Page 8 of Buon Natale, My Wicked Rogue
But she wanted time to consider the matter.
Chapter Three
“I take it you didn’t find Lord Addington all that appealing?” Lady Wyndam said.
Angela paused with her teacup at her lips, staring out the window of the Whitestone dowager house morning room at the sunrise. “I wouldn’t say that.”
Best to be noncommittal.
“You didn’t dance with him.” Lady Wyndam chuckled. “He looked quite put out. Evan is not used to such treatment. I daresay you didn’t even give him so much as a smile.”
At having her rudeness of the previous evening mentioned, Angela suppressed a cringe. Again, she carefully considered her response. “To be honest, I wasn’t quite myself last night. The evening’s events left me fatigued. I’ve never been so grateful to find myself in bed as I was last night.”
She had spent the night here as Lady Wyndam’s guest. Lady Wyndam had sent a note to Susan’s parents, telling them about how her driver had warned the ruffians off and how Angela would spend the night recovering from the shock of the unexpected attack.
All she wanted right now was to sit back and enjoy the warm, fragrant tea and the beauty of the sunrise. However, Lady Wyndam appeared so concerned, so friendly this morning, that she felt compelled to put her at ease. Pausing for one last drink,she then sat the teacup down. “Perhaps I do not have as much taste for adventure as I had thought.”
Lady Wyndam’s brows drew together ever-so-slightly, and she nodded. “I understand. You have lived a circumspect life as a married woman in Boston?”
“Yes. I was most circumspect.” For all the good it had done her. Jacob had still found reasons to belittle and bedevil her.
“Married women in New England don’t have the same liberties as they do here, I am told.”
“You are correct. It is a delicate thing, to be sure. So many rules are unspoken. It depends on who one is and who one is with as far as which rules must be followed and which can be bent.”
Lady Wyndam sighed. “The same as here in England.”
“Being a foreign-born wife without the correct bloodlines surely made a difference. I felt I had to follow all the rules, spoken and unspoken, all the time.”
“That’s a shame. It must have been hard for you to feel that you had to be perfect all the time.”
“Yes, it was.”
“Is it true that unmarried young ladies have more freedom in New England?”
Angela nodded. “Though they are expected to be chaste, except perhaps with their intended husbands, unmarried women have more freedom in New England than here in England.”
“Is what they say about New Englanders and courting true?”
“What, Your Grace?”
“Is it true about bundling?” Lady Wyndam’s brown eyes twinkled merrily but with a definite naughty glint.
Disarmed by the older woman’s candor and charm, she laughed. “Well, they don’t speak of it openly, but there are whispers that more than one venerable couple had shared a midnight kiss or two over a bundling board.”
They shared a laugh. It felt good to share confidences like this and to share a naughty laugh. She felt more like a girl than when she had truly been a girl.
“And you and your husband?”
Strangely, she didn’t feel that instant choking sensation when hearing his name mentioned. Nor did she feel offense at the extremely personal question. But she blushed. “Oh, we didn’t need a bundling board.” She paused to suppress an uncharacteristic giggle. “We didn’t have a long engagement. We were so eager for each other that he begged me to run away with him. I did, and we were married by the captain of his father’s ship.”
“But that eagerness faded?”
“Yes,” she admitted simply, a sinking, empty feeling entering her stomach. “In New England, gentlemen have their business social obligations, an endless round of all male dinner parties and such. But once married, a woman is expected to confine her interests mostly to her husband and children.”
“And your marriage was not blessed with children?”
“No, it was not.” Jacob’s visits to her bedchamber had dwindled slowly until he never came there at all. What had she done wrong? She could never discern the actual issue. She knew that part of it was not being what he had expected of her. However, she wasn’t sure what he had really expected.
