In Name Only by Sarita Leone

Author:Sarita Leone [Leone, Sarita]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Victorian, Marriage of Convenience
Publisher: The Wild Rose Press
Published: 2015-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 7

“Are you certain, Lucinda Jane, that you do not want to hold the wedding at St. George’s Church? It would be no trouble, my dear…no trouble at all.”

Breakfast with her aunt was a rare occurrence, one Lucie only recalled having done a handful of times in her life. It was a familiarity that the elder woman did not deem in every respect proper, being from a generation where a day greeted in solitude was a day well begun.

When Ida Mae arrived at her bedside, poking her awake, with a note from Aunt Lucinda which requested her presence in the dowager countess’s suite of rooms, Lucie knew something far removed from normal was afoot. She knew, as well, just what the prevailing topic for the breaking of their fasts was sure to be.

She was not wrong.

Aunt Lucinda frowned into her first morning cup of hot chocolate. She had just taken a sip and swiped her tongue delicately across her upper lip before she scowled. Staring into the cup like a gypsy gazing into a crystal ball, she seemed utterly occupied with the swirling brown liquid. Lucie would not have been shocked if, written in tiny words with cream, a prediction appeared.

Honestly, nothing shocked Lucie anymore. Not that she had ever been easily startled. While other women jumped at unexpected noises or unexplainable occurrences, she was typically calmer, her emotions steadier than most.

While she had, in her early teenage years, yearned for a proclivity toward swooning, it was a feat she on no account perfected. Lucie had only swooned twice in her life. Once, she had been stricken with a high fever in childhood. Her legs had buckled and she had, as she had been told by her mother and nanny, fallen to the kitchen tile like a sack of cabbages dropped off a table. Graceless, and jarring enough that her bruised knees required more attention than the spike in her body temperature.

The second experience had been just as mundane. She had been in her sixteenth summer and tripped over the hem of her walking dress. The tumble did not preclude her swoon; when she stumbled she grazed her palm on the edge of a sharp stone ledge, part of the retaining wall she had nearly fallen onto. The blood flowed fast and freely, its red stickiness rather reminding Lucie of the raspberry jam she slathered on her morning toast. The image, and the blood, had caused her faint. It had been as graceless as the first episode. This time, her walking companion, an acquaintance on summer holiday, told any and all who would listen that Lucie dropped like a stone thrown into a well.

Neither swoon made her feel particularly feminine. After the last episode, she resolved to do her best not to allow the action to repeat itself. Thus far, Lucie had been successful, although she could not help but feel that someday, under the right circumstances, and with the perfect companion, a swoon might be one of the closest feelings to being in heaven a woman could experience.

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