Chapter One
“Mundie, you’re taking too long,” came an irritated female voice from the doorway of Rosamund’s room. “How am I supposed to make the final adjustments to my attire for the Boxhaven masquerade ball when you are taking so long to complete my gown?”
Rosamund, who hardly remembered the last time she’d used her surname and at age twenty-two was years beyond the sensation of cringing at the detested nickname, merely said, “I’m just finishing the final stitches, Aunt.”
She would not, of course, mention that it had taken her longer to finish the adjustments to the gown because the alterations required her to do far more than “just sew on a few ribbons to refresh the look,” as Melinda had ordered when she’d handed the gown to her. Melinda had put on a significant amount of weight, which no one was meant to mention, but it was a fact of which Rosamund, effectively Melinda’s personal seamstress, was well aware.
Melinda’s eyes traveled over Rosamund’s small room, which was on the top floor of the Monroes’ London town house, as far away from the main family quarters as possible, and came to rest on Rosamund’s untouched lunch tray, which contained a piece of toasted cheese and an apple.
“You’d have more time to do what little is asked of you if you weren’t always eating.”
Rosamund managed, from long practice, not to laugh. Since Rosamund was kept constantly busy sewing for the household—and with Melinda and her daughters, Vanessa and Calliope, there was always mending, and her two cousins being out, new dresses to sew—Rosamund undoubtedly made up for her keep in what they would have spent hiring a seamstress. And as she was rarely invited to join the family for meals, she was not costing them a great deal in food. She knew from the housekeeper, Mrs. Barton, that the kitchen staff had been instructed “not to be lavish” with Rosamund’s trays.
“Of course, Aunt.” Rosamund might have pointed out that if she was not allowed to consume food, she would eventually run out of energy and be of no use, but she’d learned, from the moment she’d come to the house at age fifteen, that it was best to agree with Melinda and say as little as possible.
“I don’t know why I should have to remind you of your responsibilities, Mundie. One would think you’d be grateful for being taken in and cared for as you have been.”
This was a familiar refrain.
“I am very grateful, Aunt.” And she truly was. She had a roof over her head, and meals, such as they were. More important, she had the company of Melinda’s uncle Piggott, who lived in a room down the hall from Rosamund’s little cell, and of the housekeeper, Mrs. Barton. Sometimes of an evening, the three would take a mug of tea together in Uncle Piggott’s room. Rosamund called him Uncle Piggott even though he wasn’t actually her uncle, but Melinda’s uncle by marriage. From the first, he’d insisted that Rosamund was the sort of person anyone would be proud to have as a niece and that he’d be delighted if she wished to call him uncle, as his real, “less pleasing” nieces did. Uncle Piggott, despite having been a vicar or, he would say, because of it, preferred blunt speaking.
Melinda peered closely at Rosamund’s work and offered a brief snort in judgment, then leaned into the hallway and called for Mary, one of the maids. Mary arrived in the doorway with an armful of fabric, and Rosamund’s heart sank. The Boxhaven ball was only two days away, and she’d foolishly hoped both her cousins would wear the gowns they’d worn to their last ball. But Mary was holding Calliope’s favorite gown from the previous season, which would never fit her without letting out the bust.
Melinda plucked the gown from the maid’s arms and dropped it on the small table next to Rosamund. “You know what to do, Mundie, and she wants crystals sewn along the neckline as well. You’ll need to finish it tonight, because you’ll be working on Vanessa’s gown tomorrow.”
Which meant more rushing to finish in time for any last-minute nips and tucks before the ball. Rosamund had often suspected that Melinda took special pleasure in seeing how fast she could make her sew.
“I’ll make certain the gowns are ready in time.”
“See that you do.” Melinda gestured to Mary. “Take this tray away. We don’t want Rosamund to be distracted while she works.”
With an apologetic look that Rosamund returned with a quick, understanding smile, Mary removed the tray.
The hour was late when Rosamund finally finished the last stitches on Calliope’s gown, but she knew Mrs. Barton had brought up Uncle Piggott’s evening tea and was lingering in his room to chat. Rosamund hung Calliope’s gown neatly on the hook in her room that had been installed for just that purpose and crept down the dark corridor toward the light of Uncle Piggott’s room.
Uncle Piggott’s living had been a poor one. Now nearly eighty, his financial circumstances necessitated accepting the charity of his niece Melinda, who’d offered him a room and meals in exchange for the right to let all her acquaintances know how charitable she was.
“I’m her ticket into heaven,” Uncle Piggott liked to tell Rosamund with a wink. As the stairs were now too much for him, he passed all of his time in his room, contentedly. The tall stack of books that stood on his night table and was frequently refreshed by Rosamund accounted for a large part of his contentment, along with his beloved pipe. If his body had betrayed him in age, though, his mind remained sharp.
“So, Melinda has you working your fingers to the bone so those awful daughters of hers can be paraded before the ton in the hopes of catching husbands,” Uncle Piggott said when Rosamund joined him and Mrs. Barton in his room.
“This will be the first time madam and the young ladies have been invited to Boxhaven House,” Mrs. Barton pointed out.
“Not surprising, as the Marquess of Boxhaven is surely too sensible a man to want anything to do with either Melinda or those chits,” Uncle Piggott said cheerfully. “It’s actually quite remarkable how rotten they are, considering how nice they look. I have often observed to our Lord that if He only made everyone look on the outside as they are on the inside, so many of our human problems would resolve themselves.” He shook his head. “Lemon-suckers, the pair of them.”
“Shh,” Rosamund said, giggling. “They might hear you.”
“What, all the way up here in the Outer Reaches?” Uncle Piggott liked to refer to the fourth floor as the Outer Reaches. His room was comfortable but modest, a chamber obviously meant for guests of little importance. At the far end of the corridor, in a dark, perpetually chilly spot, was Rosamund’s own tiny chamber.
“Melinda would have to be a witch to hear that well,” Uncle Piggott said, filling his pipe. “Though I have not discounted the idea that she might be some sort of devil’s imp.”
“I despair of your sense of decorum,” Rosamund said, “though I like it more than I ought to when you speak badly of Melinda. My own relations, and they’re providing my meals and shelter.” She shook her head. “I am shocking.”
“They’re the shocking ones,” Uncle Piggott said around his pipe stem. “For your mother’s own sister to treat her niece so shabbily is appalling.”
But they all knew that it was the very fact that Rosamund was her mother’s daughter that had doomed her to the position she now had in the Monroe household. Melinda had never forgiven Rosamund’s mother for marrying “a penniless sailor.” Her sister marrying beneath her, Melinda believed, had dragged down her own consequence, resulting in Melinda’s marriage to the “worthless” (and now dead) Mr. Monroe, instead of the viscount who had once pursued her.
Melinda had clearly felt vindicated when Rosamund’s father, a captain in the Royal Navy, had been involved in a public scandal related to some men who had deserted their posts. Rosamund had never wavered in her faith that her father had done the right thing throughout the affair, but he had been court-marshaled, and their distinctive family name had been dragged through mud that stuck to it forever after.
“If your mother hadn’t married a man with such an unforgettable name,” Melinda said on the day seven years before when Rosamund arrived to stay, “perhaps you could recover somewhat from the scandal. But no one will forget it, or his infamy, and I won’t have my generosity to you repaid by subjecting my family to derision. You will keep to yourself and not draw attention in any way. And you will never, under any circumstances, give anyone your last name.”
Uncle Piggott poked the air with his pipe. “You ought to be attending the Boxhaven ball. As a member of the family, you were invited.”
Rosamund had privately felt more than a few stings of disappointment while laboring over gowns for a ball she could not attend—because she couldn’t attend, she knew that. Melinda had never once included her in a social event in all the years she’d lived with the Monroes.
“Why would I want to go to the ball when, with my aunt and cousins gone for the evening, the three of us can have a whole lovely evening together?” Rosamund said. “Perhaps we might even purloin some wine.”
“Your ideas of a wonderful evening are truly pathetic,” Uncle Piggott said in a peppery voice, but Rosamund thought, for the briefest moment, that she saw a hint of moisture in his sharp old eyes.
* * *
“It’s the very thing for you, Marcus. I knew the instant I laid eyes on it. Him.”
“Er, you did?” Marcus Hallaway, the Marquess of Boxhaven, said to his mother, Lady Boxhaven, trying to keep any note of dismay out of his voice. But she had just presented him with a small spaniel. A lapdog! She’d brought the dog, concealed in a basket, into the sitting room in Boxhaven House, his London home, when she’d come for tea that afternoon. She’d lifted the top of the basket with the flourish of one offering a wonderful treat.
The dog, released from his confinement, now placed his two front paws on the top edge of the basket and yipped excitedly. With his chestnut and white coloring and enormous brown eyes, he would have looked at home in the arms of a well-dressed lady.
The dog also looked barely past the puppy stage, and Marcus had visions of him tearing through the corridors of his house with servants trailing after him. He wondered dismally whether the creature was housebroken, though he supposed his mother would not give him a gift that would create disgusting messes in Boxhaven House.
Still, he had plenty of dogs at his country houses, not that he was closely acquainted with any of them. Why had she brought him a lapdog, and with all this ceremony?
His mother gave him a shrewd look. Lady Boxhaven was the mother of four grown children, and she was no stranger to parsing the nuances of her offspring’s demeanors. “I know you have dogs at Weldwood and the other estates. But you aren’t often in the country these days, and I hate to think of you... without a companion.”
“A companion,” he repeated. Was the dog meant to be a new salvo in his mother’s longtime campaign to get him to find a wife? If so, he couldn’t comprehend her reasoning, because theoretically, if he now had a “companion,” then might not further companionship become a less pressing issue? As this line of thought in regard to a dog standing in for a wife quickly turned ridiculous, he abandoned it and mentally threw up his hands as to his mother’s motivation. His mother was not averse to eccentricity, but she was infinitely dear to him, and if she wanted him to have this small dog, he would accept her gift graciously, even if it meant the possibility of tooth marks in his best boots.
“Exactly,” she said with a grand smile.
He nodded slowly. “Well, thank you very much, Mother. Extremely thoughtful of you.”
She beamed, and the dog took this opportunity to launch himself out of the basket. Marcus braced himself to save any number of breakable and bite-able objects the animal might make for, but it was not to the divan legs or the rug tassels that the dog made his way.
“Oh!” cried his mother gleefully, “he likes you! I knew the two of you would suit.”
The dog, ignoring even the plate of biscuits perched on a low table a few feet from his basket, had raced over to Marcus and was now at his feet, wagging his tail excitedly.
“See, he’s already realized you’re to be his master.”
“A veritable example of the forces of fate in action,” Marcus muttered.
“Isn’t it?” she crowed.
The drawing room door opened at that moment to admit Marcus’s younger brother, Jack, and their sister Alice.
“Oh!” squealed Alice, who at sixteen frequently found occasion to squeal. She rushed over and dropped to her knees before what Marcus was privately already calling The Creature. “He’s darling! Or is it a she? Is this your dog, Marcus? It must be, why else would it be here? But why did you get a dog?”
“A wonder she ever manages to draw a breath, isn’t it?” Jack observed, apparently not equally overcome at the sight of the dog. But then, Jack was a gentleman of twenty-seven, with interests that inclined toward horseracing and the sort of discreet carousing favored by young men who were beloved by their families and friends as good fellows but nonetheless not immune to the pleasures of, well, carousing.
“It’s a wonder you’re even upright this morning,” Alice said, directing a withering look over her shoulder at Jack as she proceeded after the dog on her hands and knees, “considering—”
“Thank you, Alice,” their mother said firmly. “I don’t think any of us need to entertain such considerations.”
Jack shot Marcus a look that spoke volumes. He had been looking for his own town house to buy and was staying with their mother and sisters in the meantime.
“Is this your dog?” Jack asked as the dog returned to his apparently preferred spot at Marcus’s feet.
“Yes,” Marcus said, restraining a sigh. “Mother has just this morning presented him to me.”
Their mother, standing behind Jack, could not see the way her younger son’s eyes danced at these words. Marcus treated him to the sort of glare that an older brother who was a marquess learned to cultivate at an early age by practicing on his siblings. Jack only grinned.
“The little fellow certainly seems to like you,” Jack said.
“It is rather unfair,” Alice said, sitting back on her heels. “Here I am, prepared to dote on the little thing, and he only has eyes for Marcus, who’s not even paying attention to him.”
“Dogs, much like young ladies, can easily become spoiled by too much attention,” Marcus observed meaningfully.
“Don’t listen to him,” Alice said to the dog, having coaxed him to a sitting posture at his master’s feet, from which position he gazed upward adoringly. “Just because someone is a marquess doesn’t mean he knows much of anything.”
Marcus did not dignify this with a response.
“Have you decided on a name yet?” his mother asked.
“I think you should call him Rex,” Alice said.
“Brute,” Jack suggested.
“No,” their mother and sister said as one.
Marcus looked down, thereby receiving the full effect of the devoted canine gaze directed up at him. “Socrates,” he pronounced. “Let us hope he grows in wisdom.”
“Perfect!” Alice said. “You ought to bring him to the ball, dressed in a little toga. It would be the very thing.”
“Yes, wouldn’t it?” Jack said gleefully. “And Marcus could go as Caesar. I should pay handsomely to see him sporting this fellow about the ballroom in matching togas.”
Marcus reflected that, though he was on the whole glad he was no longer fourteen, there were times when he wished it would not be considered unseemly for him to pummel his brother.
“About the ball,” their mother said. “I am a wee bit concerned, because we’ve had quite a response to the invitations. Of course I’m delighted that so many are eager to attend our ball, but I do hope it won’t become a terrible crush.”
The siblings all shared glances of affectionate exasperation. Overcrowding at ton events was a perennial concern of Lady Boxhaven, who felt that a hostess ought to be occupied with her guests’ ability to circulate freely and drink a cup of lemonade without being jostled.
“It will be fine, Mother,” Marcus said kindly. “Boxhaven House is quite up to the task of hosting everyone we know all at once.”
“I do hope so,” she said, not sounding convinced. “I would hate for anyone to feel hesitant to attend because it would be an uncivilized crush.”
“Some of the people you invited are people I would not mind in the least being discouraged by the idea of a crush,” Alice said, abandoning her efforts to secure Socrates’s attention and standing up. “Tell me again why we had to invite Lord and Lady Winstonhurst and the Monroes.”
“The Winstonhursts are friends of friends. And we can hardly avoid asking the Monroes, as we’ve asked everyone else in the neighborhood.”
“But they’re so incredibly tedious,” Alice said.
Marcus, who had been cornered by Mrs. Monroe at a concert a few weeks before and subjected to a disquisition on the magnificence of her two daughters, whom he had not seen for some time, was inclined to agree.
“If the ball is as much of a crush as Mother fears it may be, perhaps they’ll find the event inhospitable and leave early,” Jack observed. “Perhaps we should invite more people to ensure that that happens.”
“You just don’t want to dance with Florence Drummond,” Alice said.
“Does anyone?” Jack asked.
“Don’t be a beast,” their mother said. “Florence Drummond is a sweet young lady.”
Jack sighed. “I know she is, as sweet as treacle. But she talks constantly. It’s like a river of words rushing over a person, drowning you before you can either respond or escape.”
“She only does that when she’s nervous,” Alice said. “Kate says Florence is actually a very interesting person. I believe those were her very words.”
“Where is Kate, anyway?” Marcus asked, surreptitiously trying to nudge the dog away from his boots, which were in grave danger of being besmeared with drool. Kate, the elder of the two sisters, was twenty-three.
“Shopping,” their mother said. “She said she needed some ribbons for the ball.”
“More likely she just wanted to sit in Gunter’s watching people,” Jack said. “Ever since she attended that lecture on poetry, she’s been ‘making sketches of ideas.’”
“Well, I hope she buys some ribbon as well, because the gown she means to wear is decidedly prim,” Lady Boxhaven said. “Despite its reputation, I don’t think poetry has brought as many people together as a pretty gown. Not, of course, that I am suggesting that a pretty gown is of ultimate importance.”
“Of course not,” Marcus agreed reasonably.
“But primness is rather discouraging to suitors. Now,” she said, looking around the room speculatively, “I’ll just go have a word with Hendricks about chair placement for the ball. That is, if you don’t mind, Marcus.”
Lady Boxhaven had been the mistress of Boxhaven House until she moved, with Marcus’s younger siblings, to a town house two blocks away the year Marcus turned twenty-eight. Though he’d told her it wasn’t necessary, she’d insisted that a man of twenty-eight deserved his own lodgings. Marcus suspected her design had also been to leave him to his own devices so he might be more motivated to find a bride.
“By all means,” he said. “Perhaps you’d like to take Socrates with you, to show him about the house?”
His mother merely laughed as she swept out the door.
It had not escaped Marcus’s notice that his family had been hosting more balls than usual this year, increasingly on very thin pretexts. He was not unaware of the reason for this, which was that his mother wanted to see all her children married and married well, and not one of them had yet obliged her.
Being the oldest and the one most expected to fill a nursery, Marcus knew that nothing would give his mother more pleasure than for him to marry. While he liked to oblige his mother whenever possible, he did not feel a pressing need to hasten to the altar. One thing was in his favor: His mother’s marriage to Marcus’s father, who had died in a carriage accident five years before, had been blissful, and she wanted nothing less than bliss for her children.
“Life is unpredictable,” his mother would say with a sad sigh now and again. “Think of your poor father, cut down in his prime. None of us has any guarantees. Which is why I so want for each of my children to know the happiness of a marriage founded on love.”
None of her children, who all adored her, ever replied to these thoughts with anything but a kind smile or a gentle patting of her arm. They all agreed with her that marriage to a person one loved was a very good idea, but finding such a person was not as easy as their mother seemed to think. She had met their father at a ball, where, as the night wore on, she would recount, they both just knew. Having found her perfect match so effortlessly, Lady Boxhaven was not considered by any of her children to be quite reasonable on the subject of finding a mate.
“How do you compete with love at first ball?” Kate had muttered to Jack the night before, after their mother had been reminiscing about the fabled “night of romance” she’d shared with their father.
“It’s not supposed to be a competition,” Alice said. “She only wants us all to know the happiness that she and Papa did.”
“It’s easy for you to be relaxed about the whole thing,” Kate had moaned. “You’re not twenty-three and attending your five hundredth ball.”
“Some people would be happy to attend five hundred balls,” said Alice, who, having only come out that Season, had begun attending balls only the month before.
“Just you wait,” Kate said.
These words were not delivered in a tone of menace, but rather, one of realism. They all knew that their parent believed that each of her children, like her, would find love at a ball. Their mother was not otherwise superstitious or prone to flights of fancy, but from this belief she could not be dissuaded. Consequently, she encouraged her children to attend as many balls as possible, and she looked for any excuse to hold a ball.
In addition to balls celebrating Jack’s return from his European tour and Marcus’s thirtieth birthday, both unobjectionable reasons for celebration, there had been balls to celebrate the redecoration of the ballroom and the successful cultivation of a new rose variety at Weldwood, the family seat. Marcus would not have been surprised had his mother announced the following week that she wanted to hold a ball in honor of the arrival of Socrates in Marcus’s household, though he dearly hoped she would not.
Tonight’s ball was in honor of Kate’s ankle, which she had sprained a few weeks before and which had only recently been pronounced safe for dancing by their family physician.
“I wish she wouldn’t refer to the ball where she met Father as a ‘night of romance,’” Jack said. “And when she goes into that part about how he got that dreamy look in his eyes…” He shuddered. “It doesn’t bear thinking about, one’s parents at balls.”
“Well, I think it’s wonderfully romantic,” Alice said. “And I hope I do meet my husband at a ball, whoever he’ll be. I think nothing would be nicer.”