This was all very tiresome, Avery thought as he moved off down the street and touched the brim of his hat to a lady who was walking with her maid in the opposite direction. He was very tempted to call upon Uxbury and settle the matter here and now. But Uxbury had chosen to be idiotic and issue a formal challenge, and proper gentlemanly protocol must now be followed.
Avery very much hoped, however, that the whole matter could be kept quiet. The thought that he might be seen as the champion of the honor of either Camille or Anna—or both—was shudderingly awful. It would ruin his reputation for effete indolence. But what was one to do when a fellow mortal chose to be an ass? One could not simply invite him to desist. Actually, one could, but it would be so much wasted breath.
Sometimes life could be quite bothersome.
*
Anna was standing in the window of the drawing room the following afternoon, gazing down at the street. Her family would be arriving soon with news and views—about the ball, about her triumphs and disasters, though she hoped the latter was singular rather than plural, about where she would go from here in her progress from being Anna Snow to becoming Lady Anastasia Westcott. It was hard not to be feeling a little despondent, though she knew she should be ecstatic with gratitude to the fates or whatever it was that had made all her dreams come true in such an abundant way. If only her sisters were here, sitting in the room behind her, or standing on either side of her, their arms linked through hers, everything would be different. But there would still be their mother, out there somewhere in the cold. And there would still be Harry, facing all the dangers and privations of war. And there would still be blanks in her history.
And who had ever said life could end up happily ever after the way fiction sometimes did? She gave her head a shake.
Elizabeth was still upstairs changing. The butler was to inform any other callers that she was not receiving today. There would be no repetition of yesterday, though there had been two more bouquets this morning, one of them clutched in the hand of a young gentleman who had stammered out a marriage proposal or at least the intention of a marriage proposal. He had actually asked to which gentleman he must apply for permission to ask for her hand. Anna had looked at Elizabeth, and Elizabeth had looked at Anna and suggested that the young man might wish to have a word with her brother, the Earl of Riverdale.
It would have been simpler and perhaps kinder for Anna to have said no, but how could she when he had not actually asked the question?
Her eyes focused upon the Duke of Netherby, who was walking along the street in the direction of the house. He was not escorting Aunt Louise today, then, but he was definitely coming here. After he had disappeared inside the door below, she waited for him to be announced.
He paused on the threshold of the drawing room and grasped the handle of his quizzing glass as he looked around, his expression somewhat pained. “I am the first to arrive?” he said. “How very lowering. It would almost suggest an eagerness to see you, Anna. And you are alone? No Cousin Elizabeth to chaperone you? No saucy maid to laugh at my wit?”
“Avery,” she murmured.
His eyes came to rest on her and for a brief moment his glass was trained upon her too.
“What is it?” he asked.
“Nothing.”
He dropped his glass and strolled farther into the room. “There is a way of saying nothing,” he said, “that suggests quite the opposite. All these flowers have come from admirers, I assume? And the ones in the hall and on the landing? I wondered for a moment as I came through the door whether I had moved outdoors rather than in. It was quite disorienting. What is it, my dear?”
The unexpected endearment brought tears welling to her eyes and she turned her head away. “I had a letter at long last this morning from Mr. Beresford,” she said. “The solicitor who dealt with my father’s business in Bath.”
“And?”
“He recalls receiving one letter from my grandfather more than twenty years ago,” she said, “informing him of my mother’s death and asking him to get word to my father. He does not still have that letter, and he cannot remember where it came from except that it was somewhere in the vicinity of Bristol. ‘Somewhere in the vicinity of ’ is very imprecise. It could be two miles away or twenty. It could be north, south, east, or west.”
“West would place it in the Bristol Channel,” he said.
“Perhaps they lived on an island,” she said crossly. “But wherever it was, it was more than twenty years ago. They may both be dead and forgotten by now. There may have been a number of vicars at that particular church in that particular village since.”
“There have not been,” he told her. “The church is St. Stephen’s. The village is Wensbury, twelve miles southwest of Bristol. The vicar is, and has been for almost fifty years, the Reverend Isaiah Snow. He lives in the vicarage beside the church with his wife of forty-seven years.”