“I understand.” Kit understood Charles’s underlying message all too well. If he failed to complete this project on time and satisfactorily, his hope of being appointed Deputy Surveyor—a step toward someday becoming Surveyor General of the King’s Works, the official royal architect—would be as good as dead.
And the rest of his dreams would die along with it.
He yanked the door back open. “I shall depart for Windsor posthaste.”
“Sir.” The man bowed and preceded him outside.
Back at the house, Kit looked about for Rand, but his friend was nowhere to be found. He went instead to make his apologies to his hostess. “Forgive me, Lady Trentingham, but I must take my leave. There’s a problem at Windsor Castle. I cannot seem to locate Rand—”
“He and Lily have a habit of disappearing,” she told him with a rueful smile. But then her brown eyes turned sympathetic. “I’ll explain,” she added. “He’ll understand.”
In no time at all, Kit was settled in his carriage, rubbing the back of his neck as the vehicle lumbered its way toward Windsor.
Could he possibly have made an error in designing Windsor’s new dining room? Had a flaw in the plans gone unnoticed? He unrolled the extra set he always carried, spreading the crisp linen over his lap. But he couldn’t seem to concentrate.
Especially when his carriage jostled past the village of Hawkridge, where he’d grown up.
He gazed out the window at the familiar landscape, remembering nights whiled away in his family’s snug cottage, he and Ellen playing on the floor while their mother read by the fire. Days spent with his father, learning carpentry and building. Afternoons fishing with the local nobleman’s son, Lord Randal, both of them starved for companionship their age.
That felt like a lifetime ago. Now Rand was a married man, a man who looked as though he’d seen all his hopes and dreams realized—on the very day that Kit’s seemed to be slipping away.
His hand went into his surcoat pocket, grasping at the small, worn bit of brick he always carried there. A chip off his very first project.
For twelve years—through school and university, through punishing hours and sleepless nights—he had dedicated himself to one goal. The Deputy Surveyor post was almost within his grasp.
He couldn’t fail now.
THREE
“YOU LOOK melancholy,” Rose’s mother said later that evening. Standing with Rose in her perfumery, Mum picked over the many flower arrangements on her large wooden worktable, plucking out the marigolds. “Why the long face, dear? Are you sad to see your creations destroyed?”
“Of course not.” Rose added a purple aster to a pile of flowers and some ivy to a bunch of greens. She cleared her throat, then forced what she hoped sounded like a romantic sigh. “The wedding was beautiful, wasn’t it?”
“Made more so by your lovely flowers.” Rose had filled the house with towering creations made of posies cut from her father’s gardens. “Which is why,” her mother added, “I thought—”
“I don’t care what becomes of my flower arrangements. Honestly, Mum, it makes no sense to let the blooms wither and die when we can turn them into essential oils for your perfumes. I don’t mind in the least.” With a bit more force than necessary, Rose tugged two lilies from the vases and tossed them onto the table. “Whatever happened to Christopher Martyn, do you know?” she asked in an attempt to change the subject.
“That messenger brought news of a problem with one of his projects. He had to leave.”
“Which project?” Rose asked.
“He didn’t say. Or perhaps I don’t remember.” Mum fixed her with a piercing gaze. A motherly gaze. “Does it signify?”
“Of course not. I was just curious, that’s all.” A touch of the headache began to pulse in Rose’s temples. “Why should I care what happens to his projects?”
“You danced with him—”
“Father traded that dance for a greenhouse. I had no say in the matter.”
Her mother nodded thoughtfully, beginning to pluck petals from a bunch of striped snapdragons. “You just look melancholy.”
Rose pursed her lips, quashing her exasperation. She lifted the lid off the gleaming glass and metal distillery that Ford had made for her mother while he was courting Violet. “It’s nothing, Mum.”
“It doesn’t bother you that your younger sister is wed?”
“Why should it?” She was chagrined to hear her voice crack. “I wish her happy, Mum. I do. I vow and swear it.”
“It’s no failing of yours, dear, that Lily met with love first.”
“Stuck as we are in the countryside, it’s a wonder she met anyone at all.” It was an ancient complaint, but in her present mood Rose had no compunctions against dragging it out again. “We’ve hardly ever been to London, or anywhere else we might meet eligible—”
“You have a point,” Mum interrupted.
“Pardon?” Rose blinked.
“You heard me. You haven’t much opportunity here to meet gentlemen.” Mum tossed the pink petals into the distillery’s large glass bulb. “I’m thinking that we—you and I—should attend court.”
“Court?” Rose decided she couldn’t be hearing right. One of them had clearly drunk too much champagne. “As in King Charles’s court?”
“I believe they’re at Windsor now—they do move around, as you may know.”
“What I know is that you and Father have always claimed court is no place for proper young ladies.”
“Well, you’re not so young anymore,” Mum said, then came to wrap an arm around Rose when she winced. “I didn’t mean it that way, dear. But you’re nineteen now, a woman grown. And I will be there to chaperone. It’s perfectly acceptable.”
It was more than acceptable, Rose knew—girls as young as fifteen went to court, many of them unchaperoned. And she also knew the licentious men there treated them like full-grown women. Violet had been to court with Ford, and she’d come back with stories that had made Rose’s hair curl.
A little part of her wondered if this was really such a grand idea.
But she wasn’t going to argue when faced with such extraordinary
