Page 8 of Bewitching Benedict (The Lovelorn Lads #1)

"I'm sure I wouldn't know, Benny. She only asked me to fetch you.

" Amelia rounded her eyes as if to emphasize her lack of knowledge, then spun into the room with a swirl of skirts and auburn hair.

She had, Benedict thought, the dignity of an Irish setter, and said so aloud.

Amelia ceased spinning and fixed him with a piercing look that showed no effect from the twirls.

"She has a letter from Great-Aunt Nancy," she said flatly. "It concerns you."

A hollowness opened in Benedict's belly, so visceral a sensation he glanced down to see if he could now see through his own body.

He could not, but from that hollow rolled a chill as if a cold wind had invaded to replace the blood in his veins.

He looked up again and in so doing caught a glimpse of his reflection, pale enough to make Amelia toss her hair with satisfaction.

"I expect your days of ladding about are at an end. Charles will be heartbroken."

There was nothing to be said to this. Amelia was likely correct on both counts, but admitting it was tantamount to agreeing to a month's worth of reminders that he had said she was right.

Benedict stood, wondering how it could be that Amelia had spun but he felt dizzy.

Trying to restore a sense of equilibrium, he brushed imagined dust from his pale blue suit coat and buckskins.

"Thank you for informing me. I shall attend her immediately. "

He had hoped that would send Amelia off, but it was a hope born in vain. She fell into companionable step beside him, still sparkling with the anticipation of trouble in the making. "Did she call for you too?" he demanded.

Amelia only smiled. "No, but if your fate is to be decided, it's inevitable that mine will be discussed as well. Women can't wait as long as you men can, you know. By five-and-twenty our bloom is gone."

Very few, even in the family, might have heard the faint note of bitterness in that statement, but Benedict, despite their clashes, loved his sister.

"Firstly, Amy, you are barely nineteen, and secondly, your bloom is unlikely ever to fade.

You'll be a dowager of eighty years and still have young men paying court to you. Those cheekbones are not in vain."

"You only compliment yourself," Amy said with a sniff, but a smile colored her tone.

Outside the parlor door she stopped him with a touch on his arm, then, as he had done, brushed imaginary dust from his clothes.

"Don't let Mother force you into anything, Benny.

Great-Aunt Nancy may be accustomed to having her way, but she doesn't have to live your life. Only you can do that."

"But you must admit it would be a great deal more luxurious with her fortune," Benedict said, and with a wry smile exchanged between siblings, they entered their mother's favorite parlor.

Its vivid green chinoiserie wallpaper, lightly painted with large flowers and narrow, sparrow-dotted branches of differing shades of the same hue, dominated the upper walls; a chair rail of mahogany broke the wall, which was below painted with two subtle tones of green that complemented the wallpaper.

The furniture had been recently re-covered in cream and yellow, with several chair legs replaced with the fanciful lion's-foot legs that were so in fashion.

At the heart of this space sat Mrs Delores Fairburn, who was proof in the flesh that Benedict's words to Amelia had not been merely idle flattery.

Mrs Fairburn may have only been fifty-five, not eighty, but she had not lost even a trace of her youthful beauty.

Instead, it had been refined, pared down, and perfected.

If she lived to eighty, she would, Benedict believed, be such a source of raw beauty that it would be difficult to look upon her.

Moreover, although she had always dressed well, the fashion for high waists and loose gowns became her in a way that clothes of decades earlier had not, though she had the wisdom to wear heavier cloth than was strictly in vogue, thus keeping warmer than many of the muslin-clad ladies of the younger generation.

At the moment she wore deep red, which set her off from every article of furniture in the room; the eye was drawn to her instantly, and could not linger elsewhere for long.

She was, all in all, a formidable picture to be presented with, even without the thick letter that lay to one side on one of the room's small elegant tables.

"Benedict," she said fondly, and with a trace of genuine amusement, "Amelia.

I'm astonished you didn't locate your brothers and sister on your way to find Ben. "

"Had you not impressed upon me the urgency of your summons, I might well have darted across town to collect Linda," Amelia said placidly, "but I could not in any likelihood have taken myself into the clubs and saloons that my brothers are likely to inhabit at this time of day.

You'll have to be satisfied with us, Mama. "

"And not merely with Benedict, who is the only one of my children with whom I actually need to speak.

Very well, sit down, both of you. Tea? No," she said after examining Benedict's expression.

"No, I see we will go straight to the meat of the matter.

I have it here in plain language, Benedict.

Aunt Nancy is dying, and she is inclined to leave you her fortune. "

The hollowness in his belly reasserted itself, this time driving air from his lungs. Benedict coughed quietly and steepled his fingers before his mouth, faintly aware that it must look as though he was trying to prepare himself for a blow. "Inclined. Provided…?"

"Provided you marry before she dies."

This time Amelia's breath left her, a more incredulous sound than Benedict had made. "How much time does he have?"

Mrs Fairburn lifted an eyebrow, not wrinkling the skin of her forehead as she did.

"He, or she? Surely you're concerned for your great-aunt's health, Amelia.

I have a letter from her doctor," she continued without awaiting Amelia's response.

"She is old and her strength is failing.

He suggests that she will not last the Season. "

"The Season," Benedict echoed, and was aware that his mother spoke again, but could not discern the words through a rush of sound in his ears.

Lightheadedness took him again, as if Amy's twirls from before had displaced their dizziness upon him a second time.

His breath was shallow around the ache of a pounding heart.

Everyone married. There was no reason the idea of doing so promptly should be so alarming, and yet he still could not breathe.

He thought, briefly and inexplicably, of Claire Dalton's green eyes, and finally began to hear Mrs Fairburn's discussion of his future again.

"…can only recommend, therefore, that you find a bride of some means, Benedict.

It's the only way to be certain. After all, you have two brothers and two sisters, and while William's commission is paid for, there are always expenses to being the eldest."

"I'm sorry, Mother. I missed that. Could you repeat it?"

With a more gentle look than he expected, his mother repeated, "If you are not married suitably by the time Aunt Nancy dies, she intends to leave her fortune to the…

" She paused, looking at the papers again, although Benedict could hardly imagine that she did not already have the words committed to memory.

"The Institute of Saint Sophia. It is a workhouse and school for orphans. I must recommend, then, that you?—"

"Yes," Benedict said faintly. "I got that part. Thank you. A school for orphans, why?—?"

"It's that vicar of hers," Mrs Fairburn said with some asperity.

"He's of gentle enough birth, but his father died young and his mother had no means of support.

He was taken in by a school and given an education that let him climb to the rank of vicar, and now he has convinced her that it's a more noble use of her fortune than leaving it to family. "

"And she would prefer to leave her fortune to the children of reprobates than her own flesh and blood if I should not marry in time or well enough?

" Offense was beginning to claw the emptiness out of Benedict's chest: he had imagined there might be caveats to the inheritance, but not like this. "I thought I was?—"

Suddenly aware of the conceit of his words, he silenced himself, but Amelia, feeling no such compunction, finished what he had chosen not to say: "But Benedict is her favorite!"

"Which is, I believe, why he is being given time to find a bride and convince her that his offspring will have more need of her fortune than a scattering of unfortunate orphans," Mrs Fairburn announced.

"Had William the misfortune to be born first—" She performed a delicate shudder that did her second-born no justice; he was an eminently suitable young gentleman in all ways save for lacking an inborn ability to flatter old, wealthy aunts.

A heartbeat later her refined theatrics were set aside for practicalities. "We must waste no time, Benedict. There is a highly fashionable ball tomorrow night. You shall be presented there and it will be made known that you are eligible and intend to wed soon."

"Mother," Benedict said faintly. "You speak of me as if I was a young lady."

Delores Fairburn fixed him with a gimlet eye.

"And in every respect except your God-given sex, you are, my dear boy.

What is Aunt Nancy's fortune but the dowry promised you upon your marriage?

I will have a tailor sent to you first thing in the morning.

It will be too soon to have a new suit for tomorrow night, but surely clever hands can turn one of your more unfortunate outfits into something new. "

"My clothes are not unfortunate—!" That, of all things, was what he chose to seize on. Even he saw it as the measure of a desperate man.