This wedding might actually happen. Her heart started to beat fast again.
“It is my greatest wish for you to be happily married before you’re too old for it.” Lady Frances didn’t clarify whether “too old for it” meant happy or married. “Anyway, I think you’ll like this one. I hear he’s a handsome creature.”
So Lady Frances hadn’t seen him, either. Jane felt a chill. And with the likelihood of him inheriting the Dudley nose—
Jane recalled the seamstress’s comments about her bust. And the fact that she had unsightly red hair and was so slight of stature that she was sometimes mistaken for a child. Maybe she shouldn’t judge. Looks, after all, should not decide the worth of a person. But that terrible nose . . .
“Thank you for warning me, Mother,” she called as her mother swept out of the room.
Her mother didn’t answer, of course. Too much to do before Saturday.
Saturday. That was four days away.
Jane got dressed quickly. Then she grabbed her book about beets, chose a second and third book (E?ians: Historical Figures and Their Downfall and Wilderness Survival for Courtiers) just in case she finished the first, and headed out to the stables. If this Gifford person was going to be her husband (but a lot of things could happen between now and Saturday, she reminded herself), then she had a right to know exactly what she was getting herself into.
Over the years, Jane had studied every map of England, both historical and modern, and that included more localized maps of the kingdom. And so she knew that Dudley Castle, where the Dudleys resided when they weren’t in London, was a little more than a half a day’s ride from Jane’s home at Bradgate. She could have simply ridden her horse to Dudley Castle, but violence was on the rise in the kingdom and the countryside was reportedly dangerous to travel alone and unguarded. (The household staff said E?ians were responsible for the disorder—some group called the Pack—but Jane refused to believe these awful rumors.) The last thing she needed on top of this sudden marriage announcement was to get caught in some kind of scuffle. So in the interest of safety (and not enraging her mother), she ordered a carriage to drive her to Dudley.
All she needed was to check on the nose situation.
It was a lovely day. The rolling hills that surrounded Bradgate were bright with early summer. Trees were in bloom. Sunlight glimmered off the stream that burbled alongside the road. The red brick of the manor gleamed invitingly behind her on a small rise. Deer leapt away as the carriage rattled along, while birds sang pretty songs.
Jane liked London; there were benefits to staying there, of course, one being close proximity to her cousin Edward. But Bradgate Park was her home. She loved the fresh air, the blue sky, the old oak trees standing on distant knolls. Her grandfather had intended the park to be the best deer-hunting ground in all of England—and it was, so it frequently received prestigious royal visitors, but that hardly mattered to Jane. (She didn’t hunt, though Edward was quite good, she’d heard.) To Jane, walking through Bradgate Park was the second-best way to escape any problem of Real Life.
The first-best way, of course, was through books. So as she left Bradgate behind, she allowed herself to become enraptured by the unabridged history of beets. (Did you know the ancient Romans were the first to cultivate the beet for the root, rather than just the greens?)
Jane, as we mentioned earlier, loved books. There was nothing she relished more than the weight of a hefty tome in her hands, each beautiful volume of knowledge as rare and wonderful and fascinating as the last. She delighted in the smell of the ink, the rough feel of the paper between her fingers, the rustle of sweet pages, the shapes of the letters before her eyes. And most of all, she loved the way that books could transport her from her otherwise mundane and stifling life and offer the experiences of a hundred other lives. Through books she could see the world.
Not that her mother would ever understand this, Jane thought after she finished the last page of her beet book and closed it with a sigh. While Lord Grey had encouraged her studies when he’d been alive, Lady Frances had never accepted Jane’s hunger for knowledge. What could a young lady possibly need to know, she’d often said, besides how to secure herself a husband? All that Jane’s mother ever cared for was influence and affluence. She loved nothing more than to remind people that she was of royal blood—“My grandmother was a queen,” she was fond of saying, over and over and over again. Too bad that the late King Henry had written Lady Frances out of the line of succession years ago. Probably because he just didn’t like her attitude.
Power and money. That was all that mattered to Lady Frances. And now she was selling off her own daughter the way one barters a prized mare. Without so much as asking her.