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Alas, it seemed she was not so fortunate.
“Well?” Adeline asked. “Open it! Perhaps your betrothed has sent you a love poem!”
“I don’t remember him being a romantic man,” Marcella replied.
Admittedly, she was six years younger than her betrothed, so she’d scarcely gotten to see him as a man before his disappearance all those years before. She remembered him as mischievous and loud, causing trouble everywhere he went. He may have grown some since then, but Marcella wasn’t sure that man presented a more marriageable prospect. She’d seen many noble sons grow into men. They’d all grown much the same—that man of thetonwas not one who would ever make her happy.
Marcella opened the letter. The handwriting was rougher than she’d expected. Most men in thetonwrote with flourishes and dramatic lines, and her betrothed’s handwriting was thin and cramped. It was as if he’d not written in a very long time and had forgotten how to use his ink.
“My dear Lady Marcella,” she read. “Doubtlessly, you’ve now heard of my return.”
“Doubtlessly,” Adeline echoed. “I believe everyone has heard of it by now.”
Of course they had. Thetonwas a storm of gossip about his reappearance. The rumors had even reached the countryside and grown more outlandish in the telling. Just wherehadLord Reginald been for so many years? Some insisted that he’d eloped with a dairy maid, and when the relationship soured, he’d returned destitute to his father’s estate and begged to receive his inheritance. Others claimed he’d been abducted as a boy by a group of criminals, who’d planned to ransom him and—at the last minute—become unsure of the plan and abandoned the young lord somewhere in the wilderness of Wales.
Like the others, Marcella was curious about where her betrothed had vanished to, but she’d never been the sort to engage in idle gossip.
“I assume that you’ve also been reminded of our engagement,”Marcella continued,“and I do not need to tell you what that means. I’m hoping that you’ll still consider me a viable candidate for your husband.”
Marcella fell silent and quickly read through the contents, which was mostly justification for why the two of them ought to still marry despite having not seen one another in several years. It was utterly ridiculous.
“Well?” Adeline asked. “He’s asking about the engagement. We expected that, remember?”
Marcella remembered. She’d been quite sincere in her resolve to see the engagement broken. No man, much less one she hadn’t seen in over a decade, would ever come between her passion and herself. She was quite set in that.
“It’s mostly just him talking about that,” Marcella replied, “but this is different. It seems that his father hopes to host a ball celebrating his son’s return. Lord Reginald humbly requests that I be in attendance.”
Althoughrequestwas really a polite way of sayingdemand. It wasn’t as though Marcella was being given a choice in the matter. The Duke of Mavis had probably already sent a letter to Marcella’s own father telling him about the ball, which meant that soon, the dressmaker would be sent for.
Marcella grimaced when she thought of the hours of measurement-taking and fabric-choosing. It seemed like a great deal of effort for a man whom she had no intention of marrying and an engagement which she had no intention of keeping. All that time would be much better spent alone at her desk, breathing life into the stories which were but half-formed inside her mind.
“I must ensure that I look hideous,” Marcella replied, “or else, I must be perceived as undesirable.”
“Only by Lord Reginald or by everyone?” Adeline asked. “You know that I cannot abide the company of an ugly woman, so if it’s the latter…”
Marcella shook her head. “You are dreadful. Do you know that?”
Adeline grinned and placed her flower coronet on Marcella’s head. “Oh, I do know. But you’d be bored if I wasn’t such a dreadful creature, wouldn’t you?”
“I suppose,” Marcella replied.
She looked dully at the letter and then at her poor novel, the pages still empty save for the small drop of ink which had fallen from her quill-tip. She supposed that she ought to send Lord Reginald a reply before she resumed her efforts at writing a novel.
Marcella’s lips curved into a small smile. She had read every book in her father’s library, all the rhetoric and all the novels, and she had no doubt that she could write. She most definitely could manage a letter which made her look utterly undesirable.
“I’ll begin with this letter,” Marcella said. “My dearest Lord Reginald—”
“I hope that your ball is interrupted by pirates,” Adeline quipped.
Marcella grinned. “Somehow, I don’t think I can anticipate pirates disturbing a ball in the English countryside, alas. But Icanmake myself sound most unpleasant.”
“Oh,dotell.”
“I was most pleased to receive your invitation to the ball celebrating your return, and I hope that you’ve given the occasion all the attention which it deserves,” Marcella said, as she wrote. “If you’ve not, I wish to recommend that you encrust every possible surface with diamonds. I also believe that you ought to consider only the finest linens for the tables, and you must know that I will not eat off any plate which is not pure silver and polished to a mirror-like shine.”
Adeline raised an eyebrow. “Suppose he does all of that for you?”
God, she hoped not. Her idea sounded nightmarish. It was too excessive and decadent.
