Page 18 of Twelve Drummers Drumming

That morning at breakfast she had volunteered herself to her sisters, as she was going to the center of London to pick up a pair of gloves. They had gone in to be mended, and she was now in dire need of them due to the impending engagement ball.

Jemima had, foolishly, not expected the flurry of desperate requests from her sisters, but she had written them all down dutifully.

“I would go myself, except—”

“Lord, if you could save me the trip—”

“You’ll have enough time, won’t you?”

It was only now she looked down at the piece of paper that Jemima realized she had just promised away the majority of her day.

Yet, with five sisters, it so often was. She did at least care about her sisters.

They were Fitzroys. They stood together, no matter what occurred.

She retired upstairs just long enough to gather up her reticule and her pelisse, as she would certainly need to protect herself and her cardinal red gown from the raging wind that had blown through London all morning.

Before the eleventh bell had been chimed by the parlor clock, she was out into the streets of London once more.

It took over an hour to locate the perfumery Arabella had insisted she visit.

Two more stops were required to ensure Esther and Lucy’s shoes were adequately re-soled in preparation for the countless dances they anticipated in Bath. Strict instructions had been left that their dancing shoes were to be sent on after them, for their patience had worn out, and they had left for Bath without them.

Jemima thought about her sisters wistfully as she waited in the short queue in the cobblers. Bath. She had never enjoyed a Season there. Her father was one of three brothers, and the middle son lived in Bath.

To be in such a place all year round! Jemima had heard her cousins complain about visiting London, which she supposed was only fair, but there was so much to enjoy and see in Bath that one never saw here.

A short venture into a patisserie—all the rage in London, despite the war in France that raged mere hundreds of miles away—meant that by the stroke of one by the church clocks, Jemima had completed the one task given to her by Sophia.

By now, the hem of her gown was brown and sticky with mud and other unidentified things she had accidentally trodden on during her journeys. It was not a particularly favorite gown, but Jemima could already imagine the look of quiet disappointment that would sweep over her stepmother’s face when she returned home.

Someone knocked Jemima’s elbow so hard, she accidentally dropped all the bundles that she was carrying, save one, straight into the road.

“God above!” Jemima cried, forgetting she was not in the private confines of her family. “Is being careful a commodity now, to only be purchased by those who consider it a basis of civility?”

She swung round to face the person who had caused her to drop the majority of her day’s toil into the mud, just as a gentleman said, “I apologize most profusely, I really do—”

The gentleman stopped speaking just as Jemima’s mouth fell open.

“Captain Rotherham,” she said weakly.

It couldn’t be him, Jemima thought wildly. It must be a trick of the light or a man that looks very similar to him.

But no; she saw, with a wrench in her stomach that felt like happiness though she was not entirely sure, that it was indeed him who had unceremoniously fallen on her the week before.

“Miss Fitzroy,” Captain Hugh Rotherham said, his voice strange and full of apology.

He was wearing his uniform once more, but he had managed to get the mud and water stains from their first encounter out most admirably—a trait no doubt, thought Jemima, learned on the battlefield.

His hair was still just as wild, and Jemima smiled just to see him before her.

Here he was, in the flesh, no figment of her imagination at all.

But Captain Rotherham was still speaking, and she attended more closely: “I am so heartily sorry for my mistake, you must forgive me—”

“No, no!” said Jemima hurriedly, seeing at a glance that Captain Rotherham’s crutch had come loose under his arm, which was surely the reason for the nudge on her elbow. “I did not mean to be so rude—well, I suppose I did but had I known that it was you—”

Captain Rotherham was barely heeding her words; instead, he was leaning down as far as he was able, desperately trying to rescue her parcels from the street before they were run over by a passing carriage.

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