The River of No Return Bee Ridgway (best free ebook reader .TXT) 📖

“Hmm. Which rules have you been breaking, pray tell?”

“Nothing very serious.” Bella stood and brushed out her green cambric skirt. “Licking my spoon. Going alone to Vauxhall Gardens. Tying my garter in public.”

“Be serious.”

“How do you know I’m not being serious?” Bella held her hand out and pulled Julia to her feet. “Let us take a stroll around the square and I shall tell you all about it.”

Bella was small, with black hair and hazel eyes. She looked nothing like Clare and Nick, who were both tall and fair. Luckily, there was an uncanny resemblance to a great-great-aunt on her father’s side. The dowager marchioness, always terrified of What Other People Might Think, had rescued the dour portrait of that otherwise forgotten ancestress from the attics and hung it prominently at Falcott House; nobody was going to accuse her of playing her husband false. Still, Bella’s family nickname was “Changeling.”

She was a mercurial young woman, mostly full of fun, though sometimes a darker thread appeared in the bright fabric of her personality. A fervent Romanticist, Bella had committed whole swathes of Werther—in German, which she only partly understood—to memory. She could often be found painting by moonlight or sitting at the piano, plunking out the tune of a dreary lied with one finger and paging through her German wordbook with the other hand, discerning the meaning of the lyrics. Sometimes she was not to be found at all, for every now and then she took herself off for a long, solitary walk, preferably when the weather was threatening. She was firmly forbidden to wander off by herself in London, but as she now explained to Julia, it was a rule that was impossible to obey. “I have the wanderlust, you see,” she said, careful to pronounce the word correctly. “I just can’t help myself. Some days I wake up, and I must simply follow my own footsteps and see where they lead.”

“You came here to find a husband, Bella. Not to explore the underbelly of London.”

“I know.” Bella squeezed Julia’s arm to her side. “I shall. The Season is excessively entertaining, Julia. The men are ridiculous and the women are worse, but . . .” She cut her eyes sideways at her friend, one black eyebrow winging up. “There are some good apples in among the bad.”

Julia glittered with intrigue. “Have you discovered any particularly good apples?”

“It depends on whether you prefer them tart or sweet.”

Julia thought of Blackdown striding angrily up the hill in the rain. “I think it’s possible to find an apple that is both tart and sweet,” she said.

“Oh.” Bella’s eyes crinkled at the corners when she laughed—much like her brother’s. “It sounds like perhaps you have come across just such an excellent fruit. I must hear all about him.”

Julia pressed her lips together. She didn’t like to think of Blackdown’s rainy kisses, not since that scene in the Blue Drawing Room.

“Ah.” Bella nodded. “And Julia becomes a clam.”

They were rounding the north corner of Berkeley Square, which meant they passed the Falcotts’ London town house. Bella raised her hand and waved, though Julia could see no one—the windows reflected back the trees and the sky. Then she saw a pale hand rise to the glass of a second-story window. “Is that your mother?”

“Yes. She watches all day when I am out without her, simply waiting for me. Now that Nick is back, she is ten times worse. You’d think she would have rallied with the news of his return. But instead she is even more tormented, because she fears losing him again. Last night she stayed up until three awaiting his return from his club.”

“He was out until three?” Julia slowed her steps.

Bella sighed. “I know. Aren’t you consumed with jealousy? Imagine such freedom! But in actual fact, he was out until even later—or should I say earlier? For it was only that Mother finally gave up and went to bed at three. She came along the hallway weeping, convinced he was dead again, and I had to gather her up and tuck her in like a child. I am surprised we did not wake you.”

Julia hadn’t heard anything. She had lain awake late thinking over her own problems, only to fall into a dreamless sleep just before two. “Do you think the marquess came home at all last night?”

Bella kicked a pebble with her silk slipper, and it skittled away into the grass. “Call him Nick, Julia, like you used to in the old days. It’s so dreary, hearing his title on your lips like he’s something special all of a sudden. Lord, I hope he stayed out all night. Imagine if you were a gentleman and you arrived home after three years. Not just any three years, but years when you didn’t even know who you were. Suddenly it turns out you are not a wandering, penniless soldier, but a great lord with a vast fortune. You discover that you have a town house in the heart of a throbbing metropolis, and everything you see is yours for the asking. Would you spend your first night at home at home, if you know what I mean?”

Julia knew exactly what her friend meant, but she wasn’t going to commit to it yet. “I’m not sure.”

“Peagoose.” Bella pinched the skin on the back of Julia’s hand. “Doesn’t blood run in here anymore? I mean that he must have gone out with all his old friends, wining and dining and wenching the night away. At breakfast he denied it. He said he’d been with the Duke of Kirklaw, catching up on old times. But I don’t believe him. Kirklaw is a terrible bore. Nick was carousing, I’ll wager you anything. Just imagine. The jollity, the gay abandon, the laughter and song. I wish I were a man or . . . or . . .” Bella subsided.

“Or what?”

“I don’t know. A woman who could do those things.”

“A member of the demimonde?”

“Well,” Bella said, “why not?” She tossed this shocking statement