Page 1 of Much Ado about a Widow

Chapter One

Late January 1817

Staring out at the bleak winter landscape of frozen grass and lifeless trees, Lady Georgina Kirkpatrick decided that the infernal bumping of the carriage taking her back to her father’s estate in East Sussex had been substantially less annoying to her yesterday. Of course, then Georgie had not spent eight hours the previous day being bounced about, plagued by roads that seemed to conjure up every rock, good-sized boulder, and deep rut possible just to shatter her spine. Now, though she was determined to face the rest of the drive with the steely fortitude passed down by generations of her family’s ancestors, she couldn’t help but sigh over the fact that the arduous ride was rather symbolic of the onerous marriage she faced at journey’s end.

The carriage hit a particularly deep rut, tossing Georgie into the lap of her lady’s maid, Clara, and making Lulu, Georgie’s King Charles spaniel, yip vigorously.

“Goodness gracious.” Georgie picked herself up off of Clara’s ample lap and gathered the protesting Lulu into her arms. “There, there, my girl. Are you quite all right?”

Lulu yipped again and sneezed.

Inspecting the dog’s paws and legs, Georgie gave a nod and placed the little animal on the soft, black leather seat beside her once more. “Folger. Folger, I say.” She stood up, swaying with the rocking motion of the carriage, and rapped on the trap with her bare knuckles. A little too smartly from the sting of them.

The trap door opened, and one of her father’s coachmen peered down at her. “Something the matter, my lady?”

“Is it at all possible to avoid at least some of the ruts in the road, Folger?” She grabbed hold of the lip of the trap as the conveyance hit another bump. “I’m being tossed about like a leaf in a high wind.” If this ghastly motion continued she might even cast up her accounts, though that was something she could not tell her coachman. “Poor Lulu cannot stay on the seat.”

Folger sent a sharp look toward the spaniel, who bared her teeth at him in return. “I’ll do what I can, my lady. This road’s a bad ’un, especially this time of year. I’ll slow the team down a mite. That should help.”

“Thank you, Folger. You are a prince among coachmen.”

The elderly servant ducked his head, his cheeks turning even redder than the cold had already made them.

Georgie beamed at him and lowered the trap. “He’s one of Father’s more reasonable servants.” She sat down and pulled Lulu into her lap, completely disregarding possible damage to her new blue-striped pelisse. “I’m surprised he’s lasted this long in my father’s employ.”

“Why’s that, my lady?” Clara’s head tilted to the side like that of an inquisitive finch. She’d only been with Georgie for two months and still had a lot to learn about the household.

“Because my father prefers his servants to do exactly as they’re told, no questions and no deviations. Folger should have just told me that he had his orders to deliver me to Blackham Castle by sundown this evening, and that should have been that. No slowing down suggested at all.” Georgie grinned at her maid. “If it had been Dobson on the seat, he’d have sped the horses up.”

Clara chuckled, then remembered herself and cleared her throat. “When you’re married you can hire a coachman who will take your orders and no others.”

As if Clara had waved a magic wand, Georgie’s good mood turned to dust, and she frowned, twisting around in her seat to stare out the window. “My husband will be the one to hire the coachmen, Clara. Hire all the outside servants.” She turned her gaze on her maid—her hard-won lady’s maid—and all the joy Georgie had known during the past weeks with her friends and brother at Hunter’s Cross attending Fanny’s wedding drained slowly out of her, leaving her as empty as a husk.

“I’m ever so sorry, my lady.” Clara eased back in her seat, trying to disappear it seemed. Glancing at Georgie and away, she picked at the hem of her handkerchief. “Perhaps Lord Travers will—”

“Never mind, Clara. From what I know of Lord Travers he is a man, much like my father, who will wish to bend all his servants to his will alone. Perhaps that is why Father agreed to his original suit and to its renewal since I became a widow. Like always fancies like from my experience.” Georgie wrinkled her nose. The idea of being married to a man like her father almost succeeded in swaying her from her resolve to marry Lord Travers.

“Your father is not like you at all, is he?”

“Hardly.” Georgie sniffed. To think she bore any resemblance to her father made her cringe. “If Father had tried to find a suitor who would be more offensive to me, I don’t think he would have succeeded.” She shivered. “Lord Travers managed to make my second Season sheer torture with his excessive attentions to me. I could not attend any party, rout, ball, soiree, or entertainment without seeing him leering in my face, fawning over me, and constantly asking me to dance.”

“Did you have to accept every one of his requests? Could you not turn him down a time or two?”

“Only if I didn’t want to dance very much that night.” As though she’d bitten into a sour lemon, Georgie puckered her mouth at the memory. “He always managed to be the first gentleman to ask me to stand up with him at the ball. Unless some other gentleman had asked for a dance beforehand, if I refused Travers, I could not have danced with anyone else who asked me for that dance. It would probably have been remarked upon, too—to my detriment instead of his, of course.” She sighed heavily. That second Season had been trying to say the least. “So inevitably I’d accept him, and he would smirk and saunter off, very proud of himself, and wait for our dance.” Recalling the naked hunger in his black-eyed gaze, she shivered. Even when dancing with other gentlemen she’d been uncomfortably aware of him watching her—like a thousand dirty fingers poking her bare flesh.

“He sounds like a very undesirable gentleman to be sure.”

“Undesired by me, certainly. Other ladies, apparently, were not so discerning. There was much gossip about him and Lady Osbourne that Season, and one of my cousins who had come out that same year as well said her mama had stricken his name from her list of eligible suitors for just such behavior.” If only Georgie’s own mother had been alive then, perhaps she could have made a stand against Father.

Instead, Georgie’s father’s sister, Aunt Augusta, had brought Georgie out, but under strict instructions about chaperonage from her father and the decree that she would not marry during her first Season so that he could turn to arranging the marriage himself. At that time he’d been busy with arranging marriages for her older twin sisters, Emma and Mary. That distraction had lasted two years and had been a godsend for Georgie because it had allowed her to circulate throughout the ton, making the acquaintance of many gentlemen without fear of making an alliance with any of them. Which was just as well. She’d not been out a month before she’d known without a doubt she could never marry anyone other than Mr. Isaac Kirkpatrick, their parish vicar’s son.

“Lord Travers must have behaved scandalously for a mother to have stricken an earl from her list.” The horror in Clara’s voice brought Georgie back to the swaying carriage.

“My cousin didn’t know all the particulars at the time—her mother would not tell her everything and for good reason. Such things are not spoken of to virginal young ladies. But after I married Mr. Kirkpatrick, I was able to find out more about Lord Travers’s escapades.” She leaned forward and lowered her voice, even though no one else was there to hear. “He had ruined at least one girl on one of his outlying estates, leaving her with a child to raise. And he dallied with a young lady of good family.”

Clara’s eyes widened. “They didn’t force him to marry her?”

Shaking her head, Georgie sat back. “The young lady was too distraught to tell anyone when she discovered her predicament. Then when she had to admit their transgression, Travers denied it had been him.” Poor wretched thing. “She was sent into the country as they scrambled to find a decent man who would wed her. I believe they found one in time, but of course everyone knew about it. She hasn’t been seen in Society since. She may never be again.”