Dedication
To my readers,
This, my twentieth book, is dedicated to each and every one of you.
To those of you who have been with me since the beginning and to those of you who have found me along the way.
Your letters, notes, e-mails, encouragement and friendship have taught me more about the power of storytelling than anything else.
Thank you for being at my side through the good days, and especially through the trying ones.
You hold my heart and appreciation.
Bless you all,
Elizabeth, your devoted fan
Author’s Note
Dear Reader,
In a tiny corner of England, there was a village that boasted a curse. Now, most places would rather ignore the fact that they were cursed, but not Kempton. Their curse made them unique, and they clung to it with a stubborn resolve.
Who was to argue with a curse that left every maiden born of the village a spinster for the length of her days? And woe be it to the man who dared marry one of Kempton’s ladies. The last courageous fellow, a Mr. John Stakes, tempted the powers that be and married Agnes Perts. A man with such a last name should never have given the Fates such an opening, nor should he have left an unsecured fire poker in the wedding chamber.
Just saying.
And while no one was quite sure how the curse had happened or how to resolve it, Miss Theodosia Walding had once let slip at the weekly meeting of the Society for the Temperance and Improvement of Kempton that she’d been researching the matter in hopes of freeing the village from this plague, and she’d found her investigations met with abject horror.
She never made such an impertinent, and quite frankly ridiculous, statement ever again.
But this is not her story. It isn’t even the story of the rather remarkable lady who is thought to have broken the curse, Miss Tabitha Timmons, the now infamous Kempton spinster, who inherited a fortune from a wayward uncle (aren’t all fortunes inherited thusly?), went to London and got herself betrothed to a duke.
Yes, a duke.
But since Tabitha and her scandalous nobleman are as yet unmarried, and the duke hasn’t shown up with some sharp object imbedded in his chest or been found floating face down in the millpond, no one can say definitively that the Curse of Kempton is broken.
However, one intrepid miss from Kempton, Miss Daphne Dale, is about to take her own stab at finding a perfectly sensible husband.
No pun intended.
Prologue
Sensible gentleman of means seeks a sensible lady of good breeding for correspondence, and in due consideration, matrimony.
An advertisement placed in the Morning Chronicle
Earlier in the Season of 1810
“No! No! No!” Lord Henry Seldon exclaimed as their butler brought a second basket of letters into the morning room. “Not more of those demmed letters! Burn them, Benley! Take them out of my sight!”
His twin sister, Lady Juniper, the former Lady Henrietta Seldon, looked up from her tea and did her best to stifle a laugh as poor Benley stood there, wavering in the doorway, grasping a large wicker basket overflowing with correspondence. “Set them beside the others and ignore his lordship, Benley. He is in an ill humor this morning.”
Ill humor? Try furious, Henry would have told her. Instead, he vented his anger toward the true object of his ire. “I am going to kill you for this, Preston.”
Preston, being Henry and Henrietta’s nephew, who was also the Duke of Preston and the head of their family, ducked behind his newspaper at the other end of the table, feigning innocence in all this.
If only he was innocent in deed.
Hardly. Currently, he was the bane of Henry’s existence. Not only had Preston’s rakish actions—having ruined no less than five young ladies in the past few weeks—put the duke on the “not received list” but now that taint had spread to Henry and Hen, for suddenly they’d joined the ranks of “barely received.”
Guilty by association, as it were.
“You cannot kill Preston,” Hen said, wading in. She wiped her lips with her napkin and set it down beside her breakfast plate. “You are his heir. It would be bad form.”
“Yes, bad form indeed, Uncle,” Preston said over the top of his paper. Preston only called Henry “Uncle” when he wanted to vex him further—there being a difference of only six months in age between the three of them—Preston’s grandfather having added the twins to the nursery at an indecently advanced age.