The False Bride (Viennese Waltz #3)

Chapter 1

Chapter One

Lady Evangeline Stafford-Hill, sister of the formidable Duke of Aldingbourne, was not supposed to be standing next to a filthy road in the Austrian countryside, with mud dripping from the brim of her bonnet, the entire front of her pelisse, and unless she was very much mistaken, the tip of her nose.

Yet here she was. Splattered, head-to-toe, with muck, mud, and other things too ghastly for a lady to mention.

But Evie, despite being a lady, certainly would. She lifted her glove to sniff at the presumed speck of mud and confirmed her worst fear.

’Twas not mud, but manure. Well, wonderful. Stranded, adorned in manure. And barely forty miles from Vienna.

How much worse could things possibly get?

The carriage wheel, it appeared, was lodged so deeply in the rut that the axle was sunk in the mire.

Evie had jumped out and given the driver some helpful advice as to how to get out of it again.

With a lever, she’d suggested, a long one.

She’d rattled off a long list of other recommendations and been about to snatch the lever from him to demonstrate how to do it properly, but the man had roared, most ungratefully, she found, in the crudest dialect, “Will you shut up, woman!” Which she understood nonetheless.

So, Evie tried to put her talents to use elsewhere and climbed on a rock, propped her hands on her hips and let a dark gaze rove over the dreary, rain-logged, muddy countryside.

At that point another vehicle swept past them.

Did they see their predicament?

Did they stop to offer help?

Did they stop to offer to take her along?

They did not.

The carriage sailed past with deadly speed, showering her top to bottom in a generous spray of puddle water.

Evie spluttered.

She clenched a murky, gloved hand to a fist, shaking it after the carriage that was speeding away merrily, entirely unaware that it was responsible for her plight.

She uttered a string of curses so loud and colourful that the coachman, who was attempting to lift their carriage wheel with the lever, dropped it in fright.

Splash it made, and another wave of mud sprayed towards her, but this time Evie had the foresight to jump for cover.

Except now the sudden jolt caused all the trunks to come tumbling from the roof.

Which, in turn, caused her maid Nellie and her companion Clara to shriek.

At least they’d had the intelligence to wait on the other side of the road, where they remained safe and dry.

Alas, not their clothes, which had come tumbling out of the trunks, flying about in a merry flag of colours, until they fluttered and landed (how could it be otherwise?) smack in the quagmire.

Aghast, Evie stared at her clothes swimming in that cursed puddle that seemed bent on ruining her life.

So she did the only sensible thing that one could do in such a situation.

She laughed.

“My lady!” Clara called out with considerable alarm. “Are you quite well?”

Evie held her side. “Oh, quite, quite well,” she gasped after she found her breath.

Not an auspicious beginning for her grand adventure, not the thrilling escapade she had visualised.

For she was running away, and no one, not even her brother, who was currently in Vienna, entangled neck-deep in diplomatic negotiations and the complications of his own private love affair, had an inkling of what his spirited, wayward sister was about.

She wondered whether, by now, he’d even noticed she was gone, then decided it was unlikely.

Evie had told him, rather cleverly, that she was on her way to visit her childhood friend, Pippa. Her brother had been completely taken in, not even questioning how she had discovered the whereabouts of her long-lost friend.

(She hadn’t).

That was, of course, because Julius had not been quite himself these days. Though she rather suspected his current distraction was due to the fact that he was trying to solve the mysterious reappearance of Catherine, his dead wife.

Who was now found.

Thanks to her, no less!

If she hadn’t espied Catherine in the streets of Vienna, and insisted that Julius seek her out, they wouldn’t have had their reunion and rekindled their love.

She’d played a role no less important than that of Cupid. Or Eros. Or the Fates. Or whoever was responsible for reuniting star-crossed lovers.

And what thanks did she receive for her troubles?

She was to dress up and dance attendance on Lady Emily Castlereagh, a most tedious lady, spend her days going shopping and trying on bonnets, and prepare herself for her own upcoming nuptials to the high and mighty Field Marshal Georg von Hartenberg.

Oh yes! While her brother was to delight in the most grand and romantic of courtships, of the kind the old medieval poets of yore sang about to the twanging of a mandolin, she, Evie, was to be bundled up and married off in the most traditional fashion: that of a cold and calculated arranged marriage.

To a man she’d never even met.

To a man who, in all likelihood, was a creaky old bat, as old as Methuselah, with the charm of a cod.

Evie was normally not fastidious when it came to food, but she did detest fish, ever since she climbed on a barrel full of pickled eel when she was a child, and the lid had broken in, and she’d suddenly found thousands of dead eel eyes staring right at her.

Not only that, but the cold, slithery, slimy feeling on her skin had given her a life’s worth of disgust for eating any creature that lived under the water.

She wouldn’t even touch it with a foot-long pole.

If James, the footman, hadn’t found her when he did, and fished her out of the barrel, she would’ve drowned in eel.

Here rests by God’s divine will

Lady Evangeline Stafford-Hill

Drowned in a barrel full of eel…

She almost wished for that fate to have come to pass, if only to have such an extraordinarily lovely epitaph engraved upon her tombstone.

But back to Hartenberg.

The fact that her betrothed was a field marshal and dealt exclusively with wars, managing battles and shooting people, as well as getting shot at, too, a little—though surely that could not be anything of significance—and had probably personally seen the whites of Bonaparte’s eyes as the cannon balls zoomed past his ears on the very ground where she now trod, did not impress Evie one tiny bit.

Never mind that he was decorated with medals and was commended as a war hero, and had personally walloped Bonaparte’s hide at Leipzig to ensure the Austrians reclaimed their honour.

Evie sniffed.

What use was winning that single battle when the Austrians had lost so many others to the Corsican over the years? Really, how was that anything to brag about? Now, if she’d been an Austrian field marshal, the history books might have recorded an entirely different kind of story…

But bringing it to the point: she’d truly had enough of war heroes.

She’d gone to the victory parades and supper parties at Apsley House in London to listen to Wellington ramble on and on about the Peninsular War, and that had not impressed her one bit.

For the rest of her life, she’d have a specimen just like Wellington sit at her own breakfast table, droning away in a similar manner, in a never-ending loop, for doddering old men invariably forgot they’d already told the story and tended to start telling it all over again once they finished.

It would be very trying upon her patience, indeed.

In her copious experience of meeting field marshals, Evie had come to the conclusion that they tended to be whiskered, white-haired old men, stiff as a board and serious as priests giving the last rites to criminals climbing the gallows.

In short: without as much as a single drop of humour.

She could possibly bear being married to a man so old, Evie reasoned, if he had the gout and couldn’t walk.

There could be some advantage to that, even.

He would sit about being old, while she could be busy tending to her own life.

She could grit her teeth and bear that he was a war hero, even.

She would pat his hand, patiently, as he counted his medals.

But if the man lacked a sense of humour…

If he failed to see the ridiculousness in life, was incapable of chuckling at a joke, appreciating a caricature or smiling at her antics…

Now that, by Jove! That would be unbearable. That she could not endure.

She would have to cry off the engagement on the spot.

Never mind her brother, who vowed their union was a matter of honour, a blood bond between the two families, above and beyond all differences, transcending politics, culture, language, and distance. He’d set up their union when she was still in the nursery. A childhood betrothal!

Every time Julius started on one of his reminiscences, “Back when Georg and I did this or that…” it was proof enough that her brother had betrothed her to an old fossil without even having the decency to ask for her permission.

Her brother wasn’t the youngest, either, but he’d met this Hartenberg when he was but a schoolboy himself, on a Grand Tour.

Hartenberg had been the eldest of the three, practically a grown man already back then.

Which, according to her mathematical skills, put him now on the far side of sixty.

She knew that women of her station were not allowed to choose the men they married. She’d long resigned herself to that fate. But she would be damned if she would step up to that marriage altar and see her bridegroom’s face for the first time.

That, she vowed to herself, would only happen over her dead body.

During their lifelong betrothal, he had never once written to her.

Really, it was quite irregular.

All communication came through her brother.

“Hartenberg sends his regards,” he’d toss at her at the breakfast table, folding up a long missive from him.

Or, “Hartenberg is very much looking forward to seeing you finally in Vienna,” which made her think that her betrothed had precisely not written that.

It certainly left her wondering.

Maybe this Hartenberg wanted to be shackled to her as much as she. Meaning: not at all.

Which, really, left her with one recourse: Find the man. Corner him. Collect the evidence. Dissolve their relationship. They would both be better off for it.

Except, to her eternal frustration, now that she had come all the way to Austria to meet the man, it turned out that he wasn’t in Vienna.

The man just doggedly refused to be in the same place as she, and she, Lady Evangeline Stafford-Hill, had had enough.

He was rusticating in the mountains, she was told. Healing from a war injury.

Well then, Evie reasoned.

If Mahomet refused to come to the mountain, then the mountain would go to Mahomet.

Except.

Not shortly after they had passed through the gates of Vienna, her companion Clara started to look peaky.

The carriage was stuck.

She was wet to her bones.

Her entire luggage was bathing in a quagmire.

There was thunder rolling in the distance.

And no inn in sight.

How, in the name of all that was good and holy, did she end up here?