When She Said I Do
Read When She Said I Do Online
Authors: Celeste Bradley
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This book is dedicated to my dear friend and partner-in-crime Susan Donovan. The ability to chase down pickpockets in Barcelona is only one of her many superpowers!
Acknowledgments
In order to complete this book, I needed help from many people. From brewers of coffee to deliverers of pizza, from Wikipedia (don’t forget to donate!) to TEDTalks, but most especially from the following people: Darbi Gill, Grace Bradley, Hannah Bradley Brazil, Cindy Tharp, Susan Donovan, Monique Patterson & Holly Blanck from St. Martin’s Press, and always my dear friend and agent, Irene Goodman.
With such amazing women at my back, how can I do anything but succeed?
Contents
Praise for
New York Times
bestselling author
Chapter 1
COTSWOLDS, ENGLAND, 1816
Well, isn’t this simply lovely?
The icy river water rushed into the carriage, sweeping Miss Calliope Worthington from her seat and crashing her into the tilting ceiling of the contraption before towing her out through the opposite door. Gasping at the shocking chill of the water, she choked on froth and mud and terror.
The river tore one of her shoes from her dangling feet. Callie closed her eyes as she clung desperately to the leather hand loop that had dangled annoyingly over her head for the entire journey from her home in London to this dark, flooded Cotswolds bridge.
The other hand was fisted into the back of the coat of her mother, Iris, who had both arms wrapped around Callie’s stout, unconscious father, Archie.
Callie threw back her head and screamed for her brother.
“Dade!”
* * *
At last the grand house loomed up in the dark before them, the fine Cotswolds limestone seeming to glow in the moonlight. No one answered the booming summons as they pounded on the vast oak door. Calliope helped her brother Daedalus ease their father’s unconscious body through the unlocked portal and through the dark chill house while Mama followed toting the single small bag they’d managed to recover. No one interrupted their progress through the entrance hall to a small salon.
As Calliope helped her mother clear the dustcovers from a pair of sofas, her heart leaped in relief as her father began to mutter fretfully as he rose to awareness.
Dade turned to her. “Callie, I should go help Morgan with the horses.”
The team, elderly and panicked and quite unused to being swept off bridges by icy snowmelt, had managed to entangle themselves thoroughly in their broken harness. Morgan, the Worthingtons’ driver and general manservant, had elected to stay behind on the riverbank until the horses had calmed.
Callie helped Dade bundle up against the chill though they had nothing dry but a few musty lap rugs found folded up within the window seat. For herself, she turned a dustcover into something of a toga, and hung her dress to dry by the hearth. Then she bent to make a fire by use of the tinderbox on the mantel.
Once Dade had left and Mama had subsided onto the opposite sofa, gazing worriedly at her husband, Callie had a moment to truly examine her surroundings.
It was a very fine house. Grand even, although one could hardly apply such a word to such terrible housekeeping. Really, some people had no respect for their things.
“Mama—” But Mama had drifted off, soothed by the fire and her husband’s even snoring. Calliope brushed a lock of silvering hair from her sleeping mother’s brow, then tugged her makeshift canvas wrapper more tightly about herself. Her gown still dripped on the hearth, like her mother’s and several items of her father’s.
Mama and Papa slept like exhausted children on the paired sofas, now slanted toward the glowing coals heaped in the hearth. If she liked, Calliope could join them in rest, curling up upon a thick albeit dusty rug before the welcome heat.
Or she could satisfy her curiosity as she searched the house for something better for them all.
First, small candlestick in hand, she found the kitchens, situated where most kitchens were—belowstairs in the rear of the fine house. She blinked in surprise at the wealth of hung meat and cheese stored in the vast larder. Baskets of root vegetables sat below the stocked shelves. All things that would keep, to be sure, but why so much in a house where no one had apparently resided for years?
Well, perhaps the owners were on the way even now. Surely they would not begrudge a stranded family a few bites of simple food? Calliope prepared a heaping plate for her mother and another for Dade when he returned with Morgan. Thick slices of salty ham and creamy white cheese kept her own hunger at bay as she carved a bit of cured beef into a pot with water and vegetables to create a soothing broth for her injured father.
She returned to the salon and left the pot of broth to thicken by the fire. She checked Mama’s brow but her mother slept deeply and without any sign of fever or chill. She squeezed Papa’s hand and he grumbled and pulled away, a lovable grump even in sleep.
After lighting the fine silver candelabra from the chimneypiece and leaving it in the front window to ease Dade’s journey “home,” Callie could think of nothing more to do. Restlessly, she tightened her coarse wrapper over her still damp shift and took up her little candle.
Soundless in bare feet, she drifted through the first floor of the house. It was an unworthy thought perhaps, but she reveled in the novel sensation of being completely alone. Her family was large and loving—if sometimes maddening—but she was never, ever,
alone
.
With seven outrageous siblings and two even more outrageous parents all crammed into the comfortable but shabby house in London, Callie could scarcely recall the last time she’d walked in silence and solitude. Surely it had been years.
And now this lovely house lay before her, empty rooms waiting like a box of bonbons to be unwrapped by no one but her! There was a spacious dining room with a long, grand table fit to seat half the House of Lords, two entirely different but pretty parlors, a music room with piano and a looming, cloth-covered shape that could only be a grand harp, and a library that might have been impressive had not the books been coated in a layer of dust too thick to read the titles through.
It was not the vast, endless mausoleum she had first thought. In fact, if one squinted a bit and imagined clean, jewel-toned carpets and polished woodwork, it would be a most cheerful and welcoming hall. She shuddered and brushed a dangling cobweb from her cheek as she pursued her curiosity up the gracefully curving stair and into the upper gallery. Her own home might be furnished in things well past their best years, but it was also, due to her own industry and the ancient housekeeper’s tutelage, quite spotless.
Well, except for that odd stain in the parlor, where the twins had spilled something nasty and tried to destroy the evidence by dissolving it with something yet nastier …
In the spacious, elegant gallery, silvery light poured through the tall windows along one wall and carved the long room into boxes of light and dark, only slightly blurred by her single flame. Calliope moved into one of the window casements and gazed out at a night turned from stormy nightmare to moonlit dream. She could see the bank of drained clouds moving aside to allow a nearly full moon to spill over her where she stood.
She felt the unwelcome sensation of a string pulled by fate somewhere in the weave of her life. What if they had roused at the inn half an hour earlier this morning? Or had left half an hour later? Either they might have passed over the wooden bridge long before it suffered damage in the flood or they might have simply driven up to it, seen it washed away, and turned safely back.
Yet she must remember to be grateful for the health of her family. It was lucky for them all that Mama had somehow spotted this dark house set back so far from the road.
Callie smiled at the grand space before her and began to run lightly down it in her bare feet, guarding her small candle flame with one hand. Laughing, she curtsied to a very grand old lady in a somber portrait. Some women had no sense of humor. Callie gave the old witch a cheeky salute and spun away, singing just to hear her voice fill the gallery. Just her own voice, alone.
“‘O merry maids do come afore, and let thy feet be dancing…’”
* * *
Ren Porter, recluse and cynic—
and don’t forget monster
—had been drunk even before the storm began. He hadn’t noticed its arrival and he cared little for its departure, save that he favored his house silent and still.
Draped on a chair before the hearth in his bedchamber—well, perhaps it was bit of a reach to call it “his” bedchamber. It was merely the latest in a long line. When one room became too fouled by smoke and crumbs and empty bottles, Ren simply moved one door down the seemingly endless hall to clean sheets and clean shirts.
It was his bloody house, wasn’t it?
His house, his fire, and his wine cellar, all conveniently provided just when he’d needed it most by an elderly cousin Ren barely remembered.
Feeling unusually mellow due to extreme use of the aforementioned wine cellar, Ren almost tipped his bottle to that cousin, who now doubtless watched the ruination of his fine estate from above—until Ren remembered that he didn’t believe in an above. Or a below.
There was plenty of hell to be found, right here on earth.
So instead, he tipped the bottle to the departed storm, for leaving him in peace and silence—
And singing.
Now, Ren had experienced a few fever dreams and many drunken hallucinations, but never had one of these visions included the light lilting voice of an angel echoing through his hallowed hermit halls.
Since the pain in his back and shoulder scarcely allowed any chair to give him comfort, it was no great sacrifice to give in to his curiosity and leave his room in search of that haunting melody. It wouldn’t be the first time he tried to chase down an illusion. He’d once spent an entire night chasing a violet dog through the attic, so this hardly seemed odd at all.
The hall was dark but a feeble light shone from an open doorway down the hall. Angel light? Perhaps stealth was in order. Angels didn’t much care for monsters.
And he’d never managed to catch that damned dog …
* * *
Deep within the house, in a grand bedchamber clearly meant for the lady of the house, Callie found a small chest of jewels sitting on an ornate mirrored vanity. She set down her small candleholder so as to reflect in the mirror, doubling her light.