The Wallflower's Mistletoe Wedding. Amanda McCabe

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СКАЧАТЬ and we can see what happens next,’ he said.

      Charles shook his head, frowning. ‘You should be careful, then, Harry. While you are gone on your adventures, someone else could easily pluck up such a prize. They do say that the Duke of Hamley, now that his time of mourning is at an end, seeks a new duchess.’

      Harry laughed. Duchess—now there was a role that would suit Helen well. ‘No one would make a better duchess than Helen.’

      Charles was silent for a long, tense moment. ‘I would never have taken you for a fool, Harry.’

      Before Harry could answer, their carriage turned through the gates of Hilltop Grange and jolted up the winding old drive, past the overgrown forest that had once been a manicured garden under the careful eye of their mother.

      Now, Hilltop looked nothing like the golden welcome of Barton Park, which had seemed to float above the night like a cloud of light. Hilltop had no light at all, save the glow of one lamp in the window of the library. Harry knew that once daylight came, the overgrown ivy on the grey stone walls, the crumbling chimneys, the covered windows, would all be too apparent. He felt again that deep pang of sadness, of guilt for following a different duty.

      But that one light meant their father was still awake, or more likely fallen asleep next to his empty brandy bottle. He seldom left the library now.

      ‘Our great inheritance,’ Charles said, his tone quiet and bitter.

      Harry gave a grim nod. ‘I am sorry, Charles. I should have been here all along.’

      Charles glanced at him, his expression startled. ‘Oh, no, Harry, never. You are doing what you have to—your duty to King and Country as you are called to do. No one has been more dutiful than you, ever since we were children.’

      He thought again of what their home had once been, what it was now. ‘I don’t know about that.’

      ‘Well, I do. Whatever I face here with Father is as nothing compared to whatever you have faced all these years. Besides, I’m seldom here at Hilltop at all these days.’ He grinned and that strange, solemn, thoughtful Charles vanished. The rakish, fun-loving young man everyone knew was back. ‘London is much more diverting. Why would a man ever live anywhere else?’

      ‘Diverting—and expensive,’ Harry muttered, but he couldn’t help laughing at Charles’s devil-may-care smile. It was always thus with his younger brother, their mother’s golden boy. While Charles was the fun one, Harry had indeed always been the responsible one. The quiet one.

      Charles shrugged. ‘What else can one do? I would be wretched in the army, worse than useless. The church would never have me.’

      ‘What of your painting?’ he asked, remembering the rare talent Charles once possessed with a brush, the way he could capture the mood of a landscape in a few deft strokes of paint.

      Charles laughed. ‘A boy’s diversion. Not fit for a grown man, y’know.’

      ‘According to who? Our father?’ Harry asked quietly.

      Rather than answer, Charles pushed open the carriage door as soon as they came to a full halt and jumped down. Harry followed him up the shallow stone steps into the echoing hall of Hilltop Grange. In the shadows, the portraits of their ancestors, including their golden-haired mother, watched them in silence. In the rooms beyond, the furniture was shrouded in canvas covers, like ghosts. Their mother’s cherished pianoforte was silent.

      For just an instant, Harry had such a different vision of the house, light gleaming on polished wood. The warmth of the fire, the scent of flowers from the gardens, the rush of small feet down the stairs, music. But the lady who turned from the keyboard to welcome him with a smile—her eyes were the sweet, soft hazel of Rose Parker.

      ‘Father, wake up!’ Charles shouted, banging on the library door with his fist. The dream was shattered, like the dust of Hilltop itself.

       Chapter One

      Winter, three years later

      ‘Jouissons dans nos asiles, jouissons de biens tranquilles! Ah, peut-on être heureux, quand on forme d’autres vouex?’

      ‘That’s quite enough!’ Aunt Sylvia shouted from her armchair near the fire, where she was swathed in shawls and a fur blanket. Her three lapdogs shifted and barked. ‘What a wretched song by that horrid Rameau. Why would you play such a thing?’

      Rose sighed and rested her wrists on the edge of the keyboard as the last notes died away in the overheated drawing room of Aunt Sylvia’s vast house. She would have laughed if she wasn’t quite so tired. She removed her spectacles and rubbed at her eyes. In her years of working as Aunt Sylvia’s companion, she had come to learn no moment was predictable. A favourite food one day, which had to be ordered from London and fetched from the village shop, a two-mile walk, by Rose every day, would not be wanted once it arrived. An expensive pelisse would be dismissed as too itchy, then needed again. The wheeled Bath chair would have to be fetched for a walk in the garden, only to be greeted with shouts of ‘What do you think I am, an old invalid? I shall walk! Give me your arm immediately, Rose. You cannot be rid of me so easily, you know, you silly girl.’

      Rose did not want to be rid of Aunt Sylvia. She paid a wage that kept Rose’s mother in her cottage, now that Lily and Mr Hewlitt had two children to take care of in their small vicarage and Mama’s small income seemed even smaller than ever. Her mother deserved to stay in her own home and Rose had to work to make it so. But Rose did wish Aunt Sylvia would make up her mind for once.

      ‘I thought you always enjoyed the old French songs, Aunt,’ she said. ‘Because they reminded you of your time at Versailles.’

      In her youth, Aunt Sylvia had once waited upon Queen Marie Antoinette, before she married the wealthy Mr Pemberton and returned to England. She spoke of it all the time and definitely never let anyone forget it, with her grey hair piled high and panniers strangely paired with newer, higher waists and puffed sleeves.

      ‘Why would I want to hear songs that remind me of such a terrible loss?’ Aunt Sylvia said, thumping her walking stick on the floor. One of the dogs barked. ‘You young people, you know nothing of such things. Nothing of how fortunate you all are.’

      Rose suddenly remembered Captain St George and their dance at the midsummer party so long ago, the haunted look in his dark eyes as he mentioned battle and seemed to remember Waterloo. She had thought of him too often in the years since, especially in the long, quiet nights as she lay awake waiting for Aunt Sylvia to call her. Had he married the beautiful Miss Layton, had he come back from battle and found peace at last? She couldn’t help but hope so.

      She glanced out the window, out the slim rectangle of thick glass revealed between the heavy brocade curtains Aunt Sylvia kept closed all the time. It had started snowing, a light, lacy, delicate pattern of white against the night sky. It reminded her that it was nearly December, nearly the Christmas season, and she wondered what her mother, what Lily and her little family, were doing now.

      Lily and her babies were surely decorating their small sitting room with greenery, baking plum cakes to carry to Mr Hewlitt’s parishioners. Perhaps her mother was embroidering new little gowns to wrap up for her grandchildren’s gifts.

      She felt the familiar pang of sadness of missing them and she had to remind herself СКАЧАТЬ