Someone to Care (Westcott #4)(111)

Oliver Jamieson had been apprenticed to a bootmaker in London two years ago at the age of fourteen and had promised to send for Bertha and marry her as soon as he got on his feet. Twice each year since then he had faithfully written a five-or six-line letter in large, careful handwriting. Bertha had shared his sparse news on each occasion and wept over the letters until it was a wonder they were still legible. There were three years left in his apprenticeship before he could hope to be on his feet and able to support a wife. They were both very young, but the separation did seem cruel. Anna always found herself hoping that Oliver would remain faithful to his childhood sweetheart.

“Are you going to turn it over and over in your hands and hope it will divulge its secrets without your having to break the seal?” Joel asked.

Stupidly, Anna’s hands were trembling. “Perhaps there is some mistake,” she said. “Perhaps it is not for me.”

He came up behind her and looked over her shoulder. “Miss Anna Snow,” he said. “It certainly sounds like you. I do not know any other Anna Snows. Do you, Bertha?”

“I do not, Mr. Cunningham,” she said after pausing to think. “But whatever can it be about?”

Anna slid her thumb beneath the seal and broke it. And yes, indeed, the paper was a thick, costly vellum. It was not a long letter. It was from Somebody Brumford—she could not read the first name, though it began with a J. He was a solicitor. She read through the letter once, swallowed, and then read it again more slowly.

“The day after tomorrow,” she murmured.

“In a private chaise,” Joel added. He had been reading over her shoulder.

“What is the day after tomorrow?” Bertha demanded, her voice an agony of suspense. “What chaise?”

Anna looked at her blankly. “I am being summoned to London to discuss my future,” she said. There was a faint buzzing in her ears.

“Oh! By who?” Bertha asked, her eyes as wide as saucers. “By whom, I mean.”

“Mr. J. Brumford, a solicitor,” Anna said.

“Josiah, I think that says,” Joel said. “Josiah Brumford. He is sending a private chaise to fetch you, and you are to pack a bag for at least a few days.”

“To London?” Bertha’s voice was breathless with awe.

“Whatever am I to do?” Anna’s mind seemed to have stopped working. Or, rather, it was working, but it was whirring out of control, like the innards of a broken clock.

“What you are to do, Anna,” Joel said, pushing a chair up behind her knees and setting his hands on her shoulders to press her gently down onto it, “is pack a bag for a few days and then go to London to discuss your future.”

“But what future?” she asked.

“That is what is to be discussed,” he pointed out.

The buzzing in her ears grew louder.





    Read on for an excerpt from the second book in Mary Balogh’s Westcott series,

    SOMEONE TO HOLD,

    now available from Jove.





One





After several months of hiding away, wallowing in misery and denial, anger and shame, and any other negative emotion anyone cared to name, Camille Westcott finally took charge of her life on a sunny, blustery morning in July. At the grand age of twenty-two. She had not needed to take charge before the great catastrophe a few months before because she had been a lady—Lady Camille Westcott to be exact, eldest child of the Earl and Countess of Riverdale—and ladies did not have or need control over their own lives. Other people had that instead: parents, maids, nurses, governesses, chaperons, husbands, society at large—especially society at large with its myriad rules and expectations, most of them unwritten but nonetheless real on that account.

But she needed to assert herself now. She was no longer a lady. She was now simply Miss Westcott, and she was not even sure about the name. Was a bastard entitled to her father’s name? Life yawned ahead of her as a frightening unknown. She had no idea what to expect of it. There were no more rules, no more expectations. There was no more society, no more place of belonging. If she did not take charge and do something, who would?

It was a rhetorical question, of course. She had not asked it aloud in anyone’s hearing, but no one would have had a satisfactory answer to give her even if she had. So she was doing something about it herself. It was either that or cower in a dark corner somewhere for the rest of her natural-born days. She was no longer a lady, but she was, by God, a person. She was alive—she was breathing. She was someone.

Camille and Abigail, her younger sister, lived with their maternal grandmother in one of the imposing houses in the prestigious Royal Crescent in Bath. It stood atop a hill above the city, splendidly visible from miles around with its great sweeping inward curve of massive Georgian houses all joined into one, open parkland sloping downward before it. But the view worked both ways. From any front-facing window the inhabitants of the Crescent could gaze downward over the city and across the river to the buildings beyond and on out to the countryside and hills in the distance. It was surely one of the loveliest views in all England, and Camille had delighted in it as a child whenever her mother had brought her with her brother and sister on extended visits to their grandparents. It had lost much of its appeal, however, now that she was forced to live here in what felt very like exile and disgrace, though neither she nor Abigail had done anything to deserve either fate.