Rivals and Revels (A Regency Romance)

12. The Gift from a Gentleman

The excitement over Hazel's engagement changed to the minutiae of preparing for the wedding, which wasn't exciting at all. Mabel reflected in solitude more often than she cared to. Thinking of heart matters was an ungrateful task. For all the time it took, it yielded nothing but sighs and painful pangs in her chest.

While the novels made suffering appear noble, she found it vexatious if it were anything. Her sensibility stubbornly refused to let go of Everett. It's a terrible foolishness, the reason protested, you must forget him utterly. Her heart just circled back to pick over the night of the ball. What she had said, what she had done, how she could have turned her dismal wooing around by some clever stratagem.

The ruminations didn't stop with the sunset. They snuck into her dreams. Particularly in her dreams! In Morpheus' realm, her dress—not the drab blue, no, a garish scarlet-and-gold dress she had never seen before—would fall off in the middle of a maddeningly fast waltz with Everett. Bare to the waist, she screamed. He only harrumphed and asked, "Why, how many hidden accomplishments do you have, Miss Walton?"

At other times she saw Everett on his knees before her in the inexplicably sunlit gardens of the manor. Only sometimes his handsome face transformed into Radcliffe's. Those were the best dreams she'd had in her life, except when both events mixed and she woke up exhausted, mortified and feverish. Once awake, she flipped through the dream book for different answers than her heart whispered.

The suggestive atmosphere that surrounded her mother and Hazel—the maiden about to be given away in marriage—made Mabel's pining worse. The interrupted threads of their conversations, the falsely lowered eyes and the special embarrassed laughter only teased her curiosity about what could have been if she didn't fumble. Or how her dreams might have ended, if Everett did more than mock her accidental nakedness.

So tormented she became, that she took to standing by the particular window at night instead of sleep, gazing at the stars, but also sweltering inside because beyond the window, if one passed the trees and the field, there was the Border Lake.

Everett was swimming there at dawn, Miss Carter told her once. She contrived that if she could have a glimpse of him, even from afar, it would be easier for her to bear the burden of this hopeless infatuation. Though, of course, it was completely impossible.

Her melancholy didn't escape Mrs. Walton's sharp eyes, but herself being much preoccupied with the wedding matters, she allowed Mabel to visit Miss Carter whenever it pleased her. This was the only thing that cheered her up.

Once, three weeks since the fateful ball, and a week ahead of the first banns being read to announce Mr. Aldington's and Hazel's wedding in the parish church—there was to be three banns' reading in the church, one every Sunday, as was proper—Miss Carter smiled a secretive smile at Mabel when they were alone.

"I have a gift for you, Mabel," she said, "but I cannot hand it over without a warning that you must conceal the truth as to what its origins are from your mother. If such deception bothers you, tell me right away, and I shall send it back, without passing it onto you, and we'll say no more of it."

Mabel stared aghast. It was very obvious that the gift was from a gentleman, otherwise Miss Carter wouldn't have made such a fuss over it.

After being overshadowed by Hazel's happiness and this awful longing for Everett, she craved a token of affection for herself. But to deceive her mother about such a token—whatever it may be—by telling it came from Miss Carter, not from...

She chewed her lip.

Who was her secret admirer?

"It is not from Dr. Berkshire, is it?" While heartbreaking, it would make her decision easy. The man came to dinner with Mr. Aldington for he was to be the best man at the wedding. Unluckily, he took an immediate liking to her, despite lack of encouragement from her.