Wicked Wager. Julia Justiss
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she found the author, one Jane Austen, quite clever, Jenna hadn’t read more than a page.
Her unfocused gaze caught on the play of dust motes as they rose and fell in a sunbeam. Drifting, like she was.
Sancha would push her to ride out with Cousin Lane. Probably better to go with him than be maneuvered into accompanying Lady Montclare, who was sure to press her once Aunt Hetty informed the sisters during their daily call that the doctor had pronounced her fully recovered.
“Fully recovered.” How little the doctor knew!
It seemed someone was always trying to bully her into doing this or that, when all she wished to do was sit in her chair or lie in her bed with her face to the wall and remain in that blessed, blank place without thought or feeling in which she’d floated since her accident.
She remembered nothing between riding toward the park that morning and waking, like a swimmer submerged, to a flicker of shapes and a distant murmur of voices. Compelled by some urgency, despite the pain in her body, she’d made herself battle upward to the light, struggling to stay conscious and focus on the words the doctor was uttering to Sancha. A weeping Sancha, who wrung her hands and whispered “My poor lady.”
Blow. Head. Recover. Lost. Son.
With a supreme effort she moved one hand to her belly, suddenly aware of pain there that nearly equaled the pounding in her head.
Sorry. Nothing. I. Could. Do.
“Here’s tea,” Sancha’s voice startled her. The maid set the tray on the side table. Frowning, she plucked the shawl from Jenna’s shoulders and tossed it aside.
“No more sitting, lazy one! Today you go out into the sun.” The maid went to pull a pelisse from the wardrobe.
Jenna eyed the garment with distaste. “I don’t wish to go out.”
“You did not wish to stop medicine. Or see cousins, or los señoras with fancy gowns and scorpion tongues. Ah, much you have lost! But you must go on.” Sancha poured a cup of tea. “Drink now. You are colonel’s daughter, eh?”
I don’t know who I am, Jenna thought. But after a moment, having neither strength nor interest enough for a battle of wills, as she had since Sancha had weaned her from the laudanum and forced her back to the world of consciousness, Jenna followed orders and took a sip.
“I bring this.” Sancha held up an envelope. “From the Handsome One with the rogue’s eyes who waits below.”
Nelthorpe? Jenna wondered with a faint stir of interest. But that brief emotion faded once she discovered the note Sancha presented came from Mr. Fitzwilliams.
Idly she scanned his standard expression of regret, about to put it aside when the last two lines snagged her attention. “Though I hesitate to intrude upon your grief, my aunt, Lady Charlotte, begs leave to visit. She has suffered as you suffer and earnestly desires to help.”
Could anyone help? Kind thoughts aside, Lady Charlotte Darnell was but a stranger, and Jenna was already surrounded by surfeit of well-meaning strangers.
How she longed for the strong, sympathetic shoulder of Harry or Alastair, the comforting arms of her dead mother! Only Sancha knew her intimately enough to appreciate the devastation of her loss—and she had never borne a child.
Suddenly a deep desire swept through her to meet this woman who, if Jenna were interpreting Fitzwilliams’s note aright, had lost a child, as she had.
“Is Mr. Fitzwilliams still below?”
“Aye, mistress. A beautiful lady waits with him.”
“Show them up, please. And fetch more tea.”
Sancha smiled and dipped a curtsy. “Si, mistress!”
The moment after Sancha left, Jenna regretted the impulse to allow their visit. Had she not already sustained a steady stream of visitors, patting her hand and expressing their deepest condolences?
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