“What? Men are known to be quite carnal creatures. Which is the case for many species.”
Both sisters unspokenly agreed that it was best to ignore this comment.
“Why are you here?” Caroline asked, wiping her hands off on her apron and pulling her spectacles out of her pocket.
“Oh, that reminds me! I have your other pair of spectacles.” Harriet fished the eyeglasses out of her reticule. “I’m so sorry to have kept them for so long.” Caroline closed her fingers around them, but it didn’t work as a distraction.
“Why are you here, Harriet? Are you intending to stay?”
“Of course I am. It’s my home.”
“But you’re married,” Frances helpfully reminded her. Harriet fidgeted under her sisters’ shrewd gazes.
“Come, let’s go inside and I’ll make us something. I know you can’t have fared well with Caroline’s cooking. Frances, leave the cat outside and wash up.” Neither sister moved. Nor did they deny that Caroline’s skills in the kitchen were substandard. Harriet was forced to relent. “You can pester me inside! I’ll explain everything!”
And she did. As she prepared a simple meal—all she was capable of, really—she told them everything.
Well, not everything. Some things one didn’t tell one’s unmarried sisters.
After dinner, the three girls sat in the small parlor, the warmest room of the house, while Harriet read aloud fromA Sicilian Romance.She’d read it to her sisters at least four times before. She tried, studiously, not to imagine Alexander’s face when she envisioned Hippolytus.
Eventually, she sent Frances up to bed and turned to Caroline to speak more freely.
“Has Father been back?”
“Not yet,” Caroline answered softly. They both knew that the longer their father stayed away, the worse his returns tended to be. Long absences meant he’d found money to spend or a man to swindle or a woman to lure with false promises. Harriet nodded.
“You ought to head to bed yourself,” she told Caroline, though her sister hardly needed instruction. Ever obliging, Caroline went.
“Aren’t you coming?” Caroline asked from the stairs.
“I’ll only be a moment.”
Instead, Harriet stayed awake another two hours, poring over household accounts and searching the house for anything that might need to be hidden from her father should he return soon. She found a few gin bottles in his library, which she moved behind the woodpile. The vial of laudanum in his desk drawer she wrapped in cloth and stashed in the linen chest. The cash book she hid behind the family’s untouched Bible—seeing what little money he had tended to send the Earl of Tidewell into fits of rage. When she finally slipped into her and her sisters’ room, she tucked the pouch with what was left of her coin into her walking boots and put her ring in a small wooden jewelry box that had been their mother’s. Currently it held a few acorn caps Frances had saved so she could whistle with them and a seashell Caroline had found years ago.
Harriet fell into bed tired but content. Mostly content. This was where she was meant to be. Caring for her sisters. Running the household. And so what if she didn’t have children of her own? She had raised her younger sisters. Surely, she had enough to manage without the trouble.
Maybe, once she got them married off, and if her father … well … if he didn’t present too many obstacles, perhaps she’d find a companion of sorts. A friend with whom she might share intimate conversations. Or even, on occasion, a proper kiss. Oh, how she wished she had remained ignorant of that experience. Once you drank from that well, you only became thirstier.
It had been four days since Alexander had returned to London. Surely, Harriet would be arriving soon. He was becoming restless and irritable. Obviously, this was a symptom of not being allowed out in society andnot, as he occasionally worried, an indication that he was besotted with a woman.
Lost for something to do, he headed to the library and decided to take a frank assessment of its inventory. Both the books and the brandy. This would be a fantastic use of his time.
After nearly emptying a decanter and fully emptying four entire bookcases, Alexander could say with certainty that his library was, in a word, shit. He’d been about an inch deep into the decanter when he had the bright idea to sort his books into stacks.
He started a pile of bookshe’denjoyed, which then spilled over into the largest pile—books Harriet might like to read. Of course, he had no earthly idea what she actually enjoyed in a book. Surely, she didn’t only read agricultural tomes?
Thus, almost everything ended up in Harriet’s pile. The only books that escaped that designation were those in poor condition or those in the wrong section of the library, based on its loose organization some ten years prior.
A few hours into his undertaking, he happened upon a shelf he’d forgotten about, one filled with dusty tomes of sermons and pamphlets on morality, behind which a much younger Alexander had stashed a trove of erotic literature. He smiled stupidly at thediscovery, and at his younger self, so randy yet so embarrassed to enjoy such material. Scooping up the hidden books, their pages dusty and yellowed, as untouched as the pious protectors who shielded them, he settled into an armchair and began reading.
Early the next morning, he awoke feeling sick as a horse. Again. He hadn’t been so irresponsibly lush in ages. In faith, he had never been entirely abstemious, but before Harriet he had not been so immoderate.
A quite tawdry book rested spine-up on his thigh, and he was happy to see that the brandy had taken him out before he’d taken out his cock. At least he hadn’t fully reverted into a randy, green lad. Marriage did not seem to be maturing him, despite conventional wisdom.
He sat up and surveyed the mess he’d made of the library, wincing. To be sure, the room was due for updating, but there had to be thousands more efficient ways to go about it. He stretched his back, aching from the night spent in a hard chair, and stood to find Presley.
Before he left, he gathered the stack of erotic novels he’d unearthed. Wouldn’t want someone to be scandalized. Better to just take them up to his chambers until the organizing was done. Then he could move them back to the library.
