Heiress in Red Silk, Hunter, Madeline [good beach reads TXT] 📗

had been wise to let these chambers from Chase. He could now return to Chapel Street, and that row would be from another time and place. He would still apologize to Rosamund, though. He had lost his temper and spoken rashly. In a few days, they could meet again on Bury Street and he would explain his reasoning more carefully.

He was rearranging his thinking about how to do that when he entered the house. As he mounted the staircase he realized that the house felt different. Bigger. More vacant. It reminded him of a ballroom at the end of the night, when most of the guests had departed.

He entered his apartment to find Morris busy in the dressing room. A firm welcome and a quick nod, then Morris muttered about needing to see to the mail.

Kevin went looking for Rosamund, but she was not in her chambers. He descended the stairs, but she was not in the morning room either. The first alarm of concern sounded when he saw there was no food laid out.

Morris came in with the mail. He set a stack near the place where Kevin normally sat, then held the others with a puzzled expression. “Should I send them off, sir? Forward them?”

His chest emptied out. When he breathed, it filled again, too full. So full that it crushed against his heart.

“She left last night?”

“Yes, sir. In the early evening. Her maid, Jenny, said they were going to visit Mrs. Radnor’s sister first, then see to other business. She asked the housekeeper to inform those tutors not to come again unless they were called for.”

Kevin wandered back up to her apartment. Some dresses still hung in the wardrobe, and he took reassurance from that. He looked around the bedchamber while he tried to conquer the bleakness that threatened to claim him.

He avoided looking at the bed, so he was leaving before he noticed the papers on it, between the pillows. He reached for them to see if she had left a note. Perhaps word had come about her sister being ill, or some other mishap.

No note. Instead, he saw Lovelace’s proposal. Kevin let it drop to the bed while a spike of rage stabbed into his mind. That man was the cause of this. The rows, the harsh words, these empty chambers. Anger held self-recrimination at bay, but it was there like a shadow, waiting.

Another paper fell away from the first and garnered his closer attention. At first it made no sense. Then he realized it was a legal document of sorts, or at least Rosamund’s attempt to imitate one. She had written it in her own hand, with only a few errant dribbles of ink and smears from a blotting paper. He pictured her bent over the task, frowning while she tried to form her letters into something an elegant lady might write.

The document itself left him numb. In it, she signed over her share of the enterprise to her husband, Kevin Radnor.

She might return to London, and even to this house, but he knew then that she never intended to return to him.

Chapter Twenty-Two

Rosamund poured some water into the flower pot outside the shop door. She examined the window display, then went back inside. She paused to watch how the new woman, Mrs. Hutton, served a customer. Mrs. Hutton knew her trade, that had become obvious. Upon her first arrival back, Rosamund had been impressed at how well things were managed.

She mounted the stairs. Here in Richmond, the workroom was on the first story, and she entered it and took her seat under the window so she had good light for the fine sewing she was doing. Beside her, the apprentice Molly was teaching Lily how to hide a seam with some trim.

Lily pricked her finger. She did that a lot, but most new girls did. Her first time she had complained and moaned. Now she only dabbed some salve and wrapped her finger in a clean strip of cloth.

“Wait for it to stop bleeding,” Rosamund said, keeping an eye out while she worked. “We don’t want blood on that bonnet. Not even one drop.”

Lily set the bonnet aside and bided her time. She kicked her feet like a child and wound a finger in one of her long, unbound blond locks. Rosamund smiled at the image she made. Half child, half woman. Some hours one side showed and the next hours, the other.

“This is more fun than school,” Lily said. “Maybe I should stay here, or at the shop in London. I could be a milliner like you.”

“You will do better than that if I have a say in it.”

“I think school would be wonderful,” Molly said.

“You wouldn’t say that if you met the girls I live with. They are horrid and proud and conceited and—”

“And you have made two friends who are not,” Rosamund said. “One week more with me, then you are going back. We will stop in London on the way, and have some dresses made.”

New dresses ended the argument, as Rosamund knew they would. Lily was not truly unhappy at the school. She only complained like girls did at her age.

She had arrived without notice to take Lily away. She just needed Lily with her for a while. So much of what she had done was because of her sister. She needed to see Lily, and reassure herself that at least that part of it had been a good idea.

Lily came over to show the trimmed seam.

“The stitches are too big at the end here,” Rosamund said. “You will have to rip it out and do it again.”

“No one will notice those few stitches tucked under there.”

“One day your patron will be looking at the bonnet and she will see them. Then she will decide you are a careless milliner. We need to make every detail as close to perfect as it can be.”

The words echoed in her head, only now in Mr. Lovelace’s voice. That led her