“Even better—you’ll be in it!” Bridget’s eyes glowed as she beamed back. “Everyone will be, except Mama if she’s going to be ill for a while, and Great-Aunt Sophronia. They’ll be our audience.”
Her heart settled into a normal rhythm again. If Bridget meant for her to have a part, she’d have to see the play, and could put a stop to any nonsense before it got out of hand. And if anyone could make Serena smile again, it would be Bridget. For all her madcap ways, the girl was irrepressible in her good humor and wit, with a knack for making people laugh even in their foulest tempers. And the duchess had said to encourage entertainments.
“It sounds like a fine idea,” she told Bridget.
“Thank you!” The girl clapped her hands and ran back into the house before Viola could say anything more, which was likely for the best.
A gust of wind made her shiver. She wrapped her arms around herself and cast one last look down the long oak-lined avenue; the ducal carriage was already gone from sight. Her gaze drifted upward. The clouds seemed to be growing thicker and grayer by the moment, and the air had a leaden stillness that promised snow.
Viola didn’t like storms.
Chapter 1
“How much farther is it?”
Wesley Morane, Earl of Winterton, inhaled slowly and then exhaled even more slowly. If he didn’t know better, he would think his nephew was still a child instead of a young man nearing his twenty-first birthday. “A few more miles, I expect.”
Justin scowled and slumped by the window. The weak light caught his fair hair and made him look as young and petulant as he was behaving. “Aren’t we nearly to Cornwall yet?”
It felt as though they had circled the globe in this carriage. Wes tried to keep his voice calm as he replied, “No.” He did not repeat an earlier mistake, of offering to show Justin their progress on the small but handsome leather-bound atlas of England he kept in the traveling chaise. That had not gone well, with Justin fixating on the distance left to travel instead of the beauty of the illustrated map of Dorset.
Several minutes of silence passed. Wes did not fool himself they would continue indefinitely. Time had already seemed to stretch and slow, much like the distance they had still to travel. At one point he wondered if the carriage and horses had become stuck in a vast mud slick, where the hooves and wheels were only churning in place, never making an inch of progress.
“I could have stayed in Hampshire,” Justin said abruptly. “Dorset is hideous in winter.”
So is Hampshire. Wes managed to keep himself from saying it aloud. He did not manage to keep from thinking about a few places that were not hideous in winter—the East Indies, for example. The winter of 1808 had been splendid there, sitting under thick palm fronds and learning about the spice trade from his father.
“I recall you agitating to leave Hampshire,” he said instead. “Your mother told me you were wild to be away.”
The boy’s mouth pulled sullenly. “Not this far away.”
That was what his mother had feared. Anne was Wes’s oldest sister, and she knew exactly what her son wanted, so newly grown to manhood and so abruptly possessed of his father’s title. Justin had barely finished university when his father died, leaving him the new Viscount Newton. Instead of the Grand Tour he had been promised upon completing his studies, Justin had gone home to New Cross House to console his mother and sisters and lay his father to rest.
But mourning soon grew tiresome for a young man of high spirits and energy. If he couldn’t sow his wild oats in Italy or Spain, Justin was determined to sow them somewhere. He fell in with a crowd of young dandies who spent their time racing carriages, dicing, and drinking at the local pub. When the local miller called on Anne to complain of young Lord Newton’s attentions to his daughter, Anne wrote to Wes and commanded him to take charge of his nephew before the boy was hopelessly debauched.
He’d gone at once; he had to. Anne might be a decade older than he, but he was still the head of the family. Privately he didn’t think Justin was in as bad a way as Anne claimed, but his sister was grieving her husband, and rationality had never been her strong suit anyway. It seemed obvious to Wes that the best course was to separate the restless son and anxious mother.
On impulse he decided Justin should come with him to Kingstag Castle in Dorset. Wes had his eye on a particular old atlas, and he strongly suspected the duke had recently acquired it. The only way to be certain was to see it himself, and his sister’s demand that he deal with his nephew provided all the excuse Wes needed to set off for Dorset at once. Not only would it give Anne a respite from worrying about Justin, he reasoned, it would remove the boy from the miller’s daughter as well as his wastrel friends for a fortnight, and allow Wes a chance to influence his nephew for the better.
Rarely had he regretted anything more.
“Where did you want to go?” he asked, wondering what had made him think he could act as a mentor to this sulking young man. Had he been this odious when his own father died?
“Italy,” said Justin at once. “Rome. My father promised me I would see all the sights.”
“That’s an even longer journey,” Wes pointed out. “Some of it aboard ships, which can be even more beastly than the roads.”
“At least the destination is worthwhile,”
