Misleading The Marquis

1 - Gina

My Dearest Georgina Marie,

I received your signature on our marriage contract by proxy this very afternoon. It has made me the happiest of men in the North Country. It is my deepest regret that I Couldn't come to you and marry you in the way that I am sure you would have imagined it, but neither could my heart wait. I will come to you in six months time from now, after the mountain passes are clear once more, and then I shall bring you home, to Brisbane Castle. Your letters this last year have given me life and light when I thought it had passed me by. I will come for you, have faith in it. I will think of you through these coming months, and await the many winters we will spend together yet. Please accept the purse I have included with my messenger - you are now and forevermore, Lady Brisbane Marchioness of Leverford, and I will never neglet to provide for you as such, this I swear.

Lastly, I warn you against those who would doubt me, or my fidelity towards you. I am not the man that I was, because of what you've done. You've brought me back, my darling Georgina Marie. Don't let that be sullied by what others may say.

Even now I dream of your golden hair and saphire eyes. I will see you soon.

Your Husband,

Lord Brisbane, Marquis of Leverford, Count of Istalia, Baron of Rippden

Gina Marie stared into the diritied looking glass of her vanity and sighed at the sight before her. Dull brown hair and equally dull brown eyes stared back. The gray tint of dawn was peaking through the windows, into the tiny attic room her aunt and uncle had forced her into after the death of her grandfather seven years ago. Her cousin now occupied the bedchamber Gina Marie had grown up in, as well as nearly everything else that Gina Marie had once thought none could take from her.

Well, now She'd taken something back.

This was the morning, she was absolutely certain of it. This was the morning the Marquis would arrive. It had been exactly six months and two weeks since the first snowfall at the Turquoise Pass, blocking the Brisbane castle and the inhabitants of the surrounding country from moving down the mountain for the duration of winter. Never had a winter passed so slowly for Gina Marie.

"You're already awake?" came the groggy voice of her bedmate, Louisa Hampton from the small bed they shared in the corner of the room furthest from the draft of the window.

"Couldn't sleep," Gina Marie answered, still staring at the mud brown color of her hair in resigned disappointment.

"You think he is coming today then?" Louisa mumbled sleepily, rolling under the covers as if to savor the very last moments of sleep.

"he is coming today," Gina Marie declared, sitting up straighter and squaring her shoulders, "Today is the day, I can feel it."

"Then you should let me do something with your hair," Louisa smiled at her in groggy affection as she at last swung her legs over the side of the bed.

"Nothing to be done, you know that," Gina Marie frowned sourly at her best friend. Louisa's family had cared for the St. John's since before either girl could remember, and the two were the closest to sisters that anyone can have. Louisa had been Gina Marie's lady's maid up until those seven years ago when her status and everything that could remind her of it was stripped. Now Louisa cared for her cousin, the one who'd also taken the best of the bedchambers, and Gina Marie acted as a kind of furniture piece that was to be present in social situations, but unimpressive and inanimate if at all possible.

"He loves you," Louis promised, coming to take charge of the dishwater hair that fell straight as sin down Gina Marie's back, "You'll see."

"He doesn't know me," Gina Marie protested, that nagging doubt and fear rolling through her belly as it had since she wrote her first letter to Lord Brisbane over two years ago.

"He knows your heart," Louisa protested as she begain to braid Gina Marie's hair into a kind of crown, "And that is all it takes I am told."

"You mean that's all the romance novels say it takes," Gina Marie sighed heavily, though she quite liked Louisa's handiwork on her hair this morning, "Do they have any advice for tricking a stranger into marrying you?"

"More than you'd think," Louisa answered with an impish tug at Gina Marie's hair, both girls laughed. A songbird began its morning regimen from the tree outside their window and Gina Marie felt her shoulders relax if only fractionally. He'd said that he loved her. Sliding open the drawer of their small dressing table, Gina Marie felt blindly alongside the bottom side of the drawer until her fingers curled around the envelope she kept hidden there. Pulling it out again, as she did nearly every day now, she was able to reach inside and retrieve the certificate from the multitude of letters by memory alone.

MARRIAGE CERTIFICATE was typed boldly across the top, and there on the lines beneath, her name rested just adjacent to his... to her husband's.

"Alright Lady Brisbane?" Louisa smirked proudly at her handiwork before going to get dressed herself.

"Today is the day, Louisa," Gina Marie promised once more with renewed faith, clutching the legal document to her chest like a precious doll, "Today is the day he comes for me."