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Philip locked gazes with the blond-haired, blue-eyed eldest brother and thought quickly on how to answer, knowing that he couldn’t exactly admit he had been distracted once again by the mysterious strawberry blonde who so often sat outside their classroom window.
“It is such a beautiful day.” Philip shrugged. “It is infuriating being stuck in a classroom.”
Sitting beside Lady Mysterious or even walking through the gardens at her side would be a fine thing indeed,The thought quickly popped into his mind, and he struggled to remove it.
Both Edward and Stanley scoffed with laughter and nodded in agreement. “And that is exactly why we are headed to the club as soon as the last bell rings. Won’t you join us?”
Philip longed to decline. He was in no mood for drinking and gambling and likely talking business with the older nobles at whichever gentlemen’s club they had decided upon visiting. Yet he could tell from the stern look on both his friends’ faces that declining wasn’t an option.
With a deep sigh, he gave a curt nod, and both his friends cheered in excitement. “I promise you won’t regret it!” Stanley insisted, placing a hand on the shoulder that his brother wasn’t already gripping. They both squeezed his shoulders reassuringly before beginning to shove him down the corridor towards their next class.
“Come on, you have already upset Professor Pettigrew.” Stanley chuckled. “You had better not do the same with Professor Dormer, or they’ll surely send a letter home.”
“Yes, heaven forbid we should have a repeat of last year!” Edward added with a roll of his eyes, and Philip cringed at the reminder of the letter sent home about him just before Christmas the previous year. His father had been most disappointed to hear about his lack of interest in class and his constant idiotic questions, questions that Philip believed were only idiotic because the professors did not like to be stopped mid-lecture to be tested on their own knowledge.
He had taken to being quiet in class, merely being silent instead of testing the professors, not wishing to infuriate his father further by becoming the rebellious son.
“I blame the two of you!” he insisted, trying his hardest to forget all about the beautiful blonde and his desire to meet her.Perhaps one day I shall be lucky enough to stumble upon her sitting upon her marble bench,he thought hopefully.
Chapter 3
The Duke of Balfour paced up and down his library with his thumb and forefinger pressed against the bridge of his nose. Having listened to his wife rant and rave for the last few minutes, he was trying his hardest to ward off the beginnings of a headache behind his eyes.
“What would you have me do about it?” he demanded, pausing in his pacing as soon as his wife stopped to take a breath. She was standing beside the door with her hands clasped before her as though it was all she could do to stop herself from flying entirely off the handle. Much of the time, it was simply easier to give in and give her whatever she wanted. Yet there was one matter they could never quite agree upon–Daisy.
“I would have you finally put an end to it! Do what needs to be done!” his wife insisted. Agnes was a force to be reckoned with. It was one of the reasons he had chosen her as his wife, not least because she came from a well-respected and wealthy family but also because she was a widow just as he was a widower, with a daughter of her own of a similar age to Daisy.
Their marriage had been a match of convenience and advantage rather than a love match as he had experienced with his first wife. Having suffered alone after her death, he had vowed never to find such a match again, choosing instead to allow his head to rule over his heart.
Daisy needs a strong and respectable woman to guide her,he had decided, and Agnes had been the logical choice, but what she had been asking of him of late was growing harder and harder to ignore.
“She must be married, George,” Agnes insisted when he said nothing. It was an argument they had shared several times in the past and when Daisy had first entered into society, George had been dead set against the idea. He had vowed never to force his daughter into anything.
He had taught her to be strong and independent and promised she would always have a home with him and yet, here they stood, sharing the same argument all over again because his wilful daughter had led them to it again.
“Would you have me ship her off to some other poor soul and have all the responsibility fall at their feet? Do you truly think that marriage would prevent her from wanting an education?” George asked, his heart clenching at the idea of denying his daughter anything. If he could only sign the papers himself and send her off to university, he would. Yet he knew as well as everyone else did that it would not be quite that simple.
“At least then she would not be ostracized from society!” Agnes insisted. “She would have a respectable husband and a future. She might even become too busy with making her husband happy and growing a family of her own. These silly ideas of an education might well disappear entirely!”
The duke closed his eyes and sucked in a deep breath. Hearing what his wife was saying, knowing that she might well be right, did not matter when he knew deep down that no matter what he did, his daughter’s soul, her wilfulness and rebellious nature would not be changed.
I have brought this upon myself,he knew. He had given his daughter everything she could possibly want and more, always reminding her that she could do anything she set her mind upon, and yet it seemed she was fixated upon one of the few things she could never attain in life.
“George, if you do not do something soon, she will make us pariahs!” Agnes insisted. The woman’s sharp-featured face grew so pale that for a moment, George thought she might faint. A part of him even wished that she might just so that he would not have to listen to her shrill voice a moment longer.
“Agnes, please,” he insisted, placing the tips of his fingers to his temple where the headache had begun to move; he glared at his wife for several moments before continuing, “I shall take what you have said under consideration.”
“That is what you always say, and you never take action upon it!” Agnes continued, glaring back at him with her dark brown eyes so fixated upon him that he felt as though she were touching him, striking him so that he would take her words seriously. “George, when will you see this is the only way to get Daisy to settle down?”
When will you see that I could never force my daughter to do anything?he thought, though, with each passing day, he came to realise more and more that his wife was right.
“When will you see that if you do not do something soon, my Bertha will stand little chance of ever having her own time to shine?” Agnes continued. George sighed. That was what this was truly about.
As the younger of the children in the household, Bertha was forced to remain in the shadows behind Daisy, forced to wait her turn to be married off just as Agnes had once had to do with her elder siblings. “She is ready and waiting for a husband; she need only see her sister married. It is the way, George!”
Her tone was so whining then that he longed to snap at her to be quiet, to leave him be so that he could think on the matter himself in peaceful silence.
“I am still not sure that marriage is the best option for Daisy,” George insisted with a shake of his head. The mere mention of it made his chest tighten. The thought of his daughter moving out from beneath his roof, of having another man take care of her, made him feel sick to his stomach. He had promised his late wife on her deathbed that he would always do what was best for their daughter, yet now he was at a loss as to what that might be.
