His smile flashed out, bright and merry, and Camilla gave up on herself. Hopeless; she was utterly hopeless.
She had fallen in love before, and it always hurt. This would be no different.
She’d come through worse. She’d survived the loss of her father, her brothers, her sisters…
Her sisters. She had mentioned her family twice, but hadn’t told him who her sisters were. She’d changed her name so she wouldn’t embarrass them.
Judith was a marchioness. Her youngest sister was fifteen now, and would likely be coming out soon.
Lady Theresa Worth had stayed with her family. She was getting all the gowns, all the love, that Camilla had not had. And Camilla loved the sister she hadn’t seen—the sister she could not let herself look back on—enough that she would leave her to those gowns and never disturb that.
If Camilla could survive not knowing the woman her sister had grown into, she could survive anything. She could even survive Adrian Hunter.
Camilla took a deep breath and did what she did best. She smiled and looked forward.
Chapter Thirteen
Lady Theresa Worth was not the sort of young lady who left anything to chance. The Dowager Marchioness of Ashford had told her that an acceptable gift for her sister’s birthday would be a commemorative embroidered cushion.
The dowager was her sister’s husband’s mother, a woman who had taken Theresa under her wing the moment Judith’s marriage had been announced. She had declared that she’d always wanted a daughter, and after a few uneasy months together, they’d actually become friendly.
So Theresa had planned to do exactly as the dowager suggested. She had made a plan, stitch by stitch, obtained the appropriate silks, then sat down to wage war on the fabric.
The main problem with this plan was that Theresa’s embroidery was utter shite.
She’d given herself a full three months to produce something within the bounds of acceptability—something that her oldest sister could put on, say, a divan in a rarely used room, instead of quietly sending up to the attic. Or burning it to stay warm in the winter.
Alas. After two months, Theresa stared down at her current attempt—try nine—and the lopsided things that were supposed to represent the ravens of the Ashford crest.
Instead of sleek, feathered things, Theresa had managed to produce something that looked more like a withered, blackened cauliflower. Or maybe, a diseased octopus?
A shame. She liked octopodes.
She imagined herself presenting this cushion to her sister.
“What are these?” Judith would ask, her lip quirking in dismay.
Oh, just some rotting vegetables, Theresa would reply. My love for you is like a field of rotting vegetables—like rot, my love grows to encompass the entire crop. It’s rather hard on the vegetables, but if you would just look at it from the rot’s point of view—
That explanation would go over so well.
The other idea that the dowager marchioness had come up with was that Theresa could compose a poem. Perhaps Theresa could combine the two? At least she’d get a laugh.
She glared out the glass window.
“Theresa?”
Theresa turned at the sound. Her younger brother, Benedict, stood in the doorway.
She raised a single eyebrow, set her cushion of rotted splendor aside, and folded her arms, waiting for her brother to realize his mistake.
His legs came together; he straightened. His hand rose in a salute. “My pardon, your Excellency. General Worth, I mean. I beg a moment of your attention.”
Theresa considered whether she should punish her brother. On the one hand, insubordination needed to be extracted from the root. Besides, nobody told Benedict that he had to produce a cushion or a verse for his sister’s birthday. He was a boy. He was allowed to do all sorts of non-labor-intensive things, like purchasing flowers as a gift on the morning of Judith’s birthday.
On the other hand, thus far, nobody in her family had noticed that she had dragooned her younger brother into her own private army, and Theresa intended to keep it that way.
Today, she could be magnanimous. “Proceed, Corporal Benedict.”
“You promised we would deal with my little problem.”
Benedict’s little problem was not so little. Over a year ago, he’d refused to return to Eton. She could hardly blame him; he’d been badly treated. Since then, Judith and Christian had attempted to find him a place in the world. He’d been made to sit in a lawyer’s office for the last three months.
He hated it with a passion that burned hotter than…than a field of withered cauliflower, put to the flame?
“Give it some time,” Judith had told him comfortingly. “A year may feel like forever to you at this age, but it’s nothing. You can’t know if you like the work if you don’t take time to get good at it.”
“You’ll grow into it,” Christian had promised Benedict. “You like talking with people and being right. You should love the practice of law.”
Theresa, who knew her brother far better than either Judith or Christian, had promised to come up with a plan to free her brother from the tyranny of the law office. Which—admittedly—was not so tyrannical, as the man was incredibly kind to Benedict and his wife brought him biscuits. But all professions that one did not wish to have were a tyranny.
“I’ve been thinking about the matter.” Theresa slid her embroidery underneath a cushion. “What you need is to show an aptitude for some other profession. They’ll never agree to pull you from this law thing if you haven’t provided an alternative.”
“Yes, but I don’t know an alternative.”
“I do,” Theresa said. This was probably not a lie. She technically didn’t have an alternative in mind at the moment the words came out of her mouth. She was just certain that by the time she finished speaking, she would have figured one out.
“Excellent! What is it?”
“Let us come at it another way,” Theresa said. “What were your thoughts on Judith’s birthday present?”
“Flowers,” Benedict said glumly.
“Ask yourself: Does Judith really want flowers?”
“Well…”
“No,” Theresa decided. “She do
es not, any more than she wants terribly embroidered cushions depicting the last century’s worst farming tragedies. She’ll appreciate them, because they come from us, but she doesn’t want them.”
“True.”
Theresa folded her arms and tried to look like a wiser older sister. She was fifteen to Benedict’s fourteen; it shouldn’t be hard. “Let us ask ourselves this: What does Judith want? What does she really want?”
What an excellent question. If only she knew the answer.
Benedict considered. “A new hat?”
“No,” Theresa said, realizing the answer as she spoke. Judith had stopped speaking of the matter six months ago; that didn’t mean she didn’t care.
Years ago, their family had been separated. Her eldest brother had been transported as punishment for doing things that really ought not to have been crimes, but which were technically treasonous. Her father had been…could you call it separation, if he was separated from his life? And Camilla, their middle sister, had gone to live with an uncle.
Judith had tried to find her, but their uncle had passed her on to someone else, and so on and so on. Letters had not been forwarded. The whole matter was something of a disaster.
They hadn’t found her yet, and Judith was in mourning. She hadn’t said anything; she was much too Judith to do so. But after more than a year of searching with no response, Theresa knew precisely what her sister thought about the matter of Camilla.
Judith had started wearing black ribbons, the only outward show of grief that she allowed herself.
“Judith wants to find Camilla. That is what we are going to accomplish for her birthday, you and I. We are going to find Camilla.”
Benedict glanced over at Theresa. His lips pressed together. “Uh. Well. Um.” He fell silent after this proclamation, shifting uneasily from foot to foot.
Theresa tilted her head. “Permission to speak more precisely is granted, Corporal Benedict.”
“I mean to say…we have less than a month. And perhaps investigations should be left to professionals? And also…this is precisely how you always get me in trouble.”