Page 7 of Now Comes the Mist

Mamma nods with approval at my sudden conscientiousness. She has never known me quite as well as Mina, who raises an eyebrow as I curtsy and move away. Arthur is still speaking to Jonathan, but I hear his voice grow ever so slightly louder as he turns in the direction of my back.Good, I think, and while he is likely still watching, I walk right up to Dr. Jack Seward.

“Dr. Seward,” I say, my voice high and lilting so it will carry back to the group. “Thank you so much for your exquisite roses tonight. They were most appreciated.”

“Miss Westenra. Lucy.” His dark eyes light up as he brings my hand to his lips. He does not leave it there any longer than is considered proper, but his mouth opens a fraction against my skin. The heat of it sears up my arm and down my spine before he releases me, and I wonder how I could ever have thought the doctor a boring, bloodless man.

We had first become acquainted six years ago, when he was a mere medical student and assistant to my father’s physician. I had been a child, too self-absorbed and concerned for Papa’s ailing health to harbor the silly infatuations that girls of my age often did for young men, and anyway, Jack Seward had seemed dull, forever prattling on about the connection between mind and body. Imagine my surprise when he had caught me alone at the Stokers’ ball last year and lowered his lips to my ear. “I think you are the most beautiful woman I have ever seen,” he had whispered, his close-shaven hint of a beard scratching most delightfully against my cheek.

“Dr. Seward,” I had replied, smiling, “you astonish me.”

“It is you I find astonishing.” His eyes had glittered as he ran a finger over my wrist, feather light, and suddenly I had wanted nothing more than for him to take me by the waist as Arthur had moments before. I had seized his hand before he could pull away, both of us gasping at the sudden heat of our palms meeting, and tugged him close to me. He had stumbled forward a bit, off-balance, and for one glorious second I had felt all of him pressed against me.

He had released my hand and stepped away at once, looking discomfited and perhaps even displeased. In my excitement and frustration with Arthur’s cool detachment, I had forgotten my place: as the woman, I was the quarry and not the hunter. I was to be alluring and desirable through my appearance only.Nevermy words or actions. I had broken Papa’s stern rule of being above reproach at all times.

Luckily, I had known exactly what to do. “I am so sorry, Doctor,” I had said, putting my hands over my cheeks in feigned maidenly embarrassment and lowering my eyes shyly to the floor. “I was overcome by your kind words. Please forgive me.”

Dr. Seward’s displeasure had slipped away at once. “There is nothing to forgive, Miss Westenra,” he had said gently. “Lucy.”

I have always known too well the part I must play in this ridiculous game of courtship between men and women, and I have played it brilliantly. For here he is in my mother’s house, standing before me with the same spark of interest in his eyes, with his bouquet of roses, devil-red and wantonly full-blown, upstairs in my bedroom. From the slow smileparting his lips, I know he, too, must be remembering that night in the conservatory.

“I’m pleased you liked my gift,” he says. “I thought of you when I saw them.”

“And here I believed you too busy with your medical practice to care about something as frivolous as flowers,” I say archly.

“Ah, but flowers are far from frivolous.” He leans toward me as though to confide a secret, and a lock of black hair slips over his forehead. He smells like soap and clean linen. “They carry messages in code, you see. They are like innocent spies.”

“Dr. Seward!” I say, pretending to be shocked. I know Mina would shake her head at the overly coquettish tone I am wielding, but the young doctor looks charmed. “Are you telling me you have sent a bouquet of spies to my bedchamber tonight?”

A slight startled look crosses his face. I have again been too forward. But this time, he recovers quickly and says, “Perhapsspiesis the wrong word to use. I would not presume to send such intrusions to a lady so modest. We could say they are … mere couriers, perhaps.”

I tilt my head back and laugh, knowing that the bell-like sound will carry to almost every corner of the room. “You are a very amusing man, Doctor.”

He is all smiles again, looking pleased with himself.

“And what do we have here, Seward?” asks a deep, drawling voice, the vowels peculiar and stretched out flat. “Is it possible you’ve found the most dazzling lady in the room?”

“More than possible,” Dr. Seward says, frowning a little at the interruption, though he claps the newcomer genially on the shoulder. “Miss Lucy Westenra, may I introduce my friend, Mr. Quincey Morris? We met last summer when I was completing my studies in America.”

I can’t help staring at the stranger, and I notice that many others are, too, though not quite with admiration like me. The man stands out like a beacon, and not just because his skin is a rich gleaming ebony where everyone else’s, excepting mine, is lily-white. His merry, intelligent eyes dance in an otherwise stern face with thick brows, a strong wide nose, and full, beautifully shaped lips. He wears a most unconventional outfit of a long sporting coat of grey wool over a tan waistcoat, his dove-colored ascot contrasting with the dark masculine edge of his jaw. He and Dr. Seward are matched in height, build, and age, with both men around thirty or thereabouts.

But the manner in which the stranger stands is different from the languid ease of all the other gentlemen in the room: feet slightly apart, wide powerful shoulders drawn back, and hands braced on his hips, revealing a flash of silver metal tucked into a leather holster around his trim waist. He looks like a man accustomed to having to fight at a moment’s notice, and as I take in some of the guests’ barely veiled stares of hostility directed at him, I believe I can see why.

“M-Mr. Morris,” I stammer, most uncharacteristically, dazzled by his appearance. I see from his grin—straight, flawless teeth, white against his dark skin—that he is pleased by my reaction. “Are you a sharpshooter of the American West? I seem to remember someone with such a stance as yours in a play Mamma and I once saw.”

Quincey Morris laughs, a bright and cheerful sound that softens some of the grim faces watching him. “I am not a sharpshooter, ma’am, though I do know a thing or two about hitting targets. I’ve knocked plenty of bottles off a fence in my day,” he says with a kindly wink, and his smooth, buttery accent is so attractive I can’t help gasping up at him. “A more accurate term to use for me would be cowboy, like my father before me. There aren’t many of us left these days, but I keep the profession to honor his memory. Jack here,” he adds, putting a hand on Dr. Seward’s shoulder, “met me when he was doctoring in Texas. Brave man that he is, he couldn’t resist the excitement of the lawless Wild West. Could you, my friend?”

“I was there studying Indigenous medicine,” Dr. Seward says, relaxing under the other man’s gregarious cheer, though he darts nervous glances at me. My admiration of the handsome, strapping American is much too apparent for his taste. “Thatwas what drew me, as well as the need for doctors. Quincey is the heroic one. He saved me from bandits.”

Mr. Morris rolls his eyes good-naturedly at me. “Andhesavedmeand ten others on my homestead from the wasting fever. We would have all gone to glory had it not been for him. I don’t know anything about medicine myself. Give me a cow to rope or a horse to ride.”

“And a fire to light under the open night sky, I suppose?” I ask, struggling to recover as best I can. I smile at Mr. Morris’s delight. “I have read a few tales of the American West despite my mother’s disapproval of them. I suppose sharpshooters and gold mines are not the most suitable reading material for a young lady, in her eyes.”

“No reading material is out of reach when a lady is as intelligent as you clearly are, Miss Westenra,” the cowboy says smoothly, bowing with hishand on his heart. For just a brief second, those molten brown eyes flicker to my mouth, so quickly I might have imagined it.

“Lucy’s late father was my good friend and as educated a man as you could meet. He passed down his gifts, as you can see,” Dr. Seward says quickly, trying to win my attention back.

But I cannot take my eyes off Mr. Morris when he is smiling at me. It’s blinding, like gazing directly into the sun.

“You’re a diamond in the rough, then, Miss Lucy,” he says. “And all it took for us to meet was several thousand miles across land and sea. Do you believe in destiny?”

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