A Gift to the Heart (A Twist Upon a Regency Tale #11)

Chapter One

Cilla

At the time, Lucilla Wintergreen thought the New Year’s Eve rumpus to be perfectly justified.

Justice in action, in fact. Unwise, perhaps, but only because she did not want even a hint of it reaching her father.

For if Papa knew what she and the other young women at the party had done, he would shut her sister Olivia in her room forever, and he would never let Cilla out of his sight again.

Papa had not wanted her and Livy to go, but Aunt Ginny had talked him round, assuring him that it was an all-female party.

“Even Jasper won’t be there,” she had said.

“He is going to stay with friends. It will be all my own daughters, goddaughters, their sisters, and their mothers. I want my nieces with me. Other girls of Cilla’s age will be there.

Younger girls, too. It is disgraceful, by the way, that Cilla has not yet made her come out. The girl is nineteen, after all.”

“You shall leave me to know what is best for my daughter,” Father had said.

They had a fabulous time at the party. Cilla already knew and liked her cousins.

Pearl was nineteen, the same age as her.

Beryl and Ruby, the twins, were a year younger.

The other guests included at least a dozen other single young women, as well as matrons of all ages and a smattering of older widows and spinsters.

Cilla had soon made several new friends.

As for Livy, away from Papa and in an all-female environment, she blossomed. It helped that, two days into the party, her slice of the Christmas pudding contained a silver crown, making her the Lady of Misrule for the whole two weeks of the party.

Livy threw herself into the role, showing the sly humor she normally shared only with Cilla. It fueled a seemingly endless succession of merry tricks and hilarious games, and inspired others to offer suggestions of their own.

Everyone was enjoying themselves. Everyone, that is, except Aurora Thornton, a school friend of the Marple sisters from the village of Amblecote, who did her best to join in but was clearly unhappy. Cilla tried to draw her out of her shell, but to no avail.

“It is odd,” one of the cousins said. “Rory is not normally like this.”

“She was happy when the party started,” said another cousin. “Very happy. I thought she had a suitor, but if she did, he has disappointed her.”

Poor girl. Cilla had never had a suitor. From the stories she was hearing this week, perhaps that was a good thing.

In the end, what caused Aurora to sob her heart out on Cilla’s shoulder was a game, for one of the girls claimed she could read the cards and tell fortunes, and the fortune she told for Aurora was of a tall fair-headed man who would be faithful and true.

“But he wasn’t,” Aurora wailed. “Colin was not faithful, and he wasn’t true.

He made all kinds of promises, and they were all lies, for he is ma- ma- ma- ma- married!

” The final word was broken by sobs, and even though the young ladies—the mothers and aunts were closeted with a bottle of port and had left the damsels to their own devices—even though the young ladies gathered closely around, it was some time before the story was told.

She had had a secret suitor, who became her lover. He was a neighbor of the Marples, and so Aurora had arrived full of hope, certain she would be able to arrange to see him, to find out why he had not visited for several weeks.

And on Christmas Day, when the house party attended church at Marpleton, she did see him—in his pew with a woman and two children.

A few questions to those who lived locally soon confirmed they were his family—his wife and their offspring.

He also had a couple of brothers living with him, but they were not part of Aurora’s story so could be ignored.

He owned a business making and selling medicinals, Cilla discovered, and bought bottles and jars from the glass-makers of Amblecote, which explained what he was doing in that village, but not why he dared to seduce the daughter of the local vicar.

“Well,” said Livy, when she understood all, “you are not with child, and nobody knows except us. And we are all your friends, Aurora, and will keep your secret. The question is, what do we do to Colin Sanderson to embarrass him in public the way he has embarrassed you in private?”

Cilla had never been prouder of Livy. Though some of the maidens had been horrified to have a ruined woman among them, Livy had reminded them that Aurora was a sheltered innocent and Sanderson a mature man who should have known better.

And a girl from Oxfordshire said that Aurora was like the ladies who were helped by the Countess of Sutton, who was the daughter-in-law of the Duke of Winshire.

“She and some other ladies support a village for women who are in trouble because of men, Aurora. If you need help, you could go to them. Even the Duchess of Winshire is in favor of the village.”

Those who were inclined to be critical were impressed that such high society ladies were on the side of women whose reputations had been dragged in the dust because of the misbehavior of men.

Livy was still focused on Sanderson. “He set out to ruin her,” she said, fiercely. “Who is to say that any of us would have fared better, believing his lies and his promises as Aurora did?”

And one by one, they nodded their heads, and assured Aurora of their silence and support.

Even the most censorious promised to keep the secret, and all of them had suggestions about how to make Sanderson pay. The plan they came up with for New Year’s Eve was masterly, Cilla thought.

New Year’s Eve, in Marplestead, was the Festival of the Lady of Misrule, where the women took over the town and the men stayed indoors out of their way. It was the perfect time to make a fool out of a lying deceiver.

They had to enlist the boot boy who was sweet on Cilla’s eldest cousin to lure the Sanderson mountebank to the tavern in the village, but everything else, they could handle themselves.

It would be the highlight of the party.

*

Bane

Wolfbane Sanderson lived in Marplestead, not at Bancroft House near Marpleton with his two half-brothers—Mandrake, Bane’s dearest friend and the nearest to him in age, and Hemlock, the eldest, who had insisted on the name Colin since he was seventeen.

On the death of their father, Colin had inherited his father’s estate, including Sanderson Medicinals.

Larkspur, their only sister, and the child of Father’s third wife, was married and gone by then, and Colin had evicted Bane, who was the son of Father’s mistress, as soon as the funeral was over and the will had been read.

He tolerated Drake, son of the second wife.

In fact, he ignored his younger half-brother as much as he could.

Drake in turn tolerated him, because living as cheaply as possible suited the plans that Drake and Bane had made for their eventual escape.

“Can I come and stay with you?” he asked Bane a few days before Christmas. “Frances has taken the children to visit her parents, and Colin has invited some of his lordly friends to stay while she is away. You know what sort of a party that is going to be,” said Mandrake, wrinkling his nose.

Bane wondered idly which came first—the decision by Frances, Colin’s wife, to take the children to her parents, or the invitation from Colin to be with the dissolute aristocrats he called friends.

“You are welcome to stay with me, Drake,” he said. “Plenty of room in the barn loft.”

If Colin guessed where Drake had gone while he and his guests drank themselves stupid and misbehaved with the prostitutes he had imported from the nearest town, he didn’t care.

The party had become the talk of the three villages in the vicinity by New Year’s Eve.

Not only were the villagers fascinated by the goings on at Bancroft House, but the local viscount, Lord Marple, was also part of it.

Though he was at least a decade younger than Colin, he already had a reputation for dissolute carousing, as did his dear friend Curston.

Perhaps it was in the blood, for Lady Marple, the young viscount’s mother, had developed a certain amount of notoriety herself since her husband died. Indeed, local gossip had it that Curston and Marple had first met because their parents were lovers.

That said, she was a widow and discreet, so her suspected sins could be forgiven, especially since the house party at her place was an all-lady affair apparently designed to allow her daughters to make friends before they made their debut at the coming Season.

The villagers had their gossip updated every day when the servants from the two major houses collected mail, purchased milk, or otherwise met up with the neighbors, and the news circulated swiftly from that point.

Everyone agreed that Lady Marple was behaving just as she should, and Colin was riding for a fall.

On the day before New Year, Drake was in Bane’s office at the blacksmith’s forge.

He had made a hot toddy while he waited for Bane to finish totaling a column in the accounts for the local baker.

Bane’s share stood at his elbow. The baker had poor handwriting and the tendency to transpose numbers, so Bane didn’t need to muddle his brain with alcohol.

“Colin would hate to know that you do the books for all the tradesmen and shopkeepers in Marplestead and most in the other two local villages,” Drake commented.

“No one is going to tell him,” Bane pointed out. Ah. That was a seven, not a one. The man always forgot to cross them. “The blacksmith owns his forge, but most in Marpleton and a few of the others pay rent to Colin.”

“Silly duffer,” Drake said. “He cut off his nose to spite his face when he threw you out. Lucky for him he has Frannie, who has taken over the books for Sanderson’s Medicinals. He’d do well, if he’d listen to her advice.”