Page 40 of The Governess and the Rogue

“I don’t know that I’ve ever spent much time looking upward,” Jack admitted. “There’s too much to keep my attention here on the ground.”

“Indeed,” Bea said. “It’s only dreamers who have cause to stare at the stars.”

“You presume I’m not a dreamer?”

Her slim shoulder lifted in a faint shrug. “If you already have everything you want, you have no need to dream.”

A flicker of irritation took Jack unaware. “What makes you think I already have everything I want?”

“Don’t you?” she asked.

Jack didn’t answer.

He couldn’t answer.

He had wealth and position, it was true. He had the love of his family. The admiration of the soldiers that served under his command. But was that everything?

Was it enough?

“I’d not have characterized you as a dreamer either,” he said instead.

“I’m not,” she replied matter-of-factly. “It was my mother who dreamed.” She drew her shawl tighter around herself. “She had a tradition. Every night, without fail, she would venture out into our garden and make a wish on the evening star.”

“A dreamer, indeed.”

“Not outwardly. She was a practical woman in every other respect, but at her heart, she held a belief in magic.” Bea cast him another glance. “Not real magic, of course. But the power that exists for good things to happen in the bleakest circumstances.”

“Were her circumstances bleak?” Jack asked.

“I didn’t think so. But… I suppose she wanted more.”

“Is that why you’re forever searching the night sky? Making wishes on stars in memory of your mother?”

“Not only for her,” Bea said. “I make them for myself too.”

Jack studied her face. When first they’d met, he had thought her younger than her six and twenty years. And she was young in comparison to him. Yet there were already fine lines at the corners of her eyes and a certain world weariness at the back of her gaze. She’d known hardship, loneliness. It was written there in her features if one troubled to look for it.

He hated that for her. That she’d ever experienced a moment of anguish or despair. It wasn’t right that she should have suffered on account of people like the Dimsdales, or for any other reason.

“Now that I find hard to believe,” he said.

“Why?” she asked. “Because I’m a cynic?”

“I’d have said sensible.”

“I hope I am sensible.”

“Yet you make wishes.”

She smiled slightly. There was a glimmer of ruefulness in the expression. Bitterness too, so faint it might have been a trick of the moonlight. “For all my cynicism, I suppose I want to believe what my mother believed. That something wonderful can happen if you only have the courage to ask for it. To wish for it.”

As she spoke, a delicate tremor went through her frame.

Jack regarded her with concern. “You’re shivering.”

Bea dismissed the observation as though it were of no account to her. “It is a little cold this evening,” she allowed. “But I shall be all right.”

“With that meager shawl?” Jack scoffed. “Here. You might like this better.” He withdrew the parcel from his coat and offered it to her.