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M illie Yardley did not care for English roses.

She wasn’t certain if the aversion had been a lifelong one or if it had manifested sometime during the hours she’d been forced to spend alongside her mother in the Yardley family’s meticulously maintained rose garden.

She’d spent her childhood watching her mother assess the roses, ruthlessly beheading all but the most perfect blossoms at the bud.

Somehow, it had made her resent the ones that were permitted to bloom, in all their ominous perfection. She was aware, yes, that this feeling was likely about something deeper than roses. Still, she did not care for them.

Either way, she was frowning now, and quite unable to remove herself from the ostentatious display of large, blushing pink blooms arranged in a glazed vase inches from her nose, each carefully chosen from her mother’s very best rose bushes and arranged with exacting precision into this artful, fragrant, horrible bouquet.

At the very least, she could not see her mother’s glowing expression of pride about the damned flowers, as she was hidden behind them, across the table. She could only see the other two women seated with her, flanking her on either side.

To Millie’s left was her sister, Countess Bentley, Lady Claire Hightower, and to her right was Lady Patricia Hightower, the dowager countess and Claire’s mother-in-law. The dowager, just now, seemed to be observing Millie closely.

She gave an inward curse of rebuke to herself and did her best to rearrange her features into placidity. If the dowager had seen her sneering at the roses, who knows what harm she’d just done to their first impressions.

It was bad enough that she’d been stuck in the carriage with the sickly sweet smell for almost four days, wasn’t it? Did the damned roses have to be waiting for her at her first stop in the Cotswolds as well?

“They are the pride of Bloomsbury,” her mother was boasting, as demurely as she could manage, to the dowager. “This particular hue is of my own devising, after several generations of careful cross-breeding. I call it sunrise pink.”

“It is very lovely, Mrs. Yardley,” the dowager responded graciously, her ice-blue eyes sliding from Millie and over the roses back to her mother.

“I must thank you again for bringing me a sample of your botanical talent. I am truly very pleased. When next I visit London, I would very much enjoy stopping by your home and seeing these gardens of yours for myself.”

Millie thought it was well that the bouquet was so tall and wide as to block one’s view of the person across the table so that the dowager could not see Claire roll her eyes at their mother’s gasp of delight at such a prospect.

In truth, she imagined all three of them would rather be resting in their rooms this afternoon rather than sitting here, sharing niceties with the dowager. Or, she amended, listening to her mother’s breathless voice, perhaps only two of them.

She wanted nothing more than to take all the pins out of her hair and to lie flat on a bed with her legs and arms stretched out as far as they could go in all directions.

Then, perhaps after a few hours of rest, she’d take dinner all alone in the solitude of a private room with nothing but a brightly burning candle and some time in perfect silence to write in her journal and appreciate a starry view unlike any she could have had from her window in London.

There was no making sense of her thoughts until she’d written them down, much less experiences. And experiences like a multi-day sojourn with her mother, sister, nephew, and at least a hundred roses? Nonsensical as the memory of last night’s dream ten minutes into breakfast.

She let out a little sigh of wistful longing without thinking and quickly sucked it back up, hoping no one had heard it. She glanced at both the dowager and Claire, pressing her lips together as she found both of them met her gaze.

She gave a weak smile of apology to the dowager, whose pale blue eyes were inscrutable on her for that brief half a second.

Woops.

All the same. That little fantasy was what she wanted after all that travel. They’d be here for a few weeks, after all. All this socializing and looking around the house and such could wait, couldn’t it?

As though she were thinking the very same thing, Claire stifled a yawn behind her slender fingers, batting two heavy blinks of her large, brown eyes.

“My, but how thoughtless of me,” the dowager said suddenly, cutting off Mrs. Yardley mid-chatter and craning over the bouquet of sunrise pink roses to gaze at the pair of sisters.

“You all must be completely exhausted after your journey from London. It’s a wonder you aren’t all dozing into your teacups while I sit here, making small talk like a silly old woman. ”

“Oh, no,” Mrs Yardley began, horrified.

But the dowager had already risen and swung the little silver bell she kept next to her saucer, bringing forward a pair of starched maids, ready to see them to their rooms. “It is no matter at all, my dear woman,” she said soothingly, “we will have plenty of time to continue our conversation at dinner and in the days to come. Please, indulge in some rest.”

Mrs. Yardley was frowning as everyone stood, her narrowed eyes cutting between each of her daughters with obvious suspicion that they had, somehow, caused this abrupt end to her triumphant showcase of her roses to a grand lady.

Millie wondered if it was too much to hope that her room would be in an entirely different wing of the manor to her mother’s. It likely was. Not many people scattered guest quarters all over the house like Easter eggs.

Worse, she realized, it was entirely possible they would be sharing a room, at least until her sister could take over properly as lady of the house.

“Annette, could you please move Mrs. Yardley to one of the rooms overlooking our gardens? I think she may enjoy that more than the overlook of the water,” the dowager said to the taller of the two maids, who immediately bobbed a curtsey.

“I shall personally give her a tour of the gardens tomorrow after breakfast. Please arrange for that as well.”

“Oh!” said Mrs. Yardley, a scarlet blush flooding her cheeks. “Oh, I would be honored! ”

Claire gave Millie a silent nudge in the ribs with her knuckle, the equivalent of a snide giggle at their mother’s expense and a consummate challenge to suppress any sort of smile or snort in response.

Millie bit the inside of her cheek and stared straight ahead until she was summoned by her assigned servant to follow, and only then did she allow herself to throw a look over her shoulder at her sister, a glare harsh enough that she saw her sister raise a hand to cover her lips just before she rounded the corner and the whole scene vanished from view.

Almost immediately, Millie felt a sag in her limbs and a yearning for the softness of a bed. Any bed. The maid ahead of her, the shorter one, was silent and apparently utterly uninterested in her as a visitor in the home, which suited them both just fine.

Millie imagined it would fit very nicely into the mundanity of her journal entries from the last four days.

“ Maid did not speak to or look at me” would fit rather nicely alongside “ Stayed at an inn again, which looked much like the last,” or “ Oliver was fussy on the road,” or “ Carriage still cramped; Mother and Claire bickered.”

Truly, she thought once her mother had rested a bit, she’d see the wisdom in taking some respite from the road before attempting to awe the dowager countess with all of her skill and charm.

They were all rather bedraggled from the road and several days enclosed in tight quarters with baby Oliver and, frankly, with each other.

This was Claire’s official relocation to her new home and only her second time meeting her mother-in-law.

The dowager had come to London once, some months prior, to meet her grandson, but Claire had been hesitant to undergo such a long journey with him until he was at least old enough to take his first steps.

Having had to personally chase the lad around more than one inn in the last days, Millie privately wondered at that thinking.

Evidently, children did not learn their steps in a slow, steady fashion, but rather figured the thing out and went immediately to sprinting, and woe to whomever was left in their wake.

(In this case, it was Millie. Woe to Millie, specifically.)

As to Oliver’s father, the Earl Bentley, he was not permitted in this house.

Claire had seen to that when she’d assumed custodianship of the deed in exchange for paying off her husband’s substantial debts, mere hours before Oliver’s birth.

In exchange for clearing his legal burdens, Claire had secured something very near her freedom from the binds of her marriage, without losing any of the benefits of it.

She retained her title, usurped his lands, and freed herself from the necessity of his company.

Insofar as to whether or not the earl’s mother took issue with this coup, Millie did not know, and she had not asked. The dowager had received them graciously, and perhaps valued her own home here too much to speak out against it.

And the earl himself? Millie didn’t know that either. The last she’d heard of Freddy Hightower was on the day the deal was done. He’d been taken away in a carriage and could very well have kept riding right off the edge of the known world. And if he had, the devil could take him.

Millie had no love lost for Freddy Hightower. The scoundrel.

He deserved his fate and more.