Chapter 4
Friend?
Dear God in heaven, he was to be her friend.
Well, he certainly didn’t feel like a friend. It was all she could do not wear a hole in the carpet as she paced back and forth. She held a book in one hand, and she was supposed to be reading it, but it was most infuriating because she could not keep her brain trained on the lines on the page.
She had come to Heron House with a specific purpose. She’d spend her time with the books and collections on theater in this room. Yet he was driving her to distraction!
A mere man! It was most frustrating. And frankly, it was disorienting. How had he done this to her?
He had long since departed.
She had, for a moment, thought he was going to lean in and kiss her. He had not. She’d been most relieved. Really. Truly.
He had retreated with a bow and left her to her work. Friend indeed. He was trying to be a friend. She supposed she was deeply grateful. But truthfully, she had no idea what she was going to do with all these feelings racing through her.
She turned back to her desk, strode to it, placed the book down, pulled the chair out, sat, dipped the pen into her ink jar, and then started writing swiftly.
She had to make some sort of decision about how she was going to handle this.
Lists.
Yes, lists would be the best solution. She always found that a good list and a new notebook or sheet of paper was the very thing when her brain was out of order.
And so she began writing down her intentions and what she would study, which books first, and how she would analyze them, as well as what papers she would examine next.
There would be no time for him.
The door opened, and she felt a thrill race through her. It was him again surely, but the footsteps were different. They were more delicate, certainly not as bold, and the air did not crackle with his energy.
“Miss Mitchell,” a voice called.
She put her pen down and turned slowly in the chair.
Duchess Mercy, with her beautiful dark hair pulled back from her face, strewn with silver, smiled at her. “You must come and eat, my dear. It is quite late.”
“Oh no, if it is time for supper,” she said, “I must return home.”
“I will not hear of it,” the duchess said swiftly, as she strode forward in her beautiful emerald-green gown. “We are going to eat, and then we are going to go to the theater, and you are going to join us.”
The invitation was like being asked to the moon. Amazing! She’d never dared to dream that they might invite her to dine and go to the theater with them. The Briarwoods!
She gazed down at her gown.
She couldn’t possibly. She wasn’t dressed for the theater. And oh dear God, how difficult it was going to be to turn the duchess down. Theater with the Briarwoods sounded like bliss.
“But—”
“You see, my nephew Perseus told me how very much you love attending the theater. And of course, my dear, if you’re here studying it, you must come with us.
A theater evening with the Briarwoods is singular.
It’s not at all like going with other people,” the duchess added as if this would secure her approval.
And likely the duchess wasn’t accustomed to people turning down her invitations.
“I…” She looked down again at her gown. “I can’t,” she protested, though she did not wish to.
The duchess tilted her head to the side. “Why ever not, my dear?”
“I am not dressed appropriately.”
The duchess beamed at her. “This house has more ladies in it than a convent. We could find one if needed,” she said. “But besides that, I sent a note to your mother some hours ago whilst you were working, requesting a gown and that she join us in our box tonight.”
“Really?” She gasped, hardly believing her good fortune or the duchess’s kindness. Her mother would be so thrilled she’d likely be in a daze for weeks! The theater in the Westleigh box! It was a social coup of inexplicable proportions.
“Of course,” the duchess said. “We are a very friendly family and we love to bring new members into the fold.”
Muriel swallowed.
The very idea of being part of the Briarwood family was astonishing and thrilling, even as a mere guest. They lived their lives in a way that most people could only ever dream about, and she did dream about it.
Not in the sense that she would become a Briarwood, but she did wonder what it’d be like to have that sort of freedom and love for things. She stood then and crossed to the duchess.
“Thank you so much for such a thrilling invitation. I am sure my mother has accepted.”
“She has,” the duchess said merrily as she linked their elbows together.
“Now, you must come with me, my dear. Perseus said that you were in need of a good repast because you had been working very, very hard. And he also said that your passion for theater is such to be admired that you deserved a night out on the town in our box. He’s the reason for all this, not just myself. Though I should have thought of it.”
Friend. He was her friend. It was the greatest act of a friend to be so thoughtful.
“He said that?” she whispered.
“Oh yes. He is a big-hearted young man,” the duchess gushed as she led them out into the hallway decked with massive paintings of far-off lands and stunning ancestors dressed in the most sumptuous of clothes. “So when he makes a request, we all agree.”
Big-hearted?
She had thought him a charming rogue. Was he really so very big-hearted? Families, of course, could see one in an entirely different light than how one actually was.
That had to be it, and yet she liked him. She liked him very much indeed. And he’d been most taken with her interests. No man had ever done that before. Perhaps he did have a big heart.
The house was a cacophony of voices and the antics of young people. Someone was playing a pianoforte in one of the rooms, a beautiful piece by Beethoven, and children were racing around everywhere.
Her family was large enough, but the children were in the nursery most of the time, brought down for a visit with her parents at four o’clock, where they would all play together for about an hour and a half or so before her parents got ready to go out for the evening with those siblings ready to be on the mart.
That did not seem to be the case here.
And when Muriel came into the dining room, she was taken aback, not appalled, but she had no idea what to make of it. The table was so long that it looked as if it was set for a state dinner.
Now, it appeared that the children were mostly at one end of the table and the adults at the other, and not everyone had been seated yet. But suddenly, the loud banging of a gong filled the house.
“Ah, there we go,” the duchess proclaimed. “Everyone shall descend now. All of us do like our food. Do you like to eat?”
She let out a laugh. “Yes, I suppose so.”
“Good. You’ll fit in then. No mincing about plates here and being delicate with our portions. One must be strong in this family. You must partake,” she said, and she guided her to a chair.
“You will sit near me,” the duchess added, “and I shall put Perseus opposite you as you two have become friends.”
She blinked. “I beg your pardon?”
“Friends. He said you two had become friends, which is wonderful, my dear. He can always use more friends, as can I. Have you been having success in your research?”
Muriel sat down at the table and looked at the duchess, blinking. It was all a bit much. The truth was she came from a rather unimportant family in the ton, and the Briarwoods were essentially like royalty, though they weren’t actual royalty. They were legendary, which was almost better.
They were some of the most important people in the ton.
The vast difference between the daughter of a man with a knighthood and a duchess was, in her mind, rather like the distance between the moon and the earth.
Yet here she was, sitting next to the duchess as if it was the most normal thing in the world.
The gentlemen began pouring in: gorgeous, massive fellows with dark hair, and a few blonds, their clothes perfectly hugging their broad shoulders. They laughed, the sound booming across the room, bouncing off the walls. Yet somehow, in the end, it wasn’t too much.
They somehow made all of this seem…just as it should be.
Muriel would have thought that this group would be overwhelming, but the joviality of the situation was such that she immediately felt herself relax. This was no formal dining arrangement where power was on full display.
No, they were all making jokes and bantering back and forth with each other, though they were dressed in the most beautiful and expensive of clothes.
As the men sauntered in, their wives and female relatives began bustling into the room in beautiful gowns, their hair up, laced with flowers and ribbons. They laughed too! Fully, not delicately behind their fans.
The whole house seemed to be based upon laughter, and then the dowager duchess entered, her silver hair coiled atop her head, and Muriel met her gaze.
The matriarch beamed. “Oh my dear, you are staying to dine. I am so glad. Perseus was absolutely insistent that we invite you. I don’t know why we didn’t think of it before, but you did seem to be a bit of a quiet creature, and we can be a rather rowdy crew. ”
She beamed back at the dowager duchess. “Thank you for having me. It is most revelatory.”
The dowager nodded as she sat beside her. “I’m glad that we are a revelation, my dear. We’re a revelation to many. I hope it’s a good one.”
“Oh, it is,” Muriel enthused, smiling so hard her cheeks hurt. “It is. My family is quite friendly,” she said, “but this is something else altogether. Do the children always eat with you?”
“Always,” the dowager duchess said, placing her linen napkin in her lap.
“We think it best that we all spend time together. After all, one never knows how much time there is. Who wants to waste it by sending children off to rooms upstairs to dine alone with servants? The children need to learn how to converse anyway.”