Teresa Grant Read Free Page A

veins he can’t be completely sanguine.”
    “I am quite sure that he isn’t.” Suzanne glanced at the dance floor. A quadrille had just begun. The nearest set was made up of two young lieutenants partnering a blond girl in white and a brunette in pink. The soldiers were laughing as though they hadn’t a care in the world.
    Suzanne took Georgiana and Aline by the arm and steered them to an ivory damask bench against the wall.
    “Have you thought of leaving?” Georgiana asked as she sank down on the bench, her eyes wide and candid. “Going to Antwerp or even back to England?”
    England. An alien land Suzanne had only visited once and to which she only belonged by marriage. She touched the younger girl’s arm. “It’s not as though there’s a great deal waiting for me there.”
    “It’s Malcolm’s family’s home.” Georgiana cast a glance at Aline. “They’d look after you.”
    “Yes, the Rannochs and the Dacre-Hammonds could be counted on for that.” Aline settled the peach muslin folds of her skirt. “At least some of us. But no sense pretending it’s easy living among the English ton, Georgy. Goodness knows I’ve never felt I properly belonged, and I was born one of their number.”
    “Are you thinking of leaving, Georgy?” Suzanne asked.
    Georgiana shook her head. “My parents wouldn’t dream of it, with Father in command of the reserve forces and my brothers in the army. But the Mertons and Grandisons have left. Does Dr. Blackwell want you to go home, Allie?”
    Aline snorted. “Geoff knows better than to tell me what to do.” Her cool, dark gaze turned serious as it settled on the young soldiers in the quadrille. “I didn’t marry a military doctor to sit across the Channel wondering what would become of him.”
    “But you’re going to have a baby. And Suzanne already has one.”
    Aline touched her stomach, nearly flat beneath her embroidered muslin gown, as though she still couldn’t quite make sense of the fact that she was pregnant.
    Suzanne saw her son’s bright-eyed face when she’d kissed him good night before they left for the party. “Colin was born in the midst of a war, and Malcolm and I dragged him across the Peninsula. Perhaps it was selfish of us to have kept him with us, but he seemed to thrive on it. I often think that’s why he sleeps so well through the night. He’s used to being jolted over rough roads in an ill-sprung carriage with musket fire in the distance.”
    Aline’s gaze moved from the young lieutenants in the quadrille to a group of riflemen talking on the edge of the dance floor. “The French aren’t monsters if it comes to that. Even if we’re taken prisoner, there’s another seven months before my baby’s born. And more of a chance Geoff will be here to deliver it.”
    Georgiana shuddered. “How can you joke about it?”
    “Difficult to do much else,” Aline said, her smile sharp with irony.
    “I’m sorry.” Georgiana pushed a light brown ringlet behind her ear with an impatient tug. “I’m all right most of the time. And then I look at my brothers and Lord Hay and our other friends—”
    Suzanne squeezed Georgiana’s shoulders. “We’re all frightened, Georgy. We just have different ways of showing it.”
    Georgiana smiled. “Where’s Malcolm? He’s always so wonderfully sensible.”
    “Hiding out in the library I suspect,” Suzanne said, shutting her mind to images of the danger her husband might be in. “I got one waltz out of him and count myself fortunate.”
    “I saw you dancing. I’d give a great deal to have a gentleman look at me the way Malcolm was looking at you. I wish—Good heavens!” Georgiana exclaimed. “I didn’t realize she’d come to Brussels.”
    “Who?” Aline asked, looking round the ballroom.
    “Cordelia Davenport. By the door with Caro Lamb. They’re great friends. Not surprisingly, they share a penchant for scandal. But I wouldn’t have thought Lady Cordelia would dare show her face