Page 21 of Better Love Next Time
“Oh. That explains it.” It didn’t.
Though her father was out running his hounds, Kitty looked toward the drawing room’s heavy double doors and lowered her voice. “Will we turn into right bastards?”
“How should we know until we get there?”
“Well, I shall strive not to.”
“Of course you’ll never be hateful. You’ll forever be good-natured.” Georgiana’s smile reappeared, bright white and warm. “You’d befriend Satan himself and transform him into an angel.”
Wasn’t Satan an angel to begin with? “I wish I could transform Julian,” she said quietly.
“Don’t.”
“But why not?”
“He doesn’t deserve you. Or me. Or—or breathing.”
Kitty’s heart kicked in her breast. “Oh, but I shouldn’t wish for him to stop breathing. Perhaps another year and he will change again. Into a kinder person.”
Georgiana waved her off. “Per my father, this is a long phase.”
“How long?”
“Forever.”
Kitty’s face went numb.
“Stop caring,” Georgiana admonished her, planting her champagne flute to the tea table. She yanked down her sleeves. “I must prepare Turk for the hedge. Meet me there tomorrow at eight?”
“Yes.”
Kitty was never going near that monster hedge. Her brother, Shelley, had tried to herd her over it when she was nine, and she had broken her arm. Julian had hidden rose hip hairs in her brother’s bed in retaliation. To watch Shelley itch and scratch in agony had been worth the broken arm.
So why, why has my prince turned into a toad? Forever.
Tears pricked her eyes.
Alone again, Kitty picked up her current book,Clarissa. Her third reading hadn’t softened the ending’s blow. Clarissa, scorned by her family, half-mad with the loss of her virtue, was dead. Robert Lovelace, libertine, was dead. Did a girl really lose her will to live after the loss of her virtue? Was there nothing more to a girl? Did girls not have dreams like Julian’s, to build a fleet of ships, to conquer the seas?
“I won’t be able to sail all my ships,” Julian had said once, sable eyes lost in his dreams, “but I’ll be there. Anchoring in turquoise waters off unknown lands. Firing cannons in battle. Outrunning pirates. And I’ll be the pirates too.”
Kitty had giggled, rolling to her stomach on the summer grass and tickling Julian’s mouth with a lock of her hair. “I want to be a pirate.”
So long ago. Before Eton. Before he had turned into a right bastard. Back then, Julian hadn’t told her she couldn’t be a pirate, that the only thing girls did was create children. He had drawn her in, an arm hooking around her head and smothering her in his coat. Right smack in the middle of his dreams, he had appointed Kitty his second mate and navigator, teaching her the thirty-two points of a compass.Noreast by North raiseth a degree in sayling twenty-four leagues.
Where were her dreams now? What good was knowing that one should reef the sails when running downwind under a storm? To pull a jib when getting out of irons?
Tossing the book aside, Kitty stood, nodding to Harry, the red stag on the wall, who watched her every move. She fled the room to the kitchen. No one noticed her. She nabbed a carrot, two biscuits, and a cup of cold tea. Walking through the garden, past the shrubs in need of tending and the broken fountain with brown water, she halted at the lime tree shading the graves.
“Mama?”
No one answered.
Because they were all dead.
She smiled for her mother. “I brought you your favorite.”
Dropping to her knees, she set down the tea and biscuits and plucked the weeds from Mary Katherine Babbington’s headstone. She kissed the name struck in cold stone. Lying down on her side, as if tucked at her mother’s side, she stroked a rock nestled atop her mother’s grave. Only four days and fresh shoots of grass had already grown around it.
