Don’t Give a Fig (Ladies’ Revenge Club #7)

Prologue

Rosalind Murphy awoke with a start.

It took a few moments, a few frozen moments, to remember that she was not in her childhood bedroom in Aberdeen.

In those moments, she had to work to get her fingers and toes to obey her pleas to wiggle and her eyelids to flutter open, bringing the bedroom of the London townhouse she was visiting into dark focus.

She sucked in a breath, turning her head to the side to see if she’d disturbed her mother, coming awake so suddenly.

She hadn’t. Abigail Murphy was still sleeping soundly, curled around a pillow like a cat, with her chin tucked into her chest.

Rosalind exhaled in relief and turned to slip from the sheets, doing her best not to make a sound.

She tapped her bare toes around on the floor next to the bed but couldn’t find her slippers, and decided just to go barefoot as she fled the room, seeking the more abundant air of the ground level of her brother’s home, where she wouldn’t disturb anyone if she needed to have a cry.

As soon as she reached the stairs, however, she saw that she was not alone in her midnight wanderings.

There was a fire flickering down in the sitting room near the front door, and she could hear her brother’s voice murmuring as his long, bending shadow paced back and forth against the opposite wall.

He was bouncing his infant daughter against his chest as he murmured to her about his most recent investigation like it was a bedtime story.

Rosalind smiled, shaking her head, and skipped down the stairs, clicking her tongue so that she would not startle Abe when she appeared around the corner.

“Who’s that?” he called softly. “Millie?”

“No, just me,” she said, tugging her dressing gown tighter against the chill as she entered the room. “Oh, wee Heather. Was she fussing?”

Abe nodded, quirking his lips at Rosalind as she crossed the room to sit. “She wakes up hungry at all hours. Just like someone else I used to know.”

“Maybe I’m still doing it,” she replied, blinking up at him. “Maybe that’s why I’ve stirred, hm? Have you anything for me?”

He laughed, shaking his head. “No. And I’m not going to go toss the kitchen right now. I can get you a glass of milk if you like, though.”

Abe’s hair was sticking up in every direction, the same sandy blond as her own. She almost laughed at it, though she remembered her own rag curls and reached up to touch one, knowing she likely looked just as ridiculous, and thought better of it.

The baby gurgled, giving a series of thumps of her little fists against her father’s chest, and then sighed.

“You can’t feed her,” Rosalind realized, wrinkling her nose. “Millie has to.”

“She did,” he said with a chuckle. “I’m not sure she woke all the way up to do it. But we have to jostle her around a bit until she burps and settles afterward before we put her back in her bucket.”

“Bassinet,” Rosalind corrected, rolling her eyes.

“Certainly, yes,” he said, grinning at her annoyance. “It looks nothing at all like a bucket or a basket or any other thing that is exactly the same shape, but with a soft blanket draped inside.”

“If you put your bairn in a bucket, Millie will take it away and you will never see either of them again,” Rosalind said with a sniff, making him laugh and come to sit next to her. “I’ll go too.”

“Fine, fine,” he said, nudging her with his shoulder. “Is that what really woke you? Fear that I was down here putting Heather in the wood basket and calling it a bed?”

She frowned, glancing at the frost-covered windows and wondering if she ought to tell the truth. “No,” she said. “I had a bad dream.”

“Another one?” he asked, shifting the baby to his other shoulder. “About that boy?”

“It’s not about him, exactly,” she protested, shifting on the cushion as her cheeks heated.

“It’s about how embarrassing it all is now.

I thought I was a dozen chapters into a love story and now he’s gone and married someone else and everyone back home just looks at me with pity or amusement all the time.

It’s been lovely, you know? Being here in London where not a single soul knows anything about it. ”

“I could take a quick sojourn up to Aberdeen and kill him,” Abe suggested. “Would that help?”

“Help me?” she said. “No. I think it would make you feel better, though.”

Abe chuckled. “Aye, it would.”

“He didn’t do anything wrong,” she said quietly, hugging her arms around herself. “It was me that made assumptions and had expectations I had no right to. It was me that got excited over a future that no one had actually spoken aloud. I’m the fool, Abe. Not him.”

He heaved a heavy sigh. “We’re all foolish sometimes when it comes to matters of the heart, Ros.

And when you’re in the early stages of falling in love with someone, no one is writing out receipts and having them notarized on either side to make sure everyone has exactly the same intent.

If your friends back home were swooning and cheering on your blossoming connection with this lad, it’s because there was one. It’s because they could see it too.”

She shook her head, dropping her face into her hands. “I don’t know if that’s true,” she said, her voice muffled. “It might not be. Girls get excited about romance, Abe. We see things that aren’t really there. This obviously wasn’t really there. He’s got a wife now, and she isn’t me.”

There was silence for a moment, aside from the crackle of the fire and the little bubbling snores coming from the baby. Abe’s hand, warm and steady, came to rest on Rosalind’s shoulder. It sat there until she felt like she could lift her face again.

“I don’t want to go back,” she said, realizing as the words left her mouth that it was true.

“I don’t want to return to all of that. I know I have to.

I know Mother’s business with the Royal Academy is almost concluded, but I think that’s why I’m having the dreams. I am just dreading going back.

Somehow, having a reprieve from it all for a little while has made the prospect of returning to the mire unbearable. ”

“Then don’t go back,” he said, like it was the simplest thing in the world. “Stay here in London with me.”

She gave a dry little laugh, glancing at him skeptically. “What?”

“I have the extra room. Heather won’t need it for another many years at least,” he said reasonably. “We could certainly use the help as she starts to grow. And you’ve made a friend here now, haven’t you? With Hannah? I mean Miss Lazarus?”

Rosalind gaped at him. “A friend? She is so elegant and refined and …”

“And friendly?” Abe said, tilting his head downward with his eyes boring into hers. “She likes you. She invited you to go dress shopping, didn’t she? To help her with her charity project?”

“Oh, she was just being polite, Abe,” Rosalind said, already turning red at the thought of the other girl, who had joined them for dinner some nights past, so poised and fashionable and accomplished.

“She must have looked at me and seen nothing but a hopeless country girl floundering about, wide-eyed over the city.”

Abe sighed. “Did she imply that? Was she rude when my back was turned?”

“No!” She gasped the word out, horrified that anyone would think she had accused that lovely young woman of being improper. “No, absolutely not.”

“You don’t have to decide right now,” he told her. “With your Medusa snakes in and your feet bare. You don’t have to decide until Mother’s got one foot in the damned carriage headed back north. Take a breath.”

As though she thought the instruction was for her, the baby took a deep, wet breath and released it, burrowing into her father’s neck with a sound like a pig rooting for vegetables.

It made them both smile.

“Heather is such an unusual name,” she said, reaching out to delicately trace her fingertips over the baby’s back. “Are you not worried people will balk at it?”

“Balk?” Abe repeated, frowning. “Plenty of people are named for flowers. You can’t swing a stick in Mayfair without hitting a Rose or a Daisy or a Lily. Why not a Heather?”

“I’ve just never heard of one, is all,” Rosalind said, tilting her head. “Why not Rose or Daisy or Lily, then? Just so people do not talk?”

Abe gave her a bemused little shake of his head. “What do I care if they talk? I wanted something that reminded me of home. Millie wanted a wildflower. Heather was perfect. You don’t like it?”

“I do,” she said immediately, blinking. “I actually very much do. I suppose I’m always just so very concerned with what everyone else is thinking and saying. It is always easier not to give them fodder.”

“Ach,” he said with a wrinkle of his brow and a shrug. “Give them the fodder. Let them make cud. What do I mind?”

She smiled at him fondly, shaking her head. “Perhaps it is very different for men. Or men like you, in any event.”

“Men like me?” he repeated, affronted. “The perfect ones?”

“Yes, Abe,” she replied seriously. “The perfect ones.”

Abe’s expression softened, his head tilting thoughtfully to the side. “Maybe men should suffer from gossip a little more than they do, in fact,” he said after a moment. “Your Dougal should be shunned for leading a sweet girl down the garden path and then marrying someone else.”

“Douglas,” she said with a frown. “Not Dougal. And again, he never actually made me any promises, Abe.”

“Hm,” he said, frowning.

“You’re not going to kill him,” she said again, a little more sternly, which only made him shrug his shoulder at her impatiently. “Abe.”

“Yes, fine,” he said with a sigh. “But I think you should stay. I want you to stay. I’ve lived in both places, after all. I know best.”

“I will consider it,” she said, gazing at the baby’s face as her eyes began to droop. “After we sleep.”

“So,” said Abe, grinning at her, “that is a yes.”

“It’s a maybe,” she corrected, standing and smoothing her hands down her dressing gown. “Maybe.”

“It’s a yes,” he said to her back as she returned to the staircase.

She only smiled and shook her head as she climbed back toward bed.

Because she knew he was right.