Page 4 of A Lady's Beloved Novelist
“Andrea, you are our only daughter. I just do not want you to be left alone in the world when I am…when we are both gone someday. I have always admired your ambition, but perhaps it is now time to live in the real world and understand that you can find what you are looking for in a man much closer to home.”
“I will not be alone, I will still have Lily,” Andrea pointed out.
“Your cousin is already married. She has her own household to look after now and a husband to take care of,” her mother countered.“I will not let my only child become a spinster, not whilst there is still breath in my lungs.”
“Speaking of Lily, I am supposed to be meeting her for a walk,” Andrea muttered, rising to excuse herself.
“Andrea, you sit back down, we are not finished discussing this!”
“I am sorry, Mother, you know how I feel about being late for things,” Andrea called from the doorway before dashing away. She could hear her mother’s voice chasing after her, but Andrea did not care. That was enough talk of suitors for one day.
*
“Not you too!”
The groan Andrea let out was almost animalistic. She was thankful they were walking through the woodland area of the grounds where the only ones to hear them would be the animals in the undergrowth.
“I am just saying that you need to find someone soon or people will start to talk,” Lily reasoned.
Her cousin was two years younger than Andrea, but she was already married and had settled into her role as a wife without any trouble at all.
“I remember when you would climb these trees with me and have no issue doing so,” Andrea pointed out.“We would muddy our skirts together and laugh about it for hours.”
“We were much younger, Andrea. Now there is a certain expectation of us,” Lily responded.
“You sound like my mother.”
“I am just looking out for you. There is nothing worse than seeing the way that spinsters are treated by society, it is almost like a joke, except you would be the one people are laughing at.”
“I know what I want,” Andrea said, crossing her arms over her chest as they walked along the forest path. She could not help but reminisce of the times when they would play games and challenge one another to break off from the path as much as possible. Now Lily would not be caught dead off the path, and that was how Andrea knew her friend had changed.
“You want a man who does not exist.”
It was moments like that where Andrea regretted confiding in Lily about Francis.
“I want a manlikeFrancis,” Andrea said, bending the truth slightly.“I understand that I cannot marry a fictional man.”
“Sometimes I am not so sure you do,” Lily said whilst laughing to herself.“The Earl of Shaftesbury is not similar to your fictional man?”
“Not at all, I do not think he could have been more of an opposite.” Andrea scrunched up her face, not wanting to remember the hour of conversation she had endured.“All he did was talk about himself anyway. It was rather impressive since it sounds as though he lives a rather dull life.”
“You mean, he lives the life of an earl?”
Andrea stopped walking for a moment at her cousin’s words. She knew Lily was teasing her to an extent, but Andrea was beginning to get frustrated.
“I can live the life of a countess or even a marchioness just fine.”Andrea’s tone was rather cutting all of a sudden.“But I do not want to be forced into a marriage with a boring man, that is all.”
“What about that man who lives on your parents’ estate?”
“You are going to have to be more specific about that,” Andrea said.“We have a lot of tenants now.”
“The one who is a marquess and staying with you to surely try and get closer to you,” Lily said, a mischievous smile tugging at her lips. The sunlight dappled through the trees and threw strangely shaped shadows across their faces as they strolled leisurely.
“I do not think he’s staying here to get closer to me, he’s been here for years.”
The man in question was James Churchill, the Marquess of Blandford, a man who was kind and friendly to her whenever she passed him. Andrea had never really counted him as a proper suitor, though her mother had repeatedly told her that she should be impressed to have charmed the son of a duke. But James never acted like his title would suggest, he was just a friend and a kind face that she had grown used to whilst roaming around the estate.
“He has written letters to me recently,” Andrea said, looking at nothing in particular in the distance. The forest was thick around them, and it certainly felt cooler under the protection of the thick canopy of leaves than when out on one of the ground’s many lawns.“I do enjoy the way he writes to me, he just seems to have a clever way with words…”
