Page 2 of Gentleman Jim

Daphne Honeywell, the squire’s widowed sister-in-law, had come to live at Beasley Park only two years before for the sole purpose of turning Maggie into a lady. Nicholas despised the woman. Because of her, Maggie’s days were taken up with needlework and dancing lessons, and her head had been filled with thoughts of balls, routs, and assemblies. Because of her, Maggie no longer wore breeches and rode astride or stripped down to her underclothes to go swimming with him in the lake.

Now she dressed in pretty gowns, made of fabric so fragile and fine that Nicholas feared to touch it, and her thick mink-colored hair, which had once cascaded in a luxurious tumble down her back, was bound up in soft curls and silken ribbons. Even her complexion had changed. Carefully shielded from the sun with parasols and hats, it no longer glowed with a golden tan but had reverted to its natural hue: a flawless, creamy porcelain.

Two years was hardly any time at all, and yet the difference between a fourteen-year-old Margaret Honeywell and a sixteen-year-old Margaret Honeywell was as vast as the ocean.

More and more often, Nicholas found himself staring at his lifelong friend with a peculiar ache of longing in his chest. He’d never liked to be away from her, but now, whenever they were apart, he brooded over her to the point of melancholy.

And that wasn’t the worst of it.

He’d been dreaming about her, too. Vivid dreams that surely no gentleman ever dared dream of a lady.

“Miss Margaret’s not for the likes of you,” Jenny had taken to warning him whenever she caught him sulking. “She’s for Master Fred or some other fine gentleman. Ain’t nothing going to change that.”

Nicholas had never believed it. He and Maggie were soul mates. And yet, as he watched her slow transformation, there were times when he was stricken with an awful pang of sadness, a nagging worry that the day was fast approaching when Margaret Honeywell would take her rightful place in society and be lost to him forever.

“I shan’t stop teaching you to dance merely because Fred and Aunt Daphne object,” Maggie said as they lay by the stream. “I’ve always shared my lessons with you, haven’t I? And dancing is really no different from reading or writing, I feel.”

Nicholas levered up on his elbow and looked down at her. “When you taught me to read, you were seven years old. And we weren’t required to touch each other.”

“Why shouldn’t we touch each other?”

He arched a brow at her.

She only laughed. “What hypocrisy. I’ll wager no one would think it unladylike if I had been dancing with Fred. And he wouldn’t have behaved half as gentlemanly as you do.”

“Wouldn’t he?” he asked, all of his senses instantly alert.

“You know he wouldn’t. He always holds me far too close, and he’s forever staring down at my bosom.”

Nicholas suppressed the now familiar swell of jealousy and rage. The primitive urge to find Fred, and any other gentlemen who dared to look at Maggie, and beat them to a bloody pulp. “If anyone ever so much as lays a finger on you, I’ll—”

“You never do,” she interrupted, a hint of accusation in her eyes. “When we’re dancing, I mean.”

He was briefly diverted from his anger. “I never do what?”

“Stare at my bosom.”

Heat rose in his cheeks. He looked at her a moment, dumbstruck, before giving her a crooked smile. “What bosom?”

Maggie responded to his teasing with a rare blush of her own. At sixteen, she had the beginnings of a figure that promised to one day be as glorious as that of her late mother, a lady who had often been referred to as the Somerset Aphrodite. “Naturally you wouldn’t notice any of my endowments. You’re too busy paying court to Cornelia Peabody.”

“What?”

“Jenny told me so.”

Nicholas scowled. “She wishes I would court one of the baker’s daughters. I daresay old Peabody’s offered to give her a discount on hot cross buns if I take one of them off his hands. Though how the devil either of them think I could keep a wife on less than five pounds a year is a mystery to me.”

“It’s not impossible,” Maggie said.

“No, not impossible.” He affected to give the matter a great deal of thought. “I suppose Miss Peabody could always find employment. Perhaps your father might even give her a job scrubbing out chamber pots up at the main house?” His smile reemerged. “Then there’s the issue of lodging her, of course, but I’m sure she wouldn’t mind living with me in that godforsaken little room of mine above the stable. Cornelia Peabody has always struck me as the sort of girl who longs to set up house in a small, rat-infested cupboard.”

Maggie wasn’t diverted by his teasing. “Then it’s not true?”

“Gad, Maggie, what in blazes would I want with Cornelia Peabody?”

“She’s very pretty.”

Nicholas plucked a dark blue wildflower from the grass and twisted the stem idly between his fingers. It was a forget-me-not. The hearty little flower ran rampant at Beasley Park, decorating the grounds in a wash of blue every spring. The same arresting shade of blue as Maggie Honeywell’s eyes. “So are lots of girls in the village. What does that signify?”