching him.
“I adore you,” he replied, reaching for his newspaper. “I hope I have been forthright in that regard.”
He shook out his newspaper, and I wondered if he was teasing me.
“Did you know these benches fold out to make a comfortable traveling bed?” I asked, as casually as I could. “The jostling is ever so much more bearable when one reclines.”
He folded his newspaper over and peered at the article in the upper righthand corner. “Violet, are you propositioning me? If so, I can acquaint you with two facts that are relevant to your aspirations. First, I desire you madly. When I say madly, I do mean I desire you madly. Second, if and when it is my very great honor to become your lover, I will not allow our passions to be consummated in the traveling monstrosity where your late husband casually took his pleasure of you between posting inns.”
That Hugh would disdain a chance to make love with me hurt; that he’d judge my husband for the lusty opportunist he’d been comforted.
“So.” St. Sevier snapped the newspaper open and refolded it. “Were you propositioning me?”
“You flatter yourself outrageously.”
He grinned and saluted with two fingers. “My apologies for presuming. Would you like to read the Society pages?”
I did not give a rotten fig for the Society pages. “Thank you.”
He passed them over, and for the next three changes, I dutifully stared at somebody’s natterings about a Venetian breakfast. All the while, I was preoccupied with a question: If Hugh St. Sevier would not consummate our passions in my comfy traveling coach, under what circumstances would he consummate them?
St. Sevier and I fell into a routine, reading to each other, dozing on our respective benches, and even—this was not the done thing under usual circumstances—taking turns riding up on the box with John Coachman. The scenery as we traveled north appealed to me strongly, for it was more dramatic than the tame rural hills of the south. On our fourth night out, we stopped at an inn that appeared to offer better lodging than most.
Unfortunately, the Stag and Stork was also as raucous as an election-day market. On our fifth morning, I climbed into the coach more fatigued than when I disembarked the previous evening.
We bickered away half the day, and I insisted we break our journey with a midday picnic basket. Our coachman and groom were only too happy to enjoy an extra pint or two in the common of a rural inn, while St. Sevier and I took our lunch on a blanket spread beneath an enormous oak on the village green.
We were in Yorkshire, new territory for me, and I found the brisk air and broad sky invigorating.
“You have an appetite,” St. Sevier said as I started on my second sandwich of ham and cheddar. “Only great hunger could coax a refined palette past what passes for mustard in England.”
“I do have an appetite,” I said, “and I asked that your sandwiches be made with butter instead of mustard because I know your digestion to be delicate.”
He sat cross-legged on his half of the blanket, and in the bright early afternoon sunshine, I could see that St. Sevier had had no more sleep the previous night than I had.
“My digestion is equal to the insult of English mustard,” he replied. “I was with the military. I would have eaten boiled tree bark at times and been grateful. That does not mean I seek alimentary suffering in times of peace. You are wearing a dab of butter…” He used his smallest finger to trace the corner of my lip. “English butter, I will grant you, is preferable to any I have tasted on the Continent, though Irish butter is better still.”
He held forth about various nationalities of butter as I dabbed with my table napkin at the corner of my lip. When I’d completed that bit of tidying, Hugh slowly ran his tongue over his buttery fingertip.
As if an oak had fallen from the limb above and coshed me on the head, I realized he might be flirting with me.
Or he might not. We packed up and climbed back into the monstrosity, and almost at once, my eyes grew heavy.
“You need a nap,” Hugh said. “As your traveling companion, I have no wish to endure the sharp tongue a lack of rest can produce in you. I believe you mentioned that the benches fold out?”
“I mentioned that three days ago, St. Sevier.”
