Caprice: The Masqueraders Series - Book One Read Free

nerves.
    Only then did she remember the note she had begun composing earlier in the day. The remembrance brought a mischievous twinkle to her eyes, giving her handsome face the radiance of a lady half her forty-four years. Childless herself, she had reared her motherless niece, Clarissa, from shortly after she was born until the girl was old enough to travel to her father, a major general posted on the Spanish Peninsula. That was six years ago, and she had not seen the girl since. Yet she had expected that Clarissa would come back to England and her after the deaths of her father and her new husband during Wellington’s victorious battle at Vitoria the previous summer. The fact that Clarissa had not had wounded her deeply.
    Yet she suspected that some outsized sense of duty had led Clarissa to choose to spend her mourning year with her husband’s parents, and so had not tried to dissuade her from her decision. But now the matter was as clear as glass. She needed to be cajoled from her present distemper. Who better to do it than Clarissa?
    Of course, there would be the girl’s formidable conscience to be dealt with. There were still two months left in her mourning year.
    Heloise went to her desk and picked up her pen. After consigning the first note to the wastebasket, she began scribbling another. When she was done, she dipped her fingers into the porcelain vase of flowers at the corner of her desk and flicked a few drops of water onto the letter. The words spotted and ran as though tears had been shed upon them. She did not stint at the deception. Extreme times called for extreme measures. Clarissa must come home to England.
    Isle of Jersey, April 1814
    The brass bells of milch cows clanged melodiously in the bright spring air as a boy herded his father’s prized Guernseys single file across the verdant island meadow. Soft breezes rising from southern currents ruffled his hair, reminding him of the warm, drowsy summer days soon to follow. In the distance the granite cliffs fell steeply away toward the mist-blue surface of the sea. At the cliffs edge stood the familiar sight of a lady known to all as Lieutenant Evelyn Willoughby’s “English widow.”
    The boy paused a moment in admiration. The morning breeze tugged at her silk bonnet and the elegant black frock she wore, begging an observation of her slender figure and graceful carriage. In this rustic setting, she looked as out of place as a thoroughbred set in harness to plow.
    Unaware of her admirer, Clarissa suppressed a sigh as she stared northward over the silver-backed Channel waters toward the unseen coast of England. She had chosen to live on this isolated island for the past ten months, and she was now ready to admit that she had made a mistake.
    Clarissa bit her lip. She had been fond of Evelyn, but the news of his death had brought her not only sadness but also guilt. She had obediently wed her father’s choice of husband, expecting to become a proper and dutiful wife. If only her unusual looks had not set up false hopes in Evelyn, they might have had a better marriage, brief though it was. Like her father and uncle, she had inherited the Holton dark exotic attractiveness. But unlike them, she had wanted no part of the family heritage that long before her birth had made the name Holton synonymous with all that was spirited, gifted, reckless, and debauched.
    Until her marriage, she had dreaded love, sensing that would unleash in her the very thing she had always feared: the Holton strain of “wildness.” Yet marriage with Evelyn had not done that. Now with his death, she was left with less than before: the aftermath of needless anxiety and a nagging sense of failure.
    Clarissa lifted her chin suddenly, meeting the chill sea breeze defiantly. She could face the truth. The truth was she had been unable to adjust to marriage or to Evelyn’s expectations. Nor was she better suited to the sober life of her Jerseyman in-laws. Her father-in-law, a simple country