Chapter 1
One
Two months after her return to London and her mother’s subsequent marriage, Arabella Lovelock had finally solved the problem of what to call her stepfather when amongst members of the family.
“Middlewich.” She lifted her chin and dabbed at the beads of perspiration on her neck with her mother’s handkerchief, her own having been lost on the lawn of the castle. She had just come in from playing shuttlecock with her new aunt Lady Marianne Cavendish, one year older than she.
“I’m not calling him Papa or Father or Uncle,” Arabella said.
“He’s none of those things. And he’s only twelve years older than I am.
I’m not calling him James or Jamie. That would be disrespectful.
No, not because he is a duke. Harry’s husband is an earl, and he wants me to call him Thomas, and I already call Mary’s husband David.
But I am not going to call the man married to my mother, the father of my future brother or sister, by his first name.
I asked the duke what the men at his club call him.
They call him Middlewich. So that’s what I am going to call him. ”
“It’s a mouthful,” said her mother Catherine, the very pregnant and very new Duchess of Middlewich.
Arabella shrugged. “Arabella has more syllables.”
The stepfather in question, James Cavendish, the Duke of Middlewich, was just coming into the room, and he was delighted by the news. “Shall I call you Lovelock then, like we had gone to school together?”
Arabella laughed. “No, Middlewich, you must call me what Mama does. Arabella. Besides, I won’t be a Lovelock forever.”
She saw her mother and her stepfather exchange looks.
Really, they had to get used to seeing her not as a child but as a woman. She would be eighteen next year, plenty old enough to get married and to change her name.
And certainly old enough to know she wanted to change it to Mrs. Alasdair Andrews.
She had waited all summer for an invitation from her sister Harry or her brother-in-law Thomas to come to Sommerleigh, their country estate. She had written letters to both, hinting at her desire to visit.
Once she was at Sommerleigh, she thought she might feign an illness.
And then Dr. Alasdair Andrews, the local physician, would have to be sent for.
She would wear her prettiest nightdress.
She would have her golden hair down, around her shoulders and flowing down her back, because what lady wore hair pins to bed?
He would come and lay his head on her chest to listen to her heart. Oh, the thrill she would feel to see the shiny waves of his auburn hair when he bent his head down, putting his ear and maybe even his cheek against her bosom. Would he know, from listening to her heart, how she felt about him?
Next, his hands would touch her while he looked at her with his green eyes, the left eye perhaps hidden by that single lock of dark-red hair that she had seen droop down when she had met him.
That lock he had pushed back while speaking to her.
And oh, those beautiful, long, strong fingers pressing against her.
Where would her ailment be? Her stomach, she thought, some pain. And he would touch her stomach through her thin nightdress. A firm but gentle touch, she thought.
And then the thought of his devastating hands, perhaps under the nightdress, made her throb in a place that was quite a bit lower than her stomach.
But the invitation to summer at Sommerleigh never came.
Her mother, newly married herself, said of Harry and Thomas, “They are on their honeymoon. I should think they will not want visitors now.”
Honeymoon? What was her mother on about? Harry and Thomas had been married for over a year! Really, these married people—Mary and David, her mother and Middlewich included—were so tiresome.
She had met Alasdair only once. In June.
In the study of the bishop of London in St. Paul’s Cathedral.
This was just after her time in Cornwall and Bath with Mary and David.
Her mother had called Arabella back to London to tell her she was marrying the Duke of Middlewich.
And there was a baby on the way. In fact, the baby was coming very soon.
Arabella had accompanied her mother and Middlewich to the cathedral to discuss their nuptial banns with the bishop.
Of course, the required three weeks of banns had turned out to be much too long for the groom-to-be, and he had applied to the Archbishop of Canterbury and paid for a special license since he was, after all, a duke.
Her mother and Middlewich were then able to have a lovely garden wedding a few days later, and Arabella wore her new rose-pink dress.
She had hoped the doctor might be invited to the wedding.
Yes, in part so he could see how pretty she was, but mostly so she could see him, talk to him, flirt with him.
But he was not invited. After all, he was Thomas and Harry’s friend, not her mother’s, not Middlewich’s.
She tried very hard not to sulk on the wedding day and instead be happy for her mother and Middlewich.
But how would she ever see Alasdair again?
The meeting at the cathedral had been entirely accidental.
The doctor had accompanied her sister Harry to help clear up a misunderstanding between Harry and Harry’s husband Thomas that somehow involved the bishop.
That was all Arabella was told. She didn’t really understand, and her mother had declined to explain further, saying she thought it was likely a private matter.
Later, after the wedding, Arabella had applied to Middlewich on the question, and he had said she surely better ask Harry about it herself.
But one didn’t really ask Harry personal questions like that. The answer would be confusing and not at all accurate. Perhaps she might ask Thomas?
And, anyway, the ostensible reason why they—Arabella, Alasdair, her mother, Middlewich, Harry, Thomas—were gathered at the cathedral was hardly the point.
The point was, of course, that it had been how she had come to meet Alasdair. It was meant to be.
To think she had almost not come with her mother and Middlewich, imagining it would be rather boring.
And, in truth, because she was a little envious of her mother and her mother’s obvious infatuation with Middlewich.
Not that Arabella harbored feelings for Middlewich.
Actually, he seemed too young for Arabella but just right for her mother. How funny was that?
No, she just was jealous of love. In general. Mary, Harry, her mother. As always, she was last in everything. When was she going to meet him? The not-stupid man of her dreams?
And then she did.
She and Alasdair spoke together for ten minutes in total.
Oh, how she cherished every single one of those minutes.
She would lie in bed at night and carefully extract from her memory each exchange that had passed between them, turning them over in her mind like an old miser polishing his gold coins.
The discussion of the weather. His answers to her questions about his burr.
His lovely Scottish burr. And he mentioned his home village of Bailebrae, far in the north, in Caithness County.
“The lowest and flattest of the Highlands,” he said.
Then he asked if she liked mathematics like her sister Harry, the Countess Drake, and when she said she did not, he seemed relieved.
He wanted to know more about her interests.
She wanted to confess that, at the moment, she was chiefly interested in him.
But she did not. Instead, she mentioned her love for the works of Mr. Walter Scott.
Oh, the doctor had not read any of his novels or poems?
But he must. Arabella could give him many recommendations.
And before they spoke together, he took her hand and bowed low over it.
He was not wearing gloves, and, oh, how she wished she had not been wearing gloves herself.
But how glad she was that she had taken extra care with her dress and hair that day.
Her mother was always saying one never knew whom one might meet on an errand.
Yes, Arabella thought gleefully, one never knew. One might even meet one’s future husband. And when she saw Alasdair’s dimples for the first time, she knew, for certain, she had.
But the weeks of summer went by with no opportunity to travel to Sommerleigh, and she could think of no other way to meet Alasdair again.
Arabella fretted and embroidered another tablecloth for her trousseau trunk as well as a christening dress and two baby bonnets for her future baby brother or sister.
Her mother’s confinement was to be in September.
Yes, her mother and Middlewich had only been married for three months.
And, yes, she understood what that meant even before her mother spoke to her about it.
She was not a child. After all, Mary had schooled Arabella on that beach in Cornwall.
She understood what the baby meant about her mother.
Her mother had lain down with Middlewich before the wedding.
In fact—Arabella made a swift calculation—her mother had lain with Middlewich during Christmastide when they had all been together with Harry and Thomas at Sommerleigh.
There would be no problem with the baby’s legitimacy; what was important to the law of primogeniture and to the Church was that her mother and Middlewich married before the birth.
Arabella knew of an astounding number of plump nine-pound infants who had come into the world only six months after a wedding.
However, in her mother’s case, it was only three months, which seemed to Arabella rather shameful. Her mother should have known better.
Arabella was sent away in September. Middlewich’s seven sisters scattered to various aunts and uncles. Arabella hoped to be sent to Sommerleigh where she might see Dr. Alasdair Andrews. But, no. She was sent to Derbyshire, to Lord and Lady Dalrymple and their daughters.