Seducing an Angel

"Except Wesley," she said.

He nodded.

"And except Roger," she said.

"And except Roger," he agreed, gri

Cassandra set her forehead against the door and closed her eyes. She tried to remember why she could not marry him.

/19/

"I AM going out for a walk," Cassandra said, though she made no move to put words into action. She was standing at the sitting room window, looking out on a day that had not quite made up its mind whether to rain or to shine, though it seemed more inclined to decide upon the former.

She had not slept well – hardly surprisingly.

Now this morning everyone had become insubordinate.

Mary had refused to stop working in the kitchen or to stop addressing Cassandra as /my lady/.

"You are my stepdaughter-in-law, Mary," Cassandra had tried to explain, but to no avail.

"/Someone/ has to cook our breakfast and make our tea and wash the dishes and all the rest of it, my lady," Mary had said, "and it had better be me since I daresay neither you nor Miss Haytor nor Billy knows one end of a frying pan from the other. And I am no different today than what I was yesterday and last week and last month, am I?"

William had been working on the sitting room door when Cassandra came downstairs, and now the door shut tight without having to be given an extra yank. Since then he had mended the clothesline outside so that it was no longer in danger of falling to the ground, taking a load of clean washing with it. And he was in the process of cleaning every window in the house, inside and out.

William always had been energetic and restless, of course, and far happier being busy with some manual labor than idling away his time at more gentlemanly pursuits. Nigel had intended him for the church, but William had openly rebelled after finishing his studies at Cambridge.

Alice was the worst of all this morning. She was attacking the sheets with her needle, and she was downright prunish. She had an a

And Alice had given Cassandra an ultimatum, or what amounted to one.

Either Cassandra agreed to honor the betrothal that had been a

It was ridiculous and it was a non sequitur. But Alice was adamant.

"I daresay," she had said a few minutes ago, "Mr. Golding means no more than friendship by inviting me to accompany him to his family's home to celebrate his father's birthday. I daresay that after we return I will not see him again except by chance. But I will not even /think/ of seeing him again, Cassie, if you are going to insist on continuing with this silly and wholly unrealistic plan of settling in a small country cottage somewhere in the country."

"It is my idea of heaven," Cassandra had protested.

"Nonsense," Alice had told her. "You would be bored and miserable within a fortnight, Cassie. You would be far better off marrying the Earl of Merton, since despite everything the two of you seem fond of each other and I believe that after all he is a harmless, even decent, young man.

Besides which, there will be a new scandal if you break off the engagement now, and you really do not need another. You ought to have thought of all this before allowing him to kiss you in the middle of a ball. If you insist upon going to live in the country, I am going with you. And there is no point whatsoever in giving me that look. Looks do not kill. Mary will not be going with you, after all, will she? And though you will doubtless soon be able to hire half a dozen servants to take her place, you will not /know/ any of them. Or any of your neighbors. And what will they think if a strange widow comes to take up residence in their village without even as much as a companion to lend her respectability? No, Cassie, if you go, I go too."

She had seemed to know the main power point of her argument.

"And I will never see Mr. Golding again," she had added once more for good measure, snapping off her thread with her fingers.

And so Cassandra had threatened to go out for a walk.

"I'll take Roger with me," she said now, drumming her fingers on the windowsill.

Though Roger, the traitor, had been shadowing William about the house all morning. So had Belinda, her doll clutched to her bosom, her eyes as wide as saucers.

"You do that, Cassie," Alice said without looking up from her work. "And take an umbrella."

But it was too late. A carriage was approaching along the street, and it looked far too grand a conveyance to be on Portman Street even before Cassandra saw that there was a ducal coat of arms emblazoned on the door.

It drew to a halt outside her house, and she felt curiously resigned when the liveried coachman opened the door and set down the steps and handed the Duchess of Moreland down onto the pavement. She was not even surprised when he then proceeded to hand out the Countess of Sheringford and Lady Montford.

But of course. The whole triumvirate.

Their brother had a

"We have visitors, Alice," Cassandra said.

Alice set aside her work.

"I will leave you to them," she said. "I still have some packing to do."

And off she went before Mary could tap on the door and a

And so it began, Cassandra thought. The grand charade.

"Lady Paget," the Duchess of Moreland said, sweeping toward her across the room and drawing her into a hug. "But you are going to be our sister. I am going to exercise a sister's right and call you Cassandra.

May I? And you must call me Vanessa. We simply refused to wait until a more decent hour to call upon you, and so you must forgive us. Or not, I suppose. Anyway, here we are."

She smiled su

The Countess of Sheringford hugged Cassandra too.

"Last evening," she said, "we were inhibited by a rather large audience and so could not greet you quite as we wished. It was wretched of Stephen to kiss you like that out on the balcony when I certainly brought him up to know better, but we were delighted nevertheless to discover that he was so deeply in love that he had grown reckless.

Stephen is almost never reckless. And we are very pleased that it has happened with /you/. Our only wish for him has always been that he find love and happiness, Cassandra. I am Margaret."

"And I am Katherine, Cassandra," Baroness Montford said, third in line to hug her. "Stephen engaged and pla

"It is really quite wicked of us to be almost glad that you have no female relatives of your own," Vanessa said. "But we are glad, nevertheless. We are going to have /enormous/ fun for the rest of the Season – unless you plan to marry before it ends, of course. Where do you – "

"Nessie!" Margaret laughed and linked an arm through Cassandra's. "Poor Cassandra's head will be spi