Promise Me Tonight (21 page)

From the correspondence of Miss Isabella Weston,

age eighteen

Letter to her mother, Mary, Viscountess Weston, considering

various types of ailments and their potential remedies—

January 1797

I
mmediately after she locked herself in her room, Isabella began to cry. And cry. And cry. No matter how many tears she mopped away, new ones appeared. It became her mode of existence. The only time she wasn’t crying was when she slept, and she only slept when she had completely exhausted herself with crying. She kept the drapes in her room drawn tight, shrouding herself in darkness, and rarely left her bed. She would have lost all sense of time were it not for the trays of food that arrived regularly at her door; she sent them back to the kitchen almost entirely untouched.

The only people she allowed to enter the room were the maids. She shut everyone else out, taking perverse pleasure in their hurt when she refused to see them. Afterward, she always hated herself, but she couldn’t seem to stop. Her life had fallen to shambles, and she felt powerless to right it, and while James was out of her reach, her family wasn’t. She was hurting so badly, the pain so raw and unbearable, she needed them to feel a touch, some tiny fraction of the grief that swamped her, leaving her vulnerable and debilitated in both body and spirit.

It turned out James had been right all those years ago when he’d told her that loving was a weakness. When she’d protested, he’d called her an innocent. “Izzie,” he’d said gently, his voice sad, “I hope you will never find love to be a weakness. But I promise you it can be.” She should have known, Isabella reflected ruefully. James Sheffield always kept his promises.

Ten days passed before her mother finally reached the end of her patience. “Isabella,” she shouted through the thick wooden panel, “enough is enough. If you do not unlock this door right now, I am going to have it removed and chopped up for kindling! Do you understand me?”

Isabella weighed her options. On the one hand, she really had no desire to get out of bed. Because she had gone so long without eating a decent meal, any movement at all required Herculean effort. On the other hand, the permanent disappearance of her door would certainly spoil the lovely, cavelike atmosphere that so suited her mood.

“Isabella!” her mother warned.

With a growl, Izzie pushed off the covers, slid out of bed, and slowly padded over to open the door. Her mother inhaled sharply as she looked her up and down, but she didn’t say anything. She just marched into the room and began pulling back the drapes.

“What are you—aargh! Are you trying to blind me?” Izzie threw an arm over her eyes, trying to shield herself from the blinding rays of sunlight streaming into the room.

“Believe it or not, I am trying to help you. You have wallowed in self-pity long enough. Too long, actually.” Her mother started opening the windows, waving fresh air into the room.

“I didn’t ask for your help,” Izzie replied sullenly, but she said it without heat. Her eyes were starting to adjust to the light, and she found herself gravitating toward the windows, deeply inhaling the clean scent filtering in from outside. Her nose wrinkled as she caught a whiff of herself.

Her mother nodded approvingly. “What would you prefer first? Food? A bath? Something to break?”

Izzie’s stomach rumbled loudly.

“Very well, food it is. Then a hot bath. And then back to bed with you, I think. I shall endeavor to find you some things to break for tomorrow.”

Izzie shook her head. “I don’t understand.”

“Now that you have stopped crying—”

“I have
not.
” But she had. She had finally stopped crying. Well, fancy that.

“As I said, now that you have stopped crying, I expect you will become angry. Very angry. Furious, even. Men generally take out their frustrations on living things. They pummel one another, or they hunt, or they ride one of their horses into the ground. Women express their tempers in other, far more practical ways.”

“By breaking things?”

Her mother’s smile was positively devilish. “Believe me, there is nothing so satisfying as breaking things when you are truly outraged, especially those truly ugly pieces that you have always hated but felt you had to keep because they belonged to your husband’s grandmother.”

Izzie laughed. It was a little bit tentative and somewhat shaky, struggling to stand on its own two feet like a newborn calf, but a laugh it definitely was. She walked over to her mother and hugged her.

“Thank you,” Izzie whispered, wrapping her arms tightly about her mother, clinging to her strength and her love. For the first time since James had left she felt, well, it wasn’t precisely
happy
, but neither was it sad, and for the moment, that was enough.

The promised food and bath so improved her mood that by the following morning Isabella felt ready to leave her room. She walked slowly downstairs, noting with each step how, although nothing had changed, everything felt different.
She
was different. She was no longer Izzie Weston. She was Isabella Sheffield, the Countess of Dunston, and she didn’t feel as if she belonged anymore. Her discomfort grew when the conversation halted as she entered the breakfast room. Several surprised faces turned to look in her direction, one of them so completely unexpected that Izzie blinked to clear her vision.

“Aunt Kate?”

“Darling!” Her aunt rose from the table and enfolded Izzie in a warm embrace.

“What are you doing here? When did you get here? Where is Charlotte?” She looked around for her younger cousin.

Her aunt laughed. “I will answer all your questions, but first you must sit and eat something. You are nothing but skin and bones.”

Izzie flushed but complied with her aunt’s instructions. She settled into the chair one of the footmen held out for her and bit into a blissfully buttery croissant.

“Very good. Now for my end of the bargain: Charlotte is in the nursery and, I must say, quite eager to see you. We arrived yesterday evening. You were asleep and we didn’t wish to wake you. Well, Charlotte wanted to, but your mother and I managed to convince her otherwise.”

“For a child not yet five years old, she drives a wicked bargain,” her mother said, eyes twinkling with laughter.

Her aunt grimaced. “I had to promise her a puppy.”

“But don’t you
like
dogs?” Isabella said.

“I like
little
dogs,” her aunt corrected. “Charlotte doesn’t want a
little
dog. She wants a whelp from the next litter out of my stepson’s great Danish dogs. The beast will probably eat us while we sleep. Your mother has already convinced Charlotte that the dog must be named—”

“Hamlet.” Izzie groaned.

“Of course!” Her mother beamed with excitement.

“But what if it’s a girl?” Izzie countered.

“Ophelia, of course, or Gertrude would work, I suppose. You know, the other day I discovered the most fascinating—”

“Aunt Kate, you still haven’t told me what you are doing here,” Izzie said loudly. She felt horribly rude interrupting her mother, but the collective sigh of relief that ran through the room made her feel better. It was at times like this that Izzie marveled at her scholarly mother and fun-loving aunt having sprung from the same womb. It wasn’t only that their personalities were dissimilar; they also looked nothing alike. Her mother was fair and slender, much like herself, while her aunt had a mane of gorgeous sable hair and more curves than the Serpentine. They had the same expressive blue-gray eyes, though, and the stormy gray cast to her aunt’s eyes indicated that, despite her lighthearted demeanor, she was really quite troubled.

“Our purpose in coming would have been far more obvious if we had arrived, as planned, in time to surprise you for your birthday, but our journey was held up by a terrible storm, which turned all the roads into muddy rivers, and then we were further delayed when Charlotte’s nurse slipped in the mud and broke her wrist”—she paused for air—“and therefore we have missed not only your birthday, but your betrothal—”

“You didn’t miss much there,” Izzie muttered.

“And your
wedding
!” Her aunt’s voice rose to a wail.

“It’s all right, Henry missed it as well. There wasn’t really time to send invitations. Believe me, it was not exactly the wedding I had always dreamed of, but I am certain someone has already filled you in on all the sordid details.” She shoved her chair away from the table and rose to her feet. Her body fairly hummed with energy, energy that was quickly being converted to something else entirely. “Mama,” she said, nearly giddy with anticipation, “did you happen to locate the rest of Great- Grandmother Clorinda’s good china?”

“What do you want with my grandmother’s china?” her father asked suspiciously, looking up from his paper.

“Izzie thought she might like to have it as a wedding present from us. It has
such
a
lovely
pattern,” her mother improvised.

Satisfied by the explanation, her father mumbled something incoherent and retreated back behind his paper.

“Old nursery,” her mother mouthed, pointing toward the door.

When her mother had become pregnant with Henry, her parents had decided the nursery, located in the farthest, coldest, gloomiest reaches of the house, was totally unfit for children. They had converted a large suite in the east wing into more suitable surroundings, and the old nursery had been empty ever since.

When she entered the room, the first thing she noticed was that the fire had already been lit. The second thing she noticed was a stack of the most hideous plates she had ever seen. Isabella picked up the top plate and marveled for a moment that anyone would create such a monstrosity—that someone had thought it appropriate to decorate china with not just scenes of a stag hunt, but gruesome scenes of the stag’s final moments.

That person, she decided, had needed to have his or her head examined, and the same applied to her relatives for actually purchasing it. As she pulled back her arm and let fly, Izzie felt as close to happy as she had been since Jones had left. With a laugh, she reached for the next plate.

By the late afternoon, Isabella had taken to venting her rage with a fire poker and an old mattress. She found it as satisfying as hurling ugly china, of which there was a sadly limited supply, since her mother had apparently already destroyed most of it.

She had then vowed revenge on those fictional lovers, Emilia and Jordan, for daring to have a happy ending. Since she now knew from experience that scandalous seductions resulted only in misery and heartbreak, she decided the volume was rubbish and deserved to die a slow and painful death.

Many more books might have met the same fate, but after Olivia found her cackling gleefully as she poked at the charred remains of
The Mysterious Enchantress of Castle Clermont
, all novels of a romantic bent were quickly hidden from sight. Thus, Isabella had moved on to mattress beating when her second surprise visitor of the day arrived.

“Take that, you bloody bounder!” she yelled. “I”—
thwack
—“saved you”—
thwack, thwack
—“and you left me”—
thwack
—“on my
birthday
!” Her chest heaving with exertion, she slammed the iron down in a killing blow.

“I always told Mother you were a bloodthirsty wench, but she never believed me,” drawled a voice from the doorway.

“Henry?”

Isabella dropped the poker onto the mattress and took a deep breath. She had been dreading this since the moment she and Olivia had begun their plotting. She might be his sister, but he did have four others, whereas he had only one best friend. The odds were not in her favor. Five sisters. One best friend. And she had stolen him. Squaring her shoulders, she turned to face her brother. He frowned at her, and she braced herself for what was to come.

“Bloody hell, Izzie! You look terrible!”

All she could do was stare at him.

“Oh, right,” Henry muttered. “I suppose congratulations are in order, but—”

“Hal!” She choked out the childhood nickname and launched herself at him.

He let out a startled laugh, catching her up in a hug. “You know, you haven’t called me that in years.”

“I was so worried that you were going to hate me,” Izzie whispered against his coat. “But I had to do it. Otherwise, he was going to—”

“Yes, I know.”

She pulled away and began to pace around the room; the sudden release of all her Henry-related tension had given her a burst of energy. “I suppose James told you?”

Henry shook his head. “Father told me just now. I’m going to put a bullet in that bounder.”

“Hal, you can’t shoot him. He married me.”

“Yes, between ruining you and leaving you. Christ, what a mess.”

She laughed bitterly. “Is that what he called it?”

“Father? No, I believe ‘fiasco’ was—”

“No. I was talking about James. Did he call me—our marriage—a mess?”

Her brother looked at her askance. “Izzie, I haven’t seen or heard from James since I visited him in Ireland shortly after your ball. That was months ago.”

Guilt swamped her. James and Henry had always been as close as brothers, and she had driven herself as a wedge between them. A wedge created out of the best intentions, but a wedge nonetheless. “I am so sorry, Henry. He must realize that you had nothing to do with this. If you give him a few weeks to come to his senses and then go to London, I am certain . . .” There was that odd look on Henry’s face again. “What?”