1830
Once upon a time there was a little girl who loved her horse. (This is a very dull way to start a story, but it’s true.) She loved riding her horse, she loved brushing her horse, she – well, she didn’t much love mucking out the stall, but for her horse, she would do it. And that, her aunt told her, was the true measure of love.
And that was how Susannah Westforth knew she loved Sebastian Beckett. She had known it even at the tender age of nine, when the Becketts moved into the estate on the other side of the village, known as Custard House. (Yes, Custard House.) She knew it when he – a mature and authoritative thirteen-year-old – would obligingly play cards with her on rainy days, or when he would muss her hair and say, “Well done, Susie!” as she took down her opponent in bowls. She knew it when they were both home for school holidays, and he let her tag along to whatever boyish endeavor happened to be going on with the local farmers’ children, acting as her protector and advocate all at once.
And she knew it now, at the age of sixteen, watching him rumble away in his carriage to go off on his Grand Tour.
Susannah would have done anything for Sebastian. Possibly even mucked out one of his horse’s stalls, although thankfully, he never asked her.
“Oh, Clarabelle, whatever shall I do now?” she sniffed to her long-beloved horse. (Susannah would readily acknowledge Clarabelle was a name better suited to a cow than a beautiful white-socked chestnut, but she had not been a particularly clever eight-year-old when she named her.)
Clarabelle, as intelligent a horse as there ever was, did not answer.
They sat on the hill rise, watching the carriage roll away from Custard House, tears streaming down Susannah’s face. Sebastian had come over to say goodbye yesterday, and he had chuffed her on the shoulder and told her, “Don’t worry, Susie – I’ll be back before you know it. You won’t have time to change a lick!”
Susannah had managed to keep her tears in then, but there was no point in hiding them now. She watched from her spot on the hill until the carriage disappeared in the distance, completely confused and lost in the emotions reserved for a sixteen-year-old who was in love but did not know how to be.
She rode astride back to the house, which was so much faster that she could only roll her eyes every time her mother told her it was unladylike. And she wore breeches – also unladylike, but so much more comfortable than wearing that heavy habit her mother insisted upon.
But the most unladylike thing about Susannah when she walked into her home was that, due to a sudden and oddly not-metaphorical downpour, she was soaking wet.
“Susie!” she heard the shrill voice of her mother, followed quickly by the determined trot of her little body across the foyer of their home, known as Dewberry Manor (yes, Dewberry Manor). “What on Earth are you doing? Tracking mud and water all over the place. You cannot have been outside looking like that – what will the neighbors think?”
Normally, Susannah did not let her mother’s ideas of proper behavior affect her. She would let them roll off her like water out of a pitcher. Even at the age of sixteen – or perhaps because of it – Susannah knew her mother to be a deeply silly woman. She was small and fidgety, only worried about how things looked instead of how things felt and actually were in real life the way Susannah knew they were. So usually, she ignored her mother. And quite merrily, too.
But today, on this saddest of days, on the day that the one true love of her life drove away with little more than a pat on the head and a wave from the carriage, Susannah could not ignore her mother, her feelings, or how things actually were in real life.
“Oh, hang it all!” she yelled, shaking water off her head like an angry, wet dog. “It doesn’t matter what the neighbors think! There are no neighbors to think about now!”
“Susie – ” Lady Westforth gasped. “A young lady does not take such a tone with her mother!”
“My tone doesn’t matter, Mama! My life is utterly and completely over and nothing matters anymore!”
And with that, Susannah stalked off, her determined march turning her footfalls into thuds as she hurried to her room. Where she promptly threw herself on her bed, heedless of the mess her wet clothes were making of the quilt, and indulged in a good solid crying jag.
It could have been minutes later, it could have been hours, when the knock came at the door. And a soft, kind voice murmured her name.
“Susie? I know everything has apparently fallen to pieces, but I have brought tea.” There was a distinct pause. “I have always found hot tea beneficial when chunks of the earth start breaking free of their moorings. Also when one is cold and wet.”
Susannah’s face broke into a watery smile. She had forgotten Aunt Julia was visiting. Her elegant aunt always seemed to sail through life. She brought her sense of calm and dry wit wherever she went. And she was the only person Susannah might possibly open the door for now.
But Susannah was too bereft to get off the bed, so she made a mournful noise and let that be invitation enough for Aunt Julia.
“Oh, Susie.” She could hear the chuckle in her aunt’s voice upon seeing the tableau she presented. “Things must be dire indeed.”
The tea tray was set upon a little table, and the mattress shifted with the addition of Julia’s weight as she sat on the bed. Still, Susannah refused to look up.
“Would you like to talk about it?” This too was met with deafening silence. Because no matter how much Susannah might like to confide in her Aunt Julia, she just couldn’t. No one could understand how she felt, deep inside. It was too powerful, too unpronounceable, too unwieldy a thing, and if she said it out loud it would just explode like a cannon.
“Well,” Julia said with a sigh. “Perhaps I can guess.” She paused to think, but only for a moment. “You are sad because Sebastian has left for his Grand Tour, and you are afraid he will go away and forget you and meet some other young woman. Perhaps she’s Parisian. Or Belgian. Those Belgian girls do have forthrightness that comes with being from such a small country. But regardless of the nationality of this young lady, she is sophisticated and fashionable and she’ll have Sebastian wrapped around her finger. And he’ll never see you as anything other than a little sister.”
Susannah’s head came up. She stared at her aunt, her tear-stained cheeks flushed, but her eyes unblinking and suddenly quite dry.
“By the time he comes back, your young Mr. Beckett will be married to said Belgian girl, who you will be forced to smile at and visit with at Custard House, even as your heart breaks with every love-coo she sends her henpecked Sebastian.”
Susannah gaped. Her mind reeled at the exposure of her deepest, darkest fears. “That was the most terrible thing you could have possibly said,” she blurted out, slapping a hand over her mouth in horror.
But Julia just smiled. “It’s also the most unlikely to happen. Good English boys don’t go on their Grand Tour and come back married.”
“But… it could. Belgian girls, and all.”
“True, but it doesn’t happen to good English boys who rely on their good English fathers for income, at least,” her aunt said wryly. “However, there is a bigger problem.”
Susannah’s eyebrow went up.
“Even if Sebastian comes back unattached – as I promise you, he will – he is still not attached to you.” Julia’s eyes glinted with purpose. “That is what you most want, isn’t it? That’s what the tears are about. Your young Sebastian did not see you as something to be bereft at leaving.”
And Susannah quickly realized, sitting there on the bed amidst her sorrow and her muddy riding clothes, that Julia was right. (She so often was.) Her sadness was not born of the fact that she would miss Sebastian (she would) or that he might meet someone (please, God, no) – it was because he wasn’t hers. He did not belong to her. Not in the way her heart belonged to him.
And there seemed to be nothing to do but break down in sobs again.
But this time, she threw herself into the arms of her aunt, who bore the shudd
ers and the fluids, if not with sympathy, then at least gamely.
“I don’t know – *hic* – what to do!” Susannah wailed. “I’ve tried everything. I tried being near him and riding with him and… and I even tried kissing him once!”
Julia’s eyebrow went up. “Did you now?”
It had been for naught, of course. She had been sitting next to him on a felled log, after a good long sprint on Clarabelle, and she had leaned into him, her eyes closed, only to find that he had stood some moments before and she was left kissing tree bark. When Sebastian turned, he’d seen her face down and done nothing more than raise a brow and said, “Lose your balance, Susie? Up for the ride back?”
“I just know – *hic* – that if I could have kissed him, he would have felt everything I feel for him, I just know it!” Susannah continued, straightening and sniffing. “It would change everything! But now he’s gone, and I’ll never have the chance!”
This last realization brought on a whole new set of sobs. After a banal, “there, there” and perfunctory pats on the shoulder, Julia forced Susannah to a sitting position.
“That should be enough wallowing, don’t you think?” her aunt said.
“It… it should?”
“I should say so!” Julia cried in agreement, as if ending the wallow had been Susannah’s idea. “As I was saying before, you have missed no chance with young Mr. Beckett. In fact, his leaving is a blessing!”
“It is?” Now Susannah was completely bewildered.
“Because Mr. Beckett is so very used to seeing you, silly!” Julia shook her head. “Every summer, every school holiday. Men, in my experience, have a great deal of difficulty appreciating what is right in front of them.”
“So… so you think by the time he comes back from his Grand Tour… he’ll see me? Truly see me?” Susannah was too hopeful for words.
But her aunt simply regarded her with a cold, assessing eye. “Yes,” she said finally. “If we make him notice you.”
“How do we do that?”
The corners of her aunt’s mouth tightened.
“Please, Aunt –” Susie begged. “I’ll do anything.”
“Even give up wearing breeches to ride?”
Susannah’s brow came down. Then her eyes followed, taking in her clothes. Muddy boots and breeches, hanging loose on her frame. Then she looked over at her aunt. Impeccable and comfortable in her grace. There was no comparison. But still…
“What’s wrong with wearing breeches to ride?” she asked a little defensively.
“Nothing!” her aunt hastened to assure. “And if you want to wear breeches when you are riding alone, I would not tell your mother. But men – again, in my experience – like women because we are a mystery to them. Right now, in those ill-fitting breeches, you are not a mystery to men. You are a little friend. A pal.” Her nose crinkled in distaste.
And Susannah could see she was right. She was not the type to garner attention from a man, let alone from Sebastian. She had not mastered the arts the other girls at her school had always been practicing in the mirror. She hadn’t immediately excelled at such things the way she had at schoolwork or riding, so she shunned them more out of fear of embarrassment than dislike. And yet, she had always wondered… how did they do it? How did they bat their eyes just so? How did they choose just the right shade of blue to wear?
“You must have a lot of experience with men, Aunt,” Susannah said with awe.
Julia looked askance a moment, but then leaned into Susannah, her eyes sparkling with determination. “If you do everything I say, I promise you will get that kiss from young Mr. Beckett.”
And then everything will change. “Then he’ll be mine?”
A smirk crossed her aunt’s face. “And then… the rest is up to you.”
Chapter Two