The Sum of All Kisses

“I think so,” Sarah replied, although truthfully she had no idea. “I really couldn’t say about the ones who are staying in the village.” Their cousin Honoria Smythe-Smith was marrying the Earl of Chatteris the following morning. The ceremony was to be held here at Fensmore, the ancestral Chatteris home in northern Cambridgeshire. But even Lord Chatteris’s grand home could not hold all of the guests who were coming up from London; quite a few had been forced to take rooms at the local inns.

As family, the Pleinsworths had been the first to be allotted rooms at Fensmore, and they had arrived nearly a week ahead of time to help with the preparations. Or perhaps more accurately, their mother was helping with the preparations. Sarah had been tasked with the job of keeping her sisters out of trouble.

Which wasn’t easy.

Normally, the girls would have been watched over by their governess, allowing Sarah to attend to her duties as Honoria’s maid of honor, but as it happened, their (now former) governess was getting married the next fortnight.

To Honoria’s brother.

Which meant that once the Chatteris-Smythe-Smith nuptials were completed, Sarah (along with half of London, it seemed) would take to the roads and travel from Fensmore down to Whipple Hill, in Berkshire, to attend the wedding of Daniel Smythe-Smith and Miss Anne Wynter. As Daniel was also an earl, it was going to be a huge affair.

Much as Honoria’s wedding was going to be a huge affair.

Two huge affairs. Two grand opportunities for Sarah to dance and frolic and be made painfully aware that she was not one of the brides.

She just wanted to get married. Was that so pathetic?

No, she thought, straightening her spine (but not so much that she had to actually sit up), it wasn’t. Finding a husband and being a wife was all she’d been trained to do, aside from playing the pianoforte in the infamous Smythe-Smith Quartet.

Which, come to think of it, was part of the reason she was so desperate to be married.

Every year, like clockwork, the four eldest unmarried Smythe-Smith cousins were forced to gather their nonexistent musical talents and play together in a quartet.

And perform.

In front of actual people. Who were not deaf.

It was hell. Sarah couldn’t think of a better word to describe it. She was fairly certain the appropriate word had not yet been invented.

The noise that came forth from the Smythe-Smith instruments could also be described only by words yet to be invented. But for some reason, all of the Smythe-Smith mothers (including Sarah’s, who had been born a Smythe-Smith, even if she was now a Pleinsworth) sat in the front row with beatific smiles on their faces, secure in their mad knowledge that their daughters were musical prodigies. And the rest of the audience . . .

That was the mystery.

Why was there a “rest of the audience”? Sarah never could figure that out. Surely one had to attend only once to realize that nothing good could ever come of a Smythe-Smith musicale. But Sarah had examined the guest lists; there were people who came every single year. What were they thinking? They had to know that they were subjecting themselves to what could only be termed auditory torture.

Apparently there had been a word invented for that.

The only way for a Smythe-Smith cousin to be released from the Smythe-Smith Quartet was marriage. Well, that and feigning a desperate illness, but Sarah had already done that once, and she didn’t think it would work a second time.

Or one could have been born a boy. They didn’t have to learn to play instruments and sacrifice their dignity upon an altar of public humiliation.

It was really quite unfair.

But back to marriage. Her three seasons in London had not been complete failures. Just this past summer, two gentlemen had asked for her hand in marriage. And even though she’d known she was probably consigning herself to another year at the sacrificial pianoforte, she’d refused them both.

She didn’t need a mad, bad passion. She was far too practical to believe that everyone found her true love—or even that everyone had a true love. But a lady of one-and-twenty shouldn’t have to marry a man of sixty-three.

As for the other proposal . . . Sarah sighed. The gentleman had been an uncommonly affable fellow, but every time he counted to twenty (and he seemed to do so with strange frequency), he skipped the number twelve.

Sarah didn’t need to wed a genius, but was it really too much to hope for a husband who could count?

“Marriage,” she said to herself.

“What was that?” Frances asked, still peering at her from above the back of the sofa. Harriet and Elizabeth were busy with their own pursuits, which was just as well, because Sarah didn’t really need an audience beyond an eleven-year-old when she announced:

“I have got to get married this year. If I don’t, I do believe I will simply die.”

Hugh Prentice paused briefly at the doorway to the drawing room, then shook his head and moved on. Sarah Pleinsworth, if his ears were correct, and they usually were.

Yet another reason he hadn’t wanted to attend this wedding.

Hugh had always been a solitary soul, and there were very few people whose company he deliberately sought. But at the same time, there weren’t many people he avoided, either.

His father, of course.

Convicted murderers.

And Lady Sarah Pleinsworth.

Even if their first meeting hadn’t been a mind-numbingly mad disaster, they would never have been friends. Sarah Pleinsworth was one of those dramatic females given to hyperbole and grand announcements. Hugh did not normally study the speech patterns of others, but when Lady Sarah spoke, it was difficult to ignore her.