now. He’d never seen her as he just had: looking younger, much younger and more beguiling, her hair not scraped back beneath a linen cap, but loose and tousled like a dark cloud over her shoulders, her usually pinched cheeks flushed with emotion, her eyes anything but serene. Gone, too, was the strict shapeless gown, with her body bundled and barricaded within. Instead she’d been clad in only a worn linen nightdress that had slipped and slithered over her shoulders, and had revealed far more than it hid, likely far more than she’d intended. As a man, there was no conceivable way he could have overlooked the heavy fullness of her breasts, or how the chill had made her nipples tighten enticingly beneath the linen.
He grumbled wordlessly to himself, a kind of mental shake, and pushed the door shut with his elbow. God knows plenty of scullery-maid seductresses would flaunt themselves before their masters to secure extra favours, but he wasn’t that kind of master, and Miss Wood wasn’t that kind of servant—which had made this evening all the more unsettling. He’d always thought of her as a dry old virgin, scarcely female, and now—now he saw that she wasn’t. Not at all. No wonder he couldn’t forget how she’d looked, standing there with her little toes bare to lecture him about love.
About love. Miss Wood, coming to rouse him from his bed to challenge him in her nightdress. Damnation, what was it about this infernal Italian air that seemed to turn everything upside down?
‘Here you are, Your Grace,’ Wilson said, holding his dressing gown out before him. ‘Put this on, and warm yourself. This is a perilously damp place, your Grace, all this water and musty old plaster, and I won’t have you taken ill from standing about. Now here, let me take those papers from you.’
‘No, I’ll keep them,’ Richard said, ignoring the dressing gown and returning to his bed, or rather, the bed that had come with the room. No respectable Englishman would ever consider such a bedstead as ‘his’, not when it was tricked out with gilded swans and crimson hangings shot with gold thread. All it required was a looking-glass overhead in the canopy and a naked whore or two to make it fit for the priciest brothel in London.
Grumbling, he let Wilson pull the coverlet up and plump his pillows as he picked up the first package of letters, the ones that had come from his older daughter Mary. One look at that familiar, girlish penmanship, and he forgot all about Miss Wood and her bare feet.
How could his girls marry without his consent? How could they abandon him like this, without so much as a by your leave? How could they possibly have changed so fast from his little girls in their white linen dresses and pink silk sashes into women grown and wed to other men?
‘Ah, your Grace,’ Wilson said, beaming. ‘Letters from the young ladies?’
‘That will be all, Wilson ,’ Richard said curtly. ‘Leave me.’
Leave me—that was what his girls had done, hadn’t they? He’d come all this way for them, yet they’d already gone.
He waited until Wilson had gone, then slowly opened the first of Mary’s letters and tipped the sheet towards the candlestick on the table beside the bed. It felt strange reading letters not addressed to him, like listening at a keyhole or behind a fence, practices no gentleman would do.
Yet as soon as he began to read, he heard the words in Mary’s voice, as clearly as if she were in the room speaking to him, and his heart filled with emotion. The letter seemed to date from early autumn, soon after her marriage, after Miss Wood had continued on to Italy with Diana and left Mary behind in Paris with her new husband.
Ah, Mary, his dear Mary. Mary had always been his favourite of his two daughters. It wasn’t that he loved her any more than he loved Diana, for he didn’t, but Mary was easier to like than Diana. With her calm, thoughtful manner and pleasing serenity, Mary was the opposite of her impulsive and passionate sister. For better or worse, Diana took after him, while Mary favoured her mother, and as she’d grown older, Richard had come to rely on Mary to handle things about the house that had once been his wife Anne’s domain. Even now he’d put off making certain decisions at Aston Hall—new paint for the drawing room, improvements that Cook wanted in the kitchen—telling himself that they could wait until Mary came home to guide him.
Except that now, as he read, he learned she wasn’t coming home. No, worse—that home for her no longer meant Aston Hall, but wherever this Irish-born rascal she’d married took her. He learned that though this man seemed to have some sort of income, he’d no proper home for Mary beyond bachelor lodgings in London. Instead they seemed to be content to live like vagabonds in Paris—in Paris!—dining out and wandering about day and night. To be sure, their lodgings were in an excellent area that even he recognised by name, and at least Mary had enough of a staff to be respectable. Richard could learn that much from the letters, and know his Mary wasn’t in any need or want.
But as he read on, Richard discovered that Mary had found more than simply respectable lodgings in Paris. In this Lord John Fitzgerald, she also seemed to have discovered a man who shared her interest in musty old pictures and books and long-ago history: a man who could make her happy.
And Mary was happy. There wasn’t any doubt of that. Every page, every word seemed to bubble with unabashed joy in her new life and her new husband. Richard couldn’t recall the last time she’d been as jubilant and light-hearted as this, not since she’d been a small girl before her mother had died.
Diana’s letters were shorter, less thoughtful, and full of the dashes and false starts that made her writing so similar to her speech, darting here and there like a dragonfly over the page. Her new bridegroom, Lord Anthony Randolph, was delicious, and sought endlessly to please her. Their life together in his native Rome was full of music and friends, parties and other amusements. She’d ordered a new gown, a new hat, yellow stockings to his lordship’s delight. He’d given her a talking bird from Africa. Like her sister, she was happy, more happy, she claimed, than she’d ever been in her life. She was also already four months with child.
His grandchild.
Richards groaned, and let his daughter’s familiar girlish signature blur and swim before his tired eyes. He wasn’t even forty, yet tonight he felt twice that. Oh, he’d learned a great deal from the letters. He’d learned that though he’d always done his best to make his girls happy, these unknown young men had succeeded far beyond his lowly paternal efforts. He’d learned that, no matter that his daughters had been the very centrepiece of his life, he really didn’t know them at all, not as they were now. He’d learned that Mary and her husband were likely even now on their way here to Venice to meet Diana and her husband, and together to bid their favourite Miss Wood farewell before she sailed away for England. But the blistering greeting that Richard would have offered them earlier wouldn’t happen. Not now, not after he’d read these letters.
Because what he’d learned the most from them this night was exactly what Miss Wood had predicted: that his darling girls had somehow changed into women in love, blissful, heavenly love, with the men they’d chosen as their mates for life.
And he, their father, had been left behind.
Chapter Four
Giovanni Rinaldini di Rossi stood close by his bedchamber window, watching. It was early for the Englishwoman to come calling on him, impossibly early by Venetian standards, yet there was Miss Wood, hurrying across the bridge towards his house. She walked briskly, with the determination and purpose with which she seemed to pursue everything, her plain dark skirts rippling around her legs. He knew ancient, widowed matriarchs who dressed with less solemnity than this little English wren did. Almost like a nun, she was, and the thought made him smile. No wonder he found her so desirable.
Without
