Page 25 of Felicity Cabot Sells Her Soul (Scandalous Sisters #3)

Felicity’s mind was at war with itself, and had been for the last few days.

She had thought she’d built herself back stronger from who she had been in her childhood, and had been utterly dismayed to find it had taken only one terrifying incident to rattle that foundation to its core.

Bits of the Felicity she had once been—Felicity Nightingale—had begun to pop out indiscriminately, in bizarre ways, at inopportune times.

Something so simple as a slammed door might set her heart to racing.

The sound of footsteps that came just a touch too hard upon the floor might send a shiver of panic sliding up her spine.

And worst of all, she’d begun experiencing night terrors.

Not dreams so much as recollections of her past, ones she had thought long-buried.

But they had crawled out again to torment her in sleep, and she could do nothing but experience the most frightening moments of her life all over again—

at least until her helpless whimpering in her sleep woke Ian, who invariably soothed her awake and out of whatever nightmare she had been inhabiting.

Somehow, she had learned in these past few days that she could trust Ian Carlisle with her life.

She simply couldn’t trust him with her heart.

Five thousand pounds.

A cold sweat broke out upon the back of her neck as she sorted through the school’s mail.

A demand finally made clear, and she had no idea what she was meant to do for it, what the consequences would be if she ignored it.

She’d not broached the subject with Ian since that night, and he’d not asked—but just occasionally she had caught him staring at her.

Not expectantly, per se…but rather more hopefully, she thought.

He couldn’t—wouldn’t—force her to speak of it.

But he clearly hoped she would of her own accord.

Felicity bit back a sigh as she finished collecting the last of the most recent set of the school’s bills to be sent round to Ian’s solicitor to be paid.

Money might no longer be a particular concern, but there was always a period of adjustment after a holiday, wherein orders that had been reduced due to the absence of most of the students would swell once again.

There were yet a few straggling students not expected to return for a few days, but the household had been thrown into chaos once again just with those that had.

A week, perhaps, as the students and staff both adjusted to the changes, and then things would calm down a bit—

“Miss Cabot?”

Felicity startled to the sound.

“Dorothea,”

she said as she spotted the girl lingering in the hallway, peering through the half-cracked door of her little office.

“Do come in.”

“Thank you.”

Awkwardly, Dorothea shuffled inside, her shoulders sloped into a droop, her hands clasped before her.

“I’m sorry,”

she said swiftly, ducking her head, her blond curls bobbing with the sharp motion.

“Mrs. Carlisle, I should have said.”

“It’s quite all right.”

She’d been Miss Cabot ever so much longer than she had been Mrs. Carlisle. She’d been Miss Cabot even longer than she had been Miss Nightingale, in fact. But Dorothea had known her as Miss Cabot for so long; she could hardly blame the girl for it.

“Has there been some sort of incident?”

Dorothea pulled a grimace.

“No, I just—I wanted to apologize,”

she said.

“About the note. The one from Mr. Marchant.”

An apology. Well, Felicity could not say that she had expected one. Dorothea was rather more headstrong than most of the girls, and she had certainly chafed against her restriction to the house. “I see,”

Felicity said. And then, because the girl truly did look rather contrite, she gestured to the chair wedged between the desk and the wall.

“Please, sit with me for a few moments.”

Lightly, like a bird poised to take flight, Dorothea settled into the chair.

“I really am sorry,”

she said.

“It’s just—”

“You don’t have to explain yourself,”

Felicity said softly.

“I know I must seem very old and stodgy to you, but I do remember what it was like to be your age. To feel so very grown and to feel also that nobody quite takes you seriously.”

She stifled a sigh as the girl looked down at her lap.

“But while you are in my care, it is my duty to watch over you and to guide you. To guard you against any potential threat to your safety and to do my very best to prepare you for the world you will enter when you leave this school.”

“I know, Miss—Mrs. Carlisle,”

Dorothea said, and there was the smallest tremble of her lower lip.

“I was just so angry with you,”

she admitted.

“For taking me to task.”

For a moment, Felicity only watched the girl before her. The hunched shoulders, the fidgety tangle of her fingers in her lap. They’d had so many moments of conflict between them, had butted heads so many times over the years. Dorothea might have been a difficult student, but still she was just a girl. And beneath that contrary and truculent demeanor was vulnerability. Uncertainty. A girl unsure of her place in the world—just as Felicity had once been.

“I do care for you, Dorothea,”

she said earnestly.

“And I do these things not to anger you or upset you, but to guard you from mistakes that could affect the whole of your life. It is not only my responsibility to protect you, but my privilege. Above all—above all, I would see you happily and safely settled into the sort of life you ought to have once you leave this school.”

Dorothea’s head popped up from its lily-like bend, her blond brows arching. “Really?”

she asked. And for perhaps the first time, her clear-eyed gaze did not fall upon Felicity like that of a sworn enemy upon a battlefield, but with simple curiosity.

“Yes, really.”

Felicity cleared her throat.

“And I am sorry to disappoint you, but I have written to Mr. Marchant’s father”—or Ian had, but there was no sense in splitting hairs—“and he has assured me that his son will cease corresponding with you.”

Before Dorothea could argue, she forged ahead.

“You are at a delicate and impressionable age, and it is not appropriate for a gentleman to correspond privately with a young lady. Your reputation could be lost in an instant for such a thing.”

Dorothea’s blue eyes widened.

“For…for only a note?”

“Reputations have been ruined on less,”

Felicity said grimly.

“When you have a proper suitor—and you are a lovely girl, Dorothea, I have no doubt but that you’ll have your pick of gentlemen—it is important that any courtship is conducted in the right way. I am certain you’ll have the guidance of your family as you navigate such things, but until then, please believe me that it is for the best that any communication between you and Mr. Marchant is put to an end.”

“I do,”

Dorothea said, so sincerely that Felicity was briefly taken aback at the ready agreement.

“I mean to say, I do believe you. I was—”

Dorothea dropped her chin again, her lashes lowering.

“I was angry to be confined to the house,”

she admitted in a small voice, with an uncomfortable lift of her shoulders.

“It seemed such a small transgression.”

“I know,”

Felicity said. But there was no such thing as a small transgression in the eyes of society.

“And if you will give me your word that you will not communicate—in secret, or otherwise—with Mr. Marchant again, I will endeavor to believe you, and we will put this unfortunate episode firmly in the past where it belongs. Can you promise me that?”

“Yes,”

Dorothea said, without even a trace of guile in her voice or in the solemn wideness of her eyes.

“It won’t happen again.”

As Felicity was only too accustomed to the shrewd expression Dorothea often wore when she was scheming something, she was inclined to believe in the girl’s sincerity. At least until proven otherwise.

“If Mr. Marchant is sincere in his regard,”

she said, in a gesture of consolation.

“once you are out in society, he will present himself to your father as a prospective suitor as he should rightly do.”

Though she harbored private doubts that Mr. Marchant would be deemed a suitable match for a girl who was something of an heiress, she knew that the girl’s father was particularly fond and indulgent of his daughter. There was the possibility, however slight, that the man just might let her marry a fellow she loved instead of pressing for a more socially advantageous match.

“You’re just sixteen, Dorothea,”

Felicity said.

“It is a difficult age to be sure. Only trust in me to guide you a little longer, and I promise you I shall have only your best interests at heart. Fortunately we have put this situation to bed without it blooming into a proper scandal. But I would warn you: it is, regrettably, not uncommon for a gentleman to lure an innocent young girl into an elopement for the purposes of securing her dowry. I would hate for you to be used in such a reprehensible manner.”

Dorothea cast her gaze down toward her lap, a guilty flush rising in her cheeks.

“Did Mr. Marchant mention such a thing to you?”

Felicity ventured hesitantly.

A little shrug, though the girl remained shamefaced.

“Not…as such,”

Dorothea murmured.

“But Annabel thought he would do, eventually. She said—she said I would be a fool if I listened to him rather than you, and that I couldn’t rely on promises rendered in secret.”

Thank God for Annabel.

Dorothea swiped one hand over her eyes.

“She said that I was too stubborn by half,”

she said.

“That you were perfectly reasonable in your disappointment and that I ought to make peace with you while I could.”

“There is never a bad time to make peace,”

Felicity said.

“And, Dorothea—you can come to me at any time, with any problem. I cannot promise to always be pleased, but I can promise always to do my very best to help you. Do we understand one another?”

Dorothea’s chin quivered. “Yes,”

she said.

“I am sorry, truly. And I will do my best not to cause more trouble for you.”

Felicity allowed herself a small smile.

That promise would last a week, perhaps two at the most.

The spirited girl was simply not fashioned for a perpetual peace. But that would be a struggle for a different day, and, God willing, not one with quite so much potential to be catastrophic in its outcome.

But as Dorothea took her leave with a perfectly respectful curtsey, for the first time since she had taken up the reins of the school, Felicity felt like its headmistress.

Probably Nellie had had numerous such talks with her pupils over the years—perhaps not on the dangers of elopement, but other matters of varying severity.

But this was Felicity’s first, and she thought—she hoped—that she had managed it with tact and grace. Enough, at least, to encourage Dorothea not to keep such secrets in the future.

The door had hardly closed behind Dorothea before there came a frantic knock, and a maid poked her head in the door.

“Mr. Butler is here, ma’am. He needs to see you urgently. He’s…really quite insistent.”

Butler, insistent? Felicity could hardly credit it. In the month or so that she had known him, she’d never seen him anything that might qualify as even mildly perturbed.

“Of course,”

she said.

“Do send him in.”

With a little bob of a curtsey, the maid withdrew, beckoning with one hand over her shoulder.

“She’ll see you now.”

And there was Butler, striding into the room, looking…perturbed. Flustered, even. Perhaps she might have gone so far as to have described him as rattled. But what had brought him here?

Surely a footman could have done the job just as well, if there were some urgent message to convey to her.

But, no. Butler had come personally, and it was—odd, seeing him outside the environs of Ian’s home. Her home.

Like he’d wandered into a place he didn’t belong.

And she thought even he must be aware of it, for there was a restless jerk inscribed into the movements of his hands as he reflexively straightened his cravat.

An absent motion she had no doubt he had been repeating for some time, given that the pleats of fabric she had known always to be perfectly arranged had instead become unforgivably wrinkled from too many repeated touches.

“Butler,”

she said.

“What brings you here?”

“Er—a matter of some urgency, madam,”

he said, and even his voice sounded frayed, worn down to its last threads of stability.

“Mr. Carlisle has sent me to fetch you home at once.”

“Fetch me home,”

Felicity echoed incredulously.

“For what purpose?”

“A—a—”

Butler grappled desperately for the words that appeared to have deserted him, his fingers drifting through the air before him as if he might somehow pluck the correct ones straight out of it.

“A certain…situation has arisen which Mr. Carlisle feels ill-equipped to manage himself.”

Felicity felt a frown pleat itself into her brow.

“And he requires my assistance to do so?”

“So I am given to understand,”

Butler said.

“Please pardon my intrusion, madam. But Mr. Carlisle did not trust anyone else on the staff to convey to you the urgent nature of his request.”

Felicity pursed her lips together against the impulse to suggest that Butler had not done a particularly compelling job of doing so himself.

“I have responsibilities here,”

she said.

“I cannot simply abandon them to—to—what is it I am meant to do, precisely?”

“I haven’t the faintest,”

Butler said weakly.

“But there’s been quite a lot of shouting thus far. I suppose Mr. Carlisle believes you might be able to talk some sense into them before it becomes a veritable bloodbath.”

Felicity blinked, no more enlightened than she had been moments ago.

“I beg your pardon,”

she said.

“I really do not understand. Talk sense into whom, exactly?”

“His in-laws,”

Butler said, in a strange squeak of a voice. And then, as if Ian might have had some other in-laws of which she was previously unaware, he added.

“They are your relations, after all, madam.”