Chapter 27

Isabella slept late the next morning.

When she woke, Frederica was sitting in a chair by the window, reading a book. She glanced over when she heard Isabella moving but said nothing and turned her attention back to her book.

Isabella pushed up into a sitting position and waited until Frederica flipped a page, curious to see if her cousin was actually reading or simply trying not to look at her.

“Why didn’t you wake me?”

Frederica huffed a sound that could have been termed a short laugh if it weren’t coated in sadness. “When a woman cries until well past three in the morning, you let her sleep.”

With a groan, Isabella flopped back onto her pillows. “I didn’t realize I was so loud.”

Another page turned. “Do remember that our beds back up to the same wall. It doesn’t take much.” She closed the book and looked at Bella with a blank expression. “What happened?”

For a few seconds Isabella considered lying. Would Freddie understand why she’d said no? Why she had to say no? Poor Frederica was waiting to find out whether or not the love of her life was even going to survive to be able to propose, while Isabella was walking away from the man who had declared his love for her and had so sweetly asked her to be his wife. Would Frederica understand that more was riding on Isabella’s success than ever before? That Freddie’s own happiness was at stake?

“He proposed.”

In the ensuing silence, Isabella couldn’t look at Frederica. She heard her cousin rise and cross the room to yank the bell pull.

“And you said no, I’m assuming. Otherwise we’d have been up all night celebrating.”

“I couldn’t, Freddie. Not with so much at stake. My father was a proud man before the accident. When I left he was barely holding on, working himself to exhaustion every day to accomplish a small fraction of what needed to be done. He’d sit before the fire at night, looking older than I’d ever seen him. How could he survive being indebted to my husband? Relying on a Peer of the Realm to care for his family, his children? It would break him, Frederica. And that would break me. And I know Griffith would blame himself for my unhappiness.”

Frederica drummed her fingers against her book. “I don’t think,” she said slowly, “that your father would be all that pleased with your making decisions for him.”

“Of course he wouldn’t. Which is why I won’t tell him.” Isabella got up from the bed and began to pace. “When I go home at the end of the Season, we’ll say I wasn’t successful. Uncle Percy agreed to pretend to help out of sympathy.”

“Leaving your father indebted to his wife’s brother instead of his daughter’s husband. I’m not sure that’s any better. Personally I think His Grace would be considerably less annoying and condescending about it than my father will be.”

Isabella frowned. “Maybe, but at least then I’d be there to suffer alongside them. Not off in my shiny new castle, living life without a care while they scrape by knowing everything they’ve got is from the hands of another.”

“It seems a rather impossible situation.”

“Yes.”

A maid arrived then, carrying a tray. The cousins waited until she’d left again before returning to their conversation.

“Are you going to be ill today?” Frederica set about pouring and fixing the tea the way Isabella normally took it. “I wouldn’t blame you. But Father’s expecting people to stop by this afternoon and informed me he expects us to be available. The House of Commons approved the draft of the bill. Now it only needs the approval of the House of Lords.”

Isabella sat at the dressing table and wrapped her hands around the cup of tea, taking a deep breath of the fragrant steam. “So it’s almost over, then? He said the Lords would vote on it once the Commons had.”

“It’s almost over. He wants you to make a final case for him, though.” Freddie frowned as if trying to remember something important. “Assuming, of course, they stop picking over it and vote on the thing. You’ll be happy to know that even though all these men want to vote on it to make the path to your side a little smoother, they’re not voting blindly. All the changes have Father worried. Of course he’s never thought it strict enough. If he had his way the apothecaries would be nothing more than chemists, able to do nothing without the oversight of a fully educated physician.”

Isabella well understood her uncle’s frustration. This Apothecary Act had been something of a burden for him for years. She just couldn’t bring herself to care. “How did you find out about all of this? He’s barely talked to me about what’s going on. Just tells me to get more men. As if they were flowers I could walk around a ballroom and pick at will.”

Frederica shrugged. “The bedroom wall isn’t the only one that’s thin.”

“I’ll be ready.” Isabella made herself take a bite of fluffy pastry even though it sat on her tongue like cotton stuffing. She swallowed hard. “I still have to see this through, and the sooner we finish it the better.”

Frederica nodded and then pulled a folded white square from her book. “I almost forgot. A letter arrived for you yesterday, but you’d already closed yourself away in here. I assumed it could wait.”

Who could possibly be sending her a letter? Had her mother sent another note?

Isabella’s hand trembled as she reached for the paper. Perhaps a word from home was just the motivation she needed to see this through, to bear the cold stares in another ballroom, to ignore the papers one more day, to resist the urge to tell her uncle what a conniving manipulator he was and leave London in her dust.

Her mother’s handwriting looped across the front of the paper, bringing a smile to Isabella’s lips.

Frederica reached down and hugged Isabella. “I’ll leave you to your letter and your breakfast, then.”

Isabella was already breaking the seal when the door latched behind Frederica.

But the words did not bring solidifying motivation. A cry wrenched from Isabella’s lips as she read the note.

They were selling the farm. Not all of it, of course, but enough to pay off the debts and send Hugh to school. There would even be enough for a small dowry for Isabella and her sisters. They wouldn’t have to rely on her uncle’s generosity anymore.

That sentiment brought tears to Isabella’s eyes.

Her mother continued by saying that once the girls married, the small farm would be more than enough to support Isabella’s parents, especially as her father had become exceptionally good at leather work during his convalescence. They’d taken his leather goods to Dumfries and made almost as much as they’d made with the farm the previous year.

Mother sounded so happy. Isabella could do nothing but cry.

It was so clear now. She’d made the wrong choice. She’d given up everything, telling herself it didn’t matter because at least she’d be saving her family. She could deal with her own unhappiness to know that they were safe and taken care of.

But she shouldn’t have.

Everywhere she looked she saw reminders of everything she’d given up, everything she’d done. Flowers from men she’d flirted with. Dresses and jewelry purchased by her uncle as an investment in her success, left strewn about the room because she so frequently dismissed her maid. The grandeur of the room itself, under a roof she’d never been allowed to visit until she’d become useful and malleable. All of it made her sick to her stomach.

Closing her eyes didn’t help. Because then all she could see was Griffith’s face when she told him no. The hurt and surprise that he couldn’t hide because he’d laid himself bare in his bid for her hand. And she’d wanted to say yes. Oh, how she’d wanted to.

But he didn’t know. And she couldn’t tell him. Because as difficult as it was to see him hurt by her hand, how much worse would it be to see his caring fade? To see his regard slide into disgust when he, who valued his integrity above all else, learned that she’d been willing to sell her honor?

Either way she was destined to lose everything she’d come to care about. At least now, when she slunk home to marry a local merchant with no ties to London and no knowledge of Town gossip, she’d be able to carry with her the knowledge that a man as wonderful and amazing as Griffith had loved her.

In time, he would love another, which was why she would never be able to accept the suit of any of the other men vying for her attention. She would never return to London, would never run the risk of seeing Griffith with someone else.

Would never again roam the rolling fields of Northumberland, safe in the feeling that at least there, she belonged. Because she didn’t anymore. And not just because her family had sold those precious fields, but because she had changed. Whether London had changed her or the pressure and subterfuge had done it didn’t matter. Perhaps it was both or neither, in some strange combination with the way she felt around Griffith.

A tear welled in her eye. She tried to blink it away, but it spilled down her cheek anyway. With an angry swipe of her hand she pushed it away. What right did she have to cry? She’d made her decisions, had foolishly believed that there was no other way out for her family and only her bravery and sacrifice could save her sisters and brothers from a life of drudgery and her parents from ruin. Now she had to live with that foolishness, the complete lack of trust in God, and the repercussions of it, with no one to blame but herself.

The letter had crumpled in her frustrated fist. For a moment she considered lighting a candle and holding the paper up to the flickering flame, erasing forever the inked proof of her folly. But she couldn’t. Her family was all she had now, and burning the precious words her mother had scraped together the time to write wouldn’t change the truth.

That didn’t mean she had to look at it, though.

She crossed the room and flipped open her jewelry box, empty save the precious memories she’d collected in London and her mother’s forgotten jewelry. At the bottom lay the only other letter her mother had been able to send. But it wasn’t the folded parchment that sparked a trembling in Bella’s lower lip and a burning in the corner of her eye.

The quaich Griffith had bought her and the scrap of thread she’d found clinging to her skirt after sewing up his arm lay across the letter. Traces of sunlight played over the piece of plane tree bark nestled beside them. Whomever she married would likely be a working man, without the time or inclination to take her around to examine strange trees and plants. Even reading about such plants was probably lost to her, as being the wife of a working man and raising a family would require every bit of her time and attention.

And while it was entirely possible she’d find the need to stitch him up at some point, she doubted the ensuing conversation would be half as enjoyable.

She would not cry. Not now. Now she would be strong. There was no denying that her lack of trust and deliberate choice of a path God wouldn’t have led her to had brought nothing but destruction. A warning about that was probably in the Bible somewhere, but she’d never paid much attention to memorizing verses unless her grandmother or parents made her.

Yet another thing to be mad at herself over. She should have taken more time. Studied Scripture instead of horticulture.

With angry swipes she scooped up all the carelessly discarded jewelry and hurled it into the box on top of all the things she’d foolishly thought to treasure. The splintering sound of the delicate piece of bark broke the dam holding back her tears, and as she slid the jewelry box lid closed, she let them come.

The trickle turned into a flood, and she found herself weeping in a heap on the floor, her hip pressed into the sturdy leg at the foot of her bed.

She cried until nothing remained but a headache and an overwhelming weakness. Too tired to climb up into the bed again, she snagged the corner of the coverlet and pulled until she could wrap the covering around her on the floor.