All I Ever Needed Read Free Page B

1818, London
    Sophie imagined she could hear their laughter. She could not blame the heat of the day for the color that crept into her cheeks. It was their laughter that had done it, just the thought of it. There was something faintly disrespectful in the sheer release of so much good humor. The deep, rolling tones of it, reverberating as they did like a series of cavernous echoes, could garner attention from every corner of a crowded ballroom. It was the sort of raucous amusement that had an energy and boisterousness that quite took a listener's breath away.
    That hard, spontaneous laughter nearly always inspired envy—except if one was the point of it as Sophie imagined herself to be.
    She closed her journal without bothering to mark her place. Writing was not holding her attention the way she had hoped it might, and when it ceased to be a respite, she had learned to put it aside. She laid the journal down, then stoppered the inkhorn and returned her pen to its stand. She idly smoothed the blanket she'd thrown haphazardly across the grass. Sunlight sifted its way through the apple tree behind her and dappled the book's dark green leather cover to give it a spotted emerald hue. She turned her head away and leaned back against the tree trunk, closing her eyes as she had been wont to do since coming to the garden. It was foolish convention that made her think she shouldn't invite sleep out here. Where else, she wondered, was she to find some few minutes of respite if not in the relative privacy of this walled sanctuary? Her own room did not permit her so much peace as this place, not when it was so easily accessible to the children. They were encouraged to seek her out before pressing their concerns on their mother. Sophie was the first to hear about scraped knees and spilled milk and the spider that had crawled under Esme's pillow, compliments of that rascal Robert. It was Sophie's duty to sift through the high drama of their childhood and inform their parents of those particulars that were deemed sufficiently important.
    Today the children were confined to their rooms for the afternoon because of an unfortunate mishap involving a regiment of tin soldiers on the stairwell and the housekeeper's hard tumble from the uppermost step all the way to the first landing. It was Sophie's fault, of course. It did not matter that she was not at home when the incident happened, nor that the reason she was away from Bowden Street was due to her ladyship's insistence that she go immediately to the apothecary for a packet of megrim powders. There was nothing to be gained by pointing out that Lady Dunsmore had not had a megrim at the time she'd sent Sophie out, but merely that she had been in expectation of having one directly.
    Sophie had purposely placed the tin soldiers out of the children's reach because of an earlier unfortunate mishap with the cook in the pantry, but no one speculated on how Robert and Esme had come to have them once again in their possession. Lady Dunsmore did not have the grace to look at all abashed. She dismissed the children to their rooms, dispatched a runner for the doctor, and laid the responsibility for it all at Sophie's feet. Her work done, she retired to her bedchamber with a megrim.
    Sophie breathed deeply of the garden's redolent scents. She supposed she should feel a shade guilty for enjoying the children's incarceration, but she could not quite summon that feeling. It had not passed her notice that she was in some small way answerable for the end to which they had come. She could have, after all, taken Robert and Esme to the apothecary with her. Keeping them in eyesight seemed to be the order of the day—and most days this sennight past. There was no predicting what tricks they might get up to, only that they would inevitably get up to some.
    Even this new penchant they had developed for planning and executing pratfalls among the servants was not entirely their fault. Oh, it was not that anyone had