Chapter Four
The glorious battle, the victory won,
All bloody blades glistening under the sun…
Sarah frowned as she attempted to make the words on the page into the beautiful, elegant, resounding words she had in her head.
Well, not precisely in her head. In her soul. Was that too poetic?
Her frown deepened as she reached forward and picked up the sandwich without even looking at it. A mouthful of cured ham and mustard met her tongue. Sarah groaned with delight.
She really must see whether Cook could start doing her sandwiches every luncheon. So much more convenient!
A dob of mustard fell onto her pocketbook. Ah. Well, mostly convenient.
Sarah haphazardly smeared the mustard off the page, leaving a bright yellow streak. Well, she would never have to struggle to find the page upon which she had practiced the description of a sword.
“Really, Sarah!”
Blinking as though emerging from a dark room, Sarah saw her mother was frowning.
Oh dear.
“I beg your pardon?” Sarah said, attempting politeness.
It was too much to enjoy her luncheon and write poetry at the same time, clearly.
Mrs. Lockwood’s glare firmly pointed at the pocketbook. “Must you have that out?”
Sarah sighed. “I do not see the problem, Mama. It is not as though we have company.”
Her mother’s eyebrow rose. “Oh, I see. I do not count as company.”
It was all Sarah could do not to wince. She had not intended it that way, something her mother was surely cognizant of, but it did not matter. No matter how many apologies she would make, it would not wipe clean the stain of the insult.
“Well, I suppose it is good that I should know where I stand with my own daughter,” Mrs. Lockwood sniffed. “Not company! Poor company, you could have said…”
With much reluctance, but the sense she would never hear the end of it if she did not, Sarah closed her pocketbook.
On her pencil. She would return to it as soon as she could. There was something so frustrating about not entirely getting the next line right.
How many ways could one describe a sword, after all? Glimmering. Glinting. Sharp. Powerful. Dangerous. Glinting—glinting was good. Shimmering in the air as it whistled past—
“Sarah!”
Sarah jumped. Her mother was glaring as though she had said something most important…something Sarah had not heard.
She gave a weak smile. “I beg your pardon, Mama?”
Mrs. Lockwood rolled her eyes. “Do tell me, Sarah, when are you ever going to finish that poem? I swear, it will be the death of me!”
Pulling the pocketbook toward her protectively, Sarah glanced at it. “Finish?”
“Yes, finish, Sarah!” her mother snapped. “Then you can abandon this fancy you have for poetry and do something better with your time!”
Sarah swallowed. She was not one to argue with anyone, let alone her mother. And she meant well. Even if that meaning well was expressed by dragging the younger Lockwood to dinner after dinner, introducing her to every eligible—and ineligible—man in Oxford.
It was not her fault. Sarah knew there was only one occupation suitable for a lady of her standing in society, and that was marriage. As soon as possible.
Apparently, being one and twenty and unmarried was a shameful thing. She had felt it, the last time the Season had begun.
“Miss Lockwood still, is it?” Lady Romeril had said graciously, on one of her rare visits outside London. “What a pity. You struggle against such difficulties, Mrs. Lockwood.”
And that was only the first time Sarah had been aware of just how shameful she was to her mother.
In at this moment, however, she could plainly see the disappointment on her mother’s face. Sitting here, eating a sandwich! At luncheon! Writing poetry at the table!
“I just want to get the duel right,” Sarah found herself saying, desperate for sympathy.
If only her father were still alive. It was in moments like this Sarah truly missed him, felt his absence. Mr. Lockwood would have been a wonderful mediator between the two of them, she could not help but think.
At least, perhaps. He had died when she was so young, she hardly remembered him.
“Duel?” Mrs. Lockwood’s nostrils flared. “My dear girl, you cannot be thinking of putting something like that in a poem!”
“Well, why not?” Sarah defended. “It is an epic poem, my readers will—”
“Your readers!”
Sarah bit her lip. She had permitted her tongue to run away with her. That was the trouble with always forcing down one’s words; when one finally spoke, it was likely to offend.
Her mother looked absolutely outraged. “You do not…you would not dream of dishonoring the Lockwood name by publishing, would you?”
Sarah hesitated. It had crossed her mind. What poet did not want to see their name in print?
“You are being foolish.”
Something defiant sparked within Sarah. “I am not being foolish.”
“You will never stop tinkering with it,” her mother said with a wave of her hand. “You’ll never be satisfied with it, and you’ll never finish it.”
“I have to get it right,” Sarah said, swallowing the hurt. “And once I learn how to fence—”
“How to—”
“I can then finish it, and you may even like it,” said Sarah as defiantly as she could.
“And to think, all the invitations I have secured for you!” Mrs. Lockwood said balefully, placing a hand on her chest as though her heart could barely cope with the disappointment. “A ball in two days, hosted by the Thornfalcones, and you will not attend!”
Heat seared Sarah’s cheeks. “I will not embarrass myself at any more balls.”
“Yet you embarrass me by not going!”
The same old argument. Would it ever end?
Her mother appeared to be of the same opinion. “I don’t know why I am surprised; you have declined so many invitations this month alone!” She started ticking them off with her fingers. “The Coles, the Marnions, that delightful little note from—”
“Mama,” Sarah interrupted. “Mama, I…I am too shy, I do not enjoy—”
“Well perhaps you would not be so shy if you attended more invitations!” Mrs. Lockwood wheedled.
It was impossible not to sigh. The same old debate from the last three Seasons. It had been all Sarah could do to delay her coming out into society until she was eighteen. Her mother had wished to do so when she was fifteen. Fifteen!
Sarah shivered at the very thought.
“And such a lovely note, I really think you should—”
“Mama,” said Sarah, pushed beyond all endurance and cringing in advance of her own words. “If you cannot understand my poetry is important to me, why should I consider your invitations important?”
Heat was roaring through her veins, uncomfortable, prickling heat. She hated arguments, she really did, but there was no way around it. She had to convince her mother just how much she despised the rigmarole of society’s events!
Her mother opened her mouth to reply, but thankfully, at that moment, the door opened and a maid entered.
Mrs. Lockwood closed her mouth immediately and shot a warning look at Sarah. It was most unnecessary. Even Sarah knew better than to argue in front of the servants.
The maid bobbed a curtsey at Sarah’s side. “Letter for you, m’lady.”
Sarah took it with some trepidation. If the ladies of Oxford started sending invitations to her rather than her mother, it was going to be all the more difficult to decline them.
“Are you sure it is not for me?” asked the shrewd Mrs. Lockwood as Sarah opened the letter. “I really think—”
“It is for me, Mama,” said Sarah breathlessly.
It was all she could do to keep the excitement from her voice. It was from the duke—at least, from the provost. But still. It was time for her first fencing lesson. One o’clock.
Sarah glanced at the grandfather clock then jumped to her feet, grabbing her pocketbook before striding to the hall.
“Sarah Lockwood!”
But Sarah paid her mother no heed. It was twenty to the hour. She was late.
“Sarah Lockwood, come back here this minute!”
Sarah pulled on her bonnet. “I have an appointment, Mama.”
“Not with a gentleman, I’ll be bound!” said Mrs. Lockwood saucily.
A flush tinged Sarah’s cheeks. If her mother knew she was about to spend some time alone with a gentleman—not merely a gentleman, but a duke…
There was a reason she was keeping that particular information to herself.
“I just do not understand you, my dear,” her mother said, shrugging her shoulders helplessly. “I have tried my best, I really have! What young lady does not wish to attend dinner parties, go for picnics in the park with eligible bachelors, make a match…”
Sarah’s heart twisted painfully. It was not her mother’s fault. It was simply what was expected, and Mrs. Lockwood had always done what was expected.
“I know that is what you want for me,” Sarah said quietly, placing a hand on her mother’s arm. “But it is not what I want. I dread most social occasions, you know that.”
Mrs. Lockwood smiled wistfully. “So you…you have no wish to be married?”
A face flashed in Sarah’s mind. A handsome, proud, grumpy face.
Montague Lancaster, Duke of Caelfall.
Sarah swallowed, forcing away the memory of how he had looked at her when she had quipped that line last they had been together.
“But I warn you, I am determined. After all, they say the pen is mightier than the sword.”
“I have my poetry,” she said aloud, thinking fiercely of anything but the devastatingly good-looking man she was on her way to meet. “That is enough for me.”
Her mother sighed. “But—”
“I have no wish to be late, Mama!” Sarah said hastily, stepping away from her mother and toward the door. “I shall be back for dinner!”
“But—”
The door snapped shut behind her as Sarah stepped into the sunshine. She was late.
The porter looked up when she approached the East Gate of Wessex College, but it appeared he had been told to expect her, for he did nothing but glower.
It was, even Sarah had to admit, an improvement.
A strange sense of belonging, there was no other word for it, crept through her. The old corridors and towering spires of Oxford had been a maze when she had been young, and much remained so, the colleges forbidden to women.
But when it came to Wessex College, no longer.