Cecilia Harcourt. What on earth was she doing in North America? She was supposed to be in Derbyshire, in that little town Thomas had been so eager to leave. The one with the hot springs. Matlock. No, Matlock Bath.
Edward had never been, but he thought it sounded charming. Not the way Thomas described it, of course; he liked the bustle of city life and couldn’t wait to take a commission and depart his village. But Cecilia was different. In her letters, the small Derbyshire town came alive, and Edward almost felt that he would recognize her neighbors if he ever went to visit.
She was witty. Lord, she was witty. Thomas used to laugh so much at her missives that Edward finally made him read them out loud.
Then one day, when Thomas was penning his response, Edward interrupted so many times that Thomas finally shoved out his chair and held forth his quill.
“You write to her,” he’d said.
So he did.
Not on his own, of course. Edward could never have written to her directly. It would have been the worst sort of impropriety, and he would not have insulted her in such a manner. But he took to scribbling a few lines at the end of Thomas’s letters, and whenever she replied, she had a few lines for him.
Thomas carried a miniature of her, and even though he said it was several years old, Edward had found himself staring at it, studying the small portrait of the young woman, wondering if her hair really was that remarkable golden color, or if she really did smile that way, lips closed and mysterious.
Somehow he thought not. She did not strike him as a woman with secrets. Her smile would be sunny and free. Edward had even thought he’d like to meet her once this godforsaken war was over. He’d never said anything to Thomas, though.
That would have been strange.
Now Cecilia was here. In the colonies. Which made absolutely no sense, but then again, what did? Edward’s head was injured, and Thomas seemed to be missing, and . . .
Edward thought hard.
. . . and he seemed to have married Cecilia Harcourt.
He opened his eyes and tried to focus on the green-eyed woman peering down at him.
“Cecilia?”
Cecilia had had three days to imagine what Edward Rokesby might say when he finally woke up. She’d come up with several possibilities, the most likely of which was: “Who the hell are you?”
It would not have been a silly question.
Because no matter what Colonel Stubbs thought—no matter what everyone at this rather poorly outfitted military hospital thought, her name was not Cecilia Rokesby, it was Cecilia Harcourt, and she most definitely was not married to the rather handsome dark-haired man lying in the bed at her side.
As for how the misunderstanding had come about . . .
It might have been something to do with her declaring that she was his wife in front of his commanding officer, two soldiers, and a clerk.
It had seemed a good idea at the time.
She’d not come to New York lightly. She was well aware of the dangers of traveling to the war-torn colonies, to say nothing of the voyage across the temperamental North Atlantic. But her father had died, and then she’d received word that Thomas was injured, and then her wretched cousin had come sniffing around Marswell . . .
She couldn’t remain in Derbyshire.
And yet she’d had nowhere to go.
So in what was probably the only rash decision of her life, she’d packed up her house, buried the silver in the back garden, and booked passage from Liverpool to New York. When she arrived, however, Thomas was nowhere to be found.
She’d located his regiment, but no one had answers for her, and when she persisted with her questions, she was dismissed by the military brass like a pesky little fly. She’d been ignored, patronized, and probably lied to. She’d used up nearly all her funds, was getting by on one meal a day, and was living in a boardinghouse room directly next to a woman who might or might not have been a prostitute.
(That she was having relations was a certainty; the only question was whether she was being paid for them. And Cecilia had to say, she rather hoped she was, because whatever that woman was doing, it sounded like an awful lot of work.) But then, after nearly a week of getting nowhere, Cecilia overheard one soldier telling another that a man had been brought to hospital a few days earlier. He’d had a blow to the head and was unconscious. His name was Rokesby.
Edward Rokesby. It had to be.
Cecilia had never actually laid eyes on the man, but he was her brother’s closest friend, and she felt like she knew him. She knew, for example, that he was from Kent, that he was the second son of the Earl of Manston, and that he had a younger brother in the navy and another at Eton. His sister was married, but she had no children, and the thing he missed most of all from home was his cook’s gooseberry fool.
His older brother was called George, and she had been surprised when Edward had admitted that he did not envy him his position as heir. With an earldom came an appalling lack of freedom, he’d once written, and he knew that his place was in the army, fighting for King and Country.
Cecilia supposed that an outsider might have been shocked at the level of intimacy in their correspondence, but she’d learned that war made philosophers of men. And maybe it was for that reason that Edward Rokesby had begun adding little notes of his own at the end of Thomas’s letters to her. There was something comforting about sharing one’s thoughts with a stranger. It was easy to be brave with someone one would never face across a dining table or in a drawing room.
Or at least this was Cecilia’s hypothesis. Maybe he was writing all the same things to his family and friends back in Kent. She’d heard from her brother that he was “practically engaged” to his neighbor. Surely Edward was penning letters to her, too.
And it wasn’t as if Edward was actually writing to Cecilia. It had started with little snippets from Thomas: Edward says such-and-such or I am compelled by Captain Rokesby to point out . . .
The first few had been terribly amusing, and Cecilia, stuck at Marswell with mounting bills and a disinterested father, had welcomed the unexpected smile his words brought to her face. So she replied in kind, adding little bits and pieces to her own missives: Please tell Captain Rokesby . . . and later: I cannot help but think that Captain Rokesby would enjoy . . .
Then one day she saw that her brother’s latest missive included a paragraph written by another hand. It was a short greeting, containing little more than a description of wildflowers, but it was from Edward. He’d signed it
Devotedly,
Capt. Edward Rokesby
Devotedly.
Devotedly.
A silly smile had erupted across her face, and then she’d felt the veriest fool. She was mooning over a man she’d never even met.