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And that was what falling in love with Jacob Eversea felt like to Isolde.

The cow was just as spectacular as Jacob promised, and it was the beginning of what would be the best season of her life so far. Jacob had a talent for organizing expeditions and a dilettante’s spirit of adventure. The Sylvaines were his willing lieutenants, and so off they went on excursions.

He took them to all of his favorite places in Pennyroyal Green: mysterious fairy-ring clearings in the woods, ancient stone bridges, up rugged paths into the hills behind Miss Marietta Endicott’s academy to a place where a cluster of willows nodded over a magical sun-dappled ponds where all the little creatures of the woods, the ones that flew or hopped or padded around on all fours, seemed to convene.

They visited neighboring towns. They brought picnics, and sometimes Jacob’s little nephews, too.

They fashioned and then raced little boats on the river; they played Pall-Mall in the clearing in front of the folly.

On days when no excursions were planned, Maria and Isolde occasionally cajoled Jacob and George into joining them in acting out scenes from Shakespeare plays or La Morte d’Arthur, tales of King Arthur.

And while George’s facility with a soliloquy boded well for his future as a courtroom barrister, Jacob delivered all of his lines with stentorian gusto, to great comic effect, and his version of Romeo died with such flamboyant groaning and thrashing that the girls collapsed with shrieks of laughter.

“It’s just that I think Romeo could have easily handled it all better,” Jacob said with mild indignation, later, only partly jesting. “He was a bit of an idiot.”

Often Jacob called upon them in the evenings, too, and stayed a few hours to chat comfortably with Mr. and Mrs. Sylvaine or play a round or two of whist or chess.

He obligingly sang when one of the ladies of the house or a visiting neighbor sat at the pianoforte. No one was excluded from his regard.

But the true reason Jacob visited the Sylvaines was clear to all. He was not fundamentally enigmatic, and his expression when he looked at Isolde required no interpretation.

He didn’t send over hothouse flowers, or pay formal calls to sit in the parlor over tea while her mother hovered nearby, or any of the other things that typically announced a Courtship with a capital “C”.

But he gently captured little frogs and placed them in Isolde’s palm for her to admire before they leaped away, or told her which flowers she ought to eat if she were ever lost in the woods alone.

He braided celandine into a crown and gave it to her to wear when she played Titania in a scene on their Folly Stage.

He was always the perfect gentleman, in manners and bearing, even when he teased.

Everything was proper when he was about.

They were never, ever alone, and always adequately chaperoned.

But the two of them had secrets.

Like a pair of pickpockets, they stole vanishingly swift touches, every one of them seemingly innocent, yet every one of them erotically charged.

Each accidentally-on-purpose brush of skin against skin rendered them mute for long seconds.

When he stood behind her and helped her perfect her aim during archery, his hands lightly, briefly guiding hers, or when she crossed a swift creek on stepping stones and he tucked his hand beneath her elbow just as she was about to slip—a quicksilver rush of longing stole her breath.

Especially when he was close enough for her to smell.

He smelled marvelous. Like grass and horse and boy and clean clothes.

And on these occasions, she’d seen hot spots of color rise his cheekbones, as if he was withstanding the impact of her nearness.

Then there came the day when they were walking along with the group and he halted abruptly. She turned, surprised, to find him holding out the corner of her shawl to her, laughter in his eyes.

She still had a grip on one side of it. She hadn’t even realized that she’d dropped the other.

“Thank you! How on earth did you know I dropped?—”

He said very evenly, as though delivering important information, “Because when you laugh, your eyes light and your whole face goes brilliant and your head tips back, and you often give a single happy clap. And nearly every time all of that makes you lose your grip on your shawl. I knew you were about to drag it on the ground.”

She stared at him, breathless.

He might as well have said “I love you”.

Because it was clear he’d memorized the details of her, cherishing them the way she cherished details about him.

When their knuckles lightly brushed as he handed the dragging end of her shawl to her, Jacob’s shoulders moved in a long, steadying breath.

“We’ve been seeing quite a lot of young Eversea,” her father mused after Jacob departed their house one day, about a month after his first visit. He’d brought a bottle of brandy to Mr. Sylvaine as a gift. “This is the kind of brandy only a very rich man could afford.”

Her father seemed unusually pensive, dryly amused, as he rotated the bottle on the table in the candlelight.

The entire family was sitting about, actively perceiving the table so that it wouldn’t disappear, enjoying slices of ginger cake.

“Ah, but the Eversea’s fortune is self-made, father,” George said. “You admire that sort of thing, don’t you? You’d best, as I intend to be rich and self-made and all that, too.”

Their father snorted softly and leaned back in his chair, thoughtfully drumming his fingers.

“As a schoolmaster I had the pleasure of meeting men from many walks of life. Fathers of pupils, mainly. Funnily enough, there’s often almost an innocence to the titled ones who are born into immense wealth.

They are content with themselves and their place in the world.

They needn’t make any effort to connive , as it were, or struggle.

It simply wouldn’t occur to them to do it, because everything is comfortable for them at all times.

And just as often there’s a certain ruthlessness to the self-made types.

The men driven to become something much grander than the lot to which they were born.

They are never quite at ease, and men like that always seek a solution to their discomfort.

Both conditions have their, shall we say, pitfalls. ”

His family was quiet.

“Just an observation,” he added mildly, tapping tobacco into his pipe. “I think Jacob is genuinely a very fine person.”

“Fine person” was about the highest praise her father would give a man. Isolde exhaled.

“But he’s a bit…restless…perhaps?” her father added.

Isolde’s heart lurched.

Her father was never casual with words, and the word “restless’ landed on the raw.

Because while Jacob’s fearless, voraciously curious spirit enchanted her, and she loved hearing him talk about the medicines and myths, and emperors and sages, and art and history of the Orient—a filament of fear flared hot inside her every time he did.

She was increasingly uncertain she would be unable to bear it when he left.

She had also witnessed in him qualities she could not quite reconcile with what she felt to be true about him.

One afternoon, Jacob and George decided to practice fencing in the clearing near the folly while she and Maria looked on.

She had never seen anyone move like Jacob with an epee in his hand. Every one of her muscles locked and her lungs seized as she watched. His lethal grace, precision, speed and ferocity excited and unnerved her.

How odd to realize that Jacob had been exquisitely trained to kill, should the need arise. Not only that, but he seemed capable of it. Born for combat.

He’d wanted to join the army as an officer; his parents would not allow it. For the first time she wondered what sort of toll it might take upon a man to be denied his true calling.

Finally, the boys had collapsed on the grass, laughing. “Pity Redmond wasn’t here to give you an actual contest,” George remarked good-naturedly.

Jacob had growled low in his throat.

As far as Isolde knew, Jacob had said nothing to anyone about his intentions toward her, as obvious as they seemed.

But she knew parliament was in session, which meant the London social season was in full sway, which meant most if not all of the wealthy young bloods of marriageable age were in the city, too.

The Sylvaines could not afford a London season for Isolde and Maria, but echoes of the ton’s festivities reached them by way of the gossip sheets sold at Postlethwaite’s and Tingle’s: it seemed a Miss Fanchette (Isolde had never heard a fancier name, her own name notwithstanding) Tarbell, the daughter of the Chancellor of the Exchequer, had been anointed this season’s diamond of the first water.

Mr. Isaiah Redmond’s name had even appeared once in a flattering context, which meant he had departed Pennyroyal Green for London weeks ago.

Which made Jacob’s continued presence in Pennyroyal Green conspicuous.

It didn’t take long for everyone in town to realize what kept him at home.

Whereupon Isolde found herself fixed in the beam of curious eyes when she was in company.

Some of those gazes sparkled when they gently teased her.

At a meeting of the Society for the Protection of Sussex Poor Mrs. Sneath archly observed, “why, Miss Sylvaine, you’re positively radiant.

Must be all the good works you’re doing lately. ”

One evening Isolde arrived at a sewing circle just in time to overhear Mrs. Hart remarking, “He could do worse, but I don’t think an Eversea has ever married a local girl. Then again, the Redmonds only make triumphant marriages.”

This was greeted with assenting murmurs and knowing, muffled laughter of the sort one likely only understood after living in Pennyroyal Green for decades.