Page 3 of Twelve Drummers Drumming

“It is as I thought,” said Jemima. She breathed out slowly and pasted a smile onto her face. “Do not fret about me, Arabella,” she said softly. “I truly am happy for Caroline, especially as Dr. Walsingham seems to be such a gentle and kind young man.”

Arabella looked at her sister shrewdly. “You cannot hide your true feelings from us, you know.”

“I know.” Jemima tried to rearrange her face so that the smile she had put there looked more genuine. “But I can from him. Walsingham. I have no wish to offend Caroline’s beau.”

Arabella shook her head with a smile. “Ever since I can remember, you have not been one for hiding your emotions!” Her smile became more serious. “I do not think that you need to marry in order to please Papa.”

Jemima shook her head. “Then why does he speak of it so often, and so forcefully? Why does he always insist on accompanying me to any occasion which I have been invited to, encouraging me to speak to every young man in attendance?”

It was mortifying. Jemima shivered at just one recollection of their attendance at the Halls’ only last week. His insistence that she dance with every gentleman there—it was scandalous!

She would gain a reputation if he were not careful.

“I truly believe he only wants you to find a husband.”

“And what if I do not want a husband?” Jemima challenged, keeping her voice low in a whisper so no one, save Arabella, could hear her.

Arabella blinked. She was the one sister Jemima ever confided in, but that did not mean Arabella often understood her elder sister. “Not…not want a husband?”

Jemima sighed and placed her hand gently on that of her sister’s as words failed her.

Was she the only Fitzroy, she wondered, that looked beyond marriage and looked at the world? Looked at the fighting that had torn France asunder—did no one mark the mentions of the dead in the newspapers?

“Forget my words, they were ill-spoken,” she said quietly. “As the eldest child of our Father and your mother, you are the most comfortable in this family, and you are our natural peacemaker.”

Though it was more, Jemima thought. Arabella’s serious temperament, paired with her genuine love of her sisters, almost always placed her in the center of sisterly trouble.

“Perhaps. You have not smiled truly since the announcement,” Arabella said in an undertone.

Jemima swallowed. Blast Arabella and her careful notice of others. Though welcome at times, this was not one of them. “Caroline and I are the same age, almost to the day. I am but a month older, and this closeness has forced an unspoken competitiveness that she cannot help but crow over me!”

“You allow yourself to be driven to irritation on almost a daily basis,” returned Arabella, softly. “It is not Caroline’s fault she is more frequently invited to card parties, or to dinner—nor if she is more frequently missed if unable to attend.”

“Yet in her first week, she elicited the smiles and compliments I did not in my first Season.”

At the age of one and twenty, Jemima had suffered through five Seasons.

Most of her peers, those who had stepped out into Society in 1808, were carrying their second child for the men they had been encouraged to marry, yet she had not even received one offer.

Even Esther, who was nineteen, and Lucy who was a mere sixteen, had attracted more attention than she had.

Now Caroline was to be married.

Arabella’s eyes flickered over to the other side of the room and saw Caroline laugh, throwing back her head so her long neck gracefully tilted. “In Caroline’s defense, she seems unaware of comparisons, regardless of who makes them, between you two. She has never striven to better you. I have heard her on more than one occasion encourage young men of her acquaintance to talk with you, dance with you, spend time with—”

Another laugh from Caroline muffled Arabella’s voice, and Jemima laughed darkly. “Oh yes, completely unaware.”

Where did it come from, this petty jealousy? Jemima hated it, hated herself for seeing it. But always being compared: not as pretty as Caroline, not as witty as Caroline, not as charming as Caroline…

Sophia was jesting with their father about the different wedding clothes their sister was to buy for her trousseau.

“And a fisherman’s smock, obviously,” said their father in a deep serious tone, Sophia in fits of giggle beside her. “Where will our Caroline be without her ability to catch trout?”

Despite herself, despite her absolute denial to her father that she should marry at all, Jemima flushed with shame.

Within a year or two, she would be considered too old to marry at all, and her chances of finding anyone would have disappeared.

It was not that she was without beauty or elegance or character or even wealth! She knew her dowry from her mother was substantial. Six thousand pounds was not a sum of money to be sniffed at.

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