will be able to sponsor you if your mama still does not feel up to it.'
Yes, Freyja thought, smiling to herself, Eve was quite as formidable as any of them.
'It is time you went back to the nursery, Prudence,' her mother said in the little-girl whine Freyja remembered so well from Bath.
'Come, Prue.' Eve got to her feet and drew the girl to hers. 'It is high time I went up and read a few stories to Becky and Davy before tucking them in for the night. Would you like to hear some stories too?'
Later, after the gentlemen had come to the drawing room and they had all taken tea and prolonged the conversation for a while, the marchioness suggested an early night, which she was sure they would all welcome after such a long journey.
'And I am quite weary myself, I must confess,' she said, 'from all the excitement of welcoming dear Joshua home, where he belongs, and his dear betrothed and her family too.'
No one voiced any objection. It really had been a lengthy journey. But Joshua was not ready to retire yet, it seemed.
'Would you care for a breath of fresh air first, Freyja?' he asked.
'Oh, but Joshua, dear,' his aunt said faintly, 'Lady Freyja would need to take her maid with her.'
Alleyne grinned and waggled his eyebrows at Freyja.
'She will be with her betrothed, ma'am,' Aidan said, sounding wonderfully arrogant and starchy. 'There will be no need of a chaperone.'
'And even if there were . . .' Freyja said, arching her eyebrows and leaving the sentence uncompleted. 'Yes, I would, Joshua, thank you.'
It was a chilly night, as befitted early autumn, but it was lovely nonetheless. The sky, which had been so dark earlier while she stood in the bay window of the drawing room, was now star-studded, and the moon shed its light onto the land and gleamed in a wide, sparkling band across the sea and the lower part of the river.
There was a footpath leading along the hillside on a level with the house, bordered by bushes and flower beds on the inner, hill side, and by a waist-high stone wall half-covered with ivy and other plants on the other. Beyond the wall there was another flower border and then lawn sloping down to bushes and the road below. In the summertime, Freyja guessed, this must all be a blaze of color. Even now, and even at night, it was beautiful.
'What a foolish woman your aunt is,' she said. 'You intended never to come back here, did you not? You would have left her to live out her life in peace here and to rule the household as if it were her own. Yet she had to stir up trouble where there was none.'
'And now Morgan is to visit us here frequently in order to paint, Alleyne is to come in order to enjoy my private beach, Aidan is interested in my farms, Eve is planning a come-out Season for my cousins, you are planning to remodel my home, and I am here,' he said. 'Yes, I suppose that if my aunt could go back and ignore Mrs. Lumbard's letter informing her of my presence in Bath, she would perhaps do so. But perhaps not. She always had to feel in complete control.'
'Why did you intend never to come back here?' she asked.
She knew very little about him apart from the fact that he was an amusing, attractive companion. It was strange how one could have known a man in the most intimate way physically and yet not really know him at all as a person. She had not wanted to know him. She still did not. Yet it seemed inevitable now. She had made the impulsive, mad decision to accompany him here, and now she had been drawn inextricably into his life.
'I came here at the age of six,' he said, 'after my parents had died. I was not even told they were dead at first. I was told they had had to go away for a while. The theory was, I suppose, that I would gradually forget them and would never have to be told the searing truth. But my aunt told me the first time I got up to some mischief here. My parents would be very disappointed to know that they had such a bad little boy, she told me. It was a good thing they were dead and would never know.'
'Ah, yes,' Freyja said. 'It is just the sort of thing the marchioness would say. I hope you told her to be damned.'
'I did,' he said, 'in words far more colorful than that, I believe. But I knew in that moment what the truth meant to me. I had endured until then with all the patience I could muster. I had lived for the day when my mother and father would come for me and take me back home. There was the truly terrifying emptiness of knowing them gone forever. And there was the knowledge that my present life with my uncle and aunt and cousins was my permanent life.'
'I hope,' she said tartly, fighting pity for the boy he had been, 'you were never abject.'
He laughed. 'Sweetheart,' he said, 'you are supposed to be in tears of pitying sentiment by now. No, I never was. I made up my mind that if my aunt was determined to think me bad, I would do all in my power to earn my reputation.'
'Your uncle?' she said. 'Your cousins? Did they share her low opinion of you?'
'My uncle had no choice,' he said. 'I was bad, Free. I could make your hair stand on end with an account of some of my escapades.'
'I doubt it,' she said. 'I grew up with Bedwyns and Butlers. I was a Bedwyn myself. But in my family we were called high-spirited and mischievous before we were punished. Never bad.'
'I rubbed along well enough with the girls,' he said. 'But they were much younger and therefore were never really my companions.'
'I suppose,' she said, 'your aunt hated you because you were the next heir after her son.'
'Undoubtedly.' He chuckled.
'Oh,' she said as they rounded a slight bend in the path and were suddenly buffeted by the wind. They also had a much wider view of the sea-and the village had come into sight on the opposite side of the river. 'Magnificent!'
'It is, is it not?' he agreed.
