Page 37 of Twelve Drummers Drumming

Jemima swallowed. Her weeks had been so taken up with Captain Hugh Rotherham there was little else she could say. Though they had not spoken of it, there seemed to be a mutual understanding that they would keep their affections a secret.

But their secret was no secret at all.

“Jemima Fitzroy,” her father said sternly, placing his knife and fork down on the table, and staring at her seriously. “You have a gentleman friend you have neglected to inform me about.”

Jemima sighed. “Perhaps, Papa.”

“Perhaps?”

“Well,” said Jemima, fiddling with the cutlery by her plate. “I am not sure if you are aware, Papa, but in the last five years I have hardly been inundated with offers from young men.”

“Or old men,” said Arthur, who had bequeathed his dry and sarcastic humor to his eldest child.

Jemima glared. “Your rude comments are noted, and unappreciated.”

Her father could not help but smile. “Child,” he said gently, “I think you are fully aware of the reasons why your friends have been taken up the aisle ahead of you. I think your character demanded someone greater than the idiots you constantly met with in the Assembly Rooms, at dinners, and at card parties.”

“Papa!” Jemima’s anger finally escaped its confines. “Your close watch on me has been a humiliation for so long, do you have to be so difficult about a conversation of a man who actually cares for me?”

“Humiliate you?” Her papa looked aghast. “It was never my intention to become a device for mortification! Embarrassment was not a factor I considered present in my protection of you.”

His last words hung in the air.

Jemima, ever aware that at any moment a sister could descend the stairs and discover them, spoke quickly. “Protection?”

Arthur smiled weakly. “My darling girl,” he said gently. “Do you really think I stand around to inspect you, make silence critiques of your appearance, note your mistakes in dancing, and silently comment on your lack of ability to keep a gentleman’s attention during a conversation?”

Jemima blushed. In truth, she had done.

“Do you remember Mr. Jettle?”

Blinking at the change in conversation, she nodded. “He was that young man who we met at the card party General Hillsborough laid on last summer. I did not like him and could not place my finger on the reason.”

“And you are an excellent judge of character,” smiled her father. “Yet, I am not so. It has always been my wish you would choose a young man of great character, but I was…concerned I would not recognize him when you did. And so, I became a student.”

“A…a student?”

“I followed your instinct, and discovered young Mr. Jettle had substantial gambling debts in Brighton.” Her father smiled. “And do you remember Mr. Browning?”

Jemima could do nothing but nod.

“You turned up your nose at him as soon as he laughed at something you said about the war effort costing our country too much. He was caught smuggling brandy a month later, did you not hear?”

Jemima swallowed. “And so, you have watched out for…for all the fools who were uninterested in me, and I had no desire to know better?” Jemima’s words were full of wonder, her eyes unbidden filling with tears. “And all of this time, I suffered under the belief that you were noting my own errors.”

“Errors?” Her father blinked and took his daughter’s chin in his hand. “I do not think you have made an error, certainly when it comes to gentlemen since you first came out into Society—and I do not say that lightly.”

Jemima stared at her father in amazement. “You know, Papa, I think there is still much that I have to learn about you.”

Arthur laughed kindly. “My dear, I think you will have little time to do it as Mrs. Rotherham.”

“Rotherham,” Jemima whispered. “Rotherham—Captain Rotherham. You think he cares for me? Truly?”

Her father nodded, a sad sort of smile on his face. “Captain Hugh Rotherham. Commended in dispatches for his bravery in France, from a good family with a good stable income, well-respected in both my club and his own, and…and I suspect, the owner of my daughter’s heart.”

Jemima’s mouth fell open.

“Now child, you forget yourself,” her father said quietly. “You are so like your mother. I wish that you could have known her. The older I see you grow, the easier I find it to understand you, for you explain yourself just like her, every feeling that passes through your heart displayed on your face in an instant. When she…when she died, I was inconsolable. I think I clung to you as though you could keep me afloat in a strange world, now it did not contain my beloved wife.”

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