Epilogue #5
Just as Gemma began to shake her head, the carriage topped a small rise and in the distance, nestled within a beech wood, she glimpsed an imposing manor house of warm, golden stone.
“I do see something,” she said, breathless with surprise.
“What are you—oh!” Lucy craned her neck, her bony elbow jabbing into Gemma’s side. “It looks like a castle!”
“It’s lovely.” Gemma’s eyes traced the graceful peaks of the roofline and the round crenellated tower set into the western wall. “And huge. Much bigger than I expected.”
“Oh, I knew it would be perfect!” Henrietta clapped her hands, in raptures. “Girls, girls, didn’t I say? I knew it must be a great house. I knew your father would take care of us.”
If only he’d taken care of our dowries as well, Gemma thought, though she kept it to herself.
Why ruin her mother’s moment of happiness with the unhappy reality that they would almost certainly have to let a house this grand to someone who could afford to live in it?
She could only hope that a lease would bring in enough to settle the Lively family somewhere sensible so she could begin her campaign of making a brilliant match.
But even as Gemma’s mind whirled and her mother and sister celebrated, the carriage continued to drive.
It rolled down the hill. And then it continued on, past the turning to the wide drive that appeared to lead to the weathered stone manor.
Throwing the window fully open, Gemma stuck her head out and called up to the driver, “I say, John, have you missed the turning? Wasn’t that the way to Five Mile House, just back there?”
“No, your ladyship,” came the driver’s quick reply.
A strong-jawed white man of middle years, dressed in the impeccable dark blue and gold of the ducal livery, John Coachman gave every appearance of knowing exactly where he was going and how to get there, despite having spent most of his career driving the dowager duchess from Ashbourn House to her hatmaker’s shop.
“We should reach the village in the next few minutes, your ladyship,” John informed her calmly, and Gemma thanked him before pulling her head back inside the coach.
“That must not be our house. It’s quite a pile, though. I wonder who lives there.”
Lucy smirked. “Probably a crusty old country gentleman and his pack of twelve hunting dogs. A perfect prospective husband for you, Gem!”
Gemma gave her sister a shove back to her side of the carriage. “I don’t care if he has fifty hunting dogs and is old enough to be my grandfather. If he’s got the income to support a house like that, he’s going on my list.”
“Oh, there’s a list now?” Lucy asked.
“Not yet, but there will be. I intend to be systematic about this.”
“Girls,” Henrietta protested again. “My poor head.”
Refraining from pointing out that she might be less prone to headaches if she didn’t insist on wearing bonnets weighed down with dead bird carcasses, Gemma went back to watching out the window for her first glimpse of their new home.
Hedgerows and the occasional low stone fence ran alongside the road and divided up the fields. Dotted about the countryside here and there, Gemma saw thatched-roof farmsteads and stone outbuildings. Sheep placidly cropped the grass and lay in the shade of tall, sturdy trees.
They were only two days’ journey from London, yet Wiltshire was so different, Gemma felt as if they’d somehow traveled to another world.
They crossed another stone bridge, the rushing brook below loud in her ears as a collection of small buildings came into view. Built from the local limestone, their crooked rooftops and smoking chimneys seemed to glow in the fading afternoon light.
Before Gemma had time to register more than the size of the village (tiny) and its level of quaintness (extreme), the carriage was slowing once more, and turning off the mail coach route, through a stone archway and into the courtyard of a ramshackle coaching inn.
Gemma stared across the dirty cobblestones at the rundown building. Streaky bare windows stared forlornly back at her as chickens scratched around the sunken steps. A wooden door hung ajar, giving a glimpse into the dark interior of the inn.
It opened, and a tall, bearded man in laborer’s clothes stepped out to lean one broad shoulder against the crumbling doorframe. He watched impassively as the coach rolled to a stop in front of him.
The tips of Gemma’s fingers went cold and tingly and her breath came short, striking against the confines of her light corset.
“What is this place?” Henrietta asked tremulously. “Are we lost?”
“Don’t be silly, John Coachman never gets lost,” Lucy reminded her, but her voice was uncharacteristically small.
“Perhaps he has stopped here to ask for directions.” Unable to bear the tension, Gemma put her head out of the window again to speak to John.
It was terrifically unladylike, but there was no one but that uncommonly tall laborer to see her, and Gemma had never been very good at being ladylike anyway.
“John? Are we lost?” she called.
“No, your ladyship,” came John’s implacable reply.
Gemma’s heart stopped. For some reason, she glanced back at the man in the doorway, who straightened with slow, insolent grace. Pulling his hands from his pockets, he strolled unhurriedly toward the coach.
Behind Gemma, her mother and sister were talking over one another, asking questions she couldn’t answer in high-pitched tones of distress that blurred into an incomprehensible din in her ears as she stared into the man’s face.
His features were rough and angular, the lines of his strong jaw softened only by the gleaming chestnut of his short-cropped beard.
He wore no hat and he had the sun-bronzed skin of a man who worked outside, though the creases that fanned out from the corners of his vivid green-gold eyes could’ve been from laughter rather than squinting against the glare.
A lock of light brown hair fell over his forehead, gleaming with strands of copper and gold in the waning sunlight, and for a mad moment, her fingers buzzed with the urge to smooth it back.
He was extraordinarily well built, tall and broad with real muscles that came from hard physical labor rather than the discreet padding of a dandy. His every movement spoke of power, a leashed animal vitality that stirred Gemma’s blood and stole the breath from her lungs.
This man was temptation incarnate.
Oh no, she thought blankly. This cannot be happening. I don't have time for an inconvenient attraction to a farmer!
Then he opened his beautiful, sensually shaped mouth, and Gemma somehow knew what he was about to say before he said it.
“Welcome to Five Mile House.”
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