Cover

Praise for Mimi Matthews

Gentleman Jim

“Tartly elegant…A vigorous, sparkling, and entertaining love story with plenty of Austen-ite wit.”

—Kirkus (starred review)

“Exhilarating…this page-turner shouldn’t be missed.”

—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“Matthews ups the ante with a wildly suspenseful romance.”

—Library Journal (starred review)

“Readers who love lots of intrigue and historicals that sound properly historical will savor this one.”

—NPR

The Belle of Belgrave Square

“Mimi Matthews never disappoints.”

—Jodi Picoult, #1 New York Times bestselling author

“Such tremendous good fun…Julian Fellowes fans will rejoice!”

—Kate Quinn, New York Times bestselling author

“This story unfolds like a rose blooming, growing more and more beautiful as each delicate layer is revealed. A tender, luminous romance.”

—Caroline Linden, USA Today bestselling author

“Mimi Matthews just doesn’t miss.”

—Evie Dunmore, USA Today bestselling author

“A grand cross-class romance, a twisty mystery, and emotional internal struggles combine to excellent effect in Matthews’s effervescent second Belles of London romance.”

—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“An intoxicating, suspenseful romance. Highly recommended.”

—Library Journal (starred review)

The Siren of Sussex

“A tender and swoonworthy interracial, cross-class romance in Victorian London…Readers will delight in this paean to women’s fashion and horseback riding.”

—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“Romance aficionados who love fashion and animals will delight in this tender romance and will be excited to see Evelyn’s friends in future installments.”

—Library Journal (starred review)

“Matthews brings the Victorian era to vivid life with meticulously researched details and an impossible romance made believable and memorable.”

—Booklist (starred review)

“A tender, empowering love story.”

—Shelf Awareness (starred review)

Fair as a Star

“A kindhearted love story that will delight anyone who longs to be loved without limits.”

—Library Journal (starred review)

“Historical romance fans won’t want to miss this.”

—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

The Matrimonial Advertisement

“For this impressive Victorian romance, Matthews crafts a tale that sparkles with chemistry and impresses with strong character development...an excellent series launch.”

—Publishers Weekly

“Matthews has a knack for creating slow-building chemistry and an intriguing plot with a social history twist.”

—Library Journal

The Work of Art

“Matthews weaves suspense and mystery within an absorbing love story. Readers will be hard put to set this one down before the end.”

—Library Journal (starred review)

“Strongly recommended.”

—Historical Novel Society

A Holiday by Gaslight

“Matthews pays homage to Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South with her admirable portrayal of the Victorian era’s historic advancements…Readers will easily fall for Sophie and Ned in their gaslit surroundings.”

—Library Journal (starred review)

“A graceful love story...and an authentic presentation of the 1860s that reads with the simplicity and visual gusto of a period movie.”

—Readers’ Favorite, Gold Medal for Holiday Fiction

The Lost Letter

“Lost love letters, lies, and betrayals separate a soldier from the woman he loves in this gripping, emotional Victorian romance.”

—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“A fast and emotionally satisfying read, with two characters finding the happily-ever-after they had understandably given up on. A promising debut.”

-Library Journal

Dedication

For my mom, who instilled me with a sense of justice.

Epigraph

All human wisdom is summed up in these two words,

—‘Wait and hope.’

Alexandre Dumas

The Count of Monte Cristo

Prologue

Beasley Park

Somerset, England

Spring 1807

Beaten and bloody, Nicholas Seaton sat on the straw-covered floor of the loose box, his legs drawn up against his chest and his forehead resting on his knees. There was no possibility of escape. The doors of the loose box had been bolted shut and the wooden walls were made strong and thick, built to hold the most powerful of Squire Honeywell’s blooded stallions. Even so, Nicholas had wasted the first fifteen minutes of his imprisonment trying to force his way out, slamming his shoulders against the doors and striking out at the walls with all of his remaining strength, earning nothing for his exertions but a fresh set of cuts and bruises.

He’d spent the next fifteen minutes pacing the confines of the loose box like a caged lion, clenching and unclenching his fists, grinding his teeth, and mentally cursing every member of the landed gentry and aristocracy.

“I’ll see you hang for this, Seaton,” Frederick Burton-Smythe had said after driving Nicholas into the loose box at the end of his whip.

And they would hang him. Nicholas was as certain of that fact as he’d ever been of anything in his whole life. Only two years ago a young man no older than himself had been hanged for the paltry crime of stealing chickens from Fred’s father, Sir Roderick Burton-Smythe. To have stolen three priceless pieces of heirloom jewelry from Squire Honeywell’s only daughter, Miss Margaret, was surely grounds for drawing and quartering.

It made no difference that Nicholas hadn’t stolen anything. What good were his protestations of innocence? He was nothing but a lowly groom in Squire Honeywell’s stables. A servant. Even worse than a servant, in fact, for he was the bastard son of Squire Honeywell’s scullery maid, Jenny Seaton.

Jolly Jenny, as she was known, who—before arriving at the kitchen door of Beasley Park eighteen years ago, big with child and begging for scraps of food—had plied her trade at a hedge tavern in Market Barrow. A hedge tavern that had once been a favored haunt of the notorious highwayman Gentleman Jim.

“The mother a whore and the father a villain,” the vicar’s wife, Mrs. Applewhite, was fond of telling anyone who would listen. “Nicholas Seaton will come to no good, you mark my words.”

No. No one would believe he was innocent. Especially when his accuser was Frederick Burton-Smythe himself.

Nicholas and Fred had been enemies for as long as he could remember, but in the past year their dislike of each other had escalated to raw hatred. As usual, Maggie Honeywell was at the heart of the matter.

The thought of her caused Nicholas’s heart to wrench painfully. She was his best friend in the whole world. The one person he trusted. The only person he loved. A blood oath taken years ago had bound them together forever, when at Maggie’s request Nicholas had gamely cut his hand and pressed it firmly against the matching cut in hers. But he needed no ritual to bind himself to Maggie Honeywell. She was everything to him.

Unfortunately, she was also everything to her widowed father, and as the years went by and she began to bloom into a strikingly beautiful woman, she became everything to Fred Burton-Smythe as well.

Sir Roderick and Squire Honeywell had long ago agreed that one day their offspring would wed, thereby joining the two greatest estates in the district—Beasley Park and Letchford Hall. Nothing had ever been formalized, as far as Nicholas was aware, but that didn’t prevent Fred from behaving as if Maggie were already his own personal property. So when he’d come upon her and Nicholas in Burton Wood earlier that day, laughing gaily as they whirled about the clearing in each other’s arms, Fred had seen red.

Maggie hadn’t helped matters. At the best of times she was an impudent minx, and at the worst, a veritable hellion. Raised by Squire Honeywell as if she were his son and heir instead of his gently bred only daughter, she could outride, outhunt, and outshoot most of the young men in the county. Her temper was legendary and she’d learned at her volatile sire’s knee that a profusion of oaths and various threats of violence were the means of solving most any problem.

“Nicholas is helping me practice my dancing,” she’d said in that imperious, toplofty way of hers. “So you can bloody well piss off, Fred!”

And then Nicholas sealed his fate.

He burst out laughing.

On any other occasion, Fred would have charged him, intent on thrashing him within an inch of his life. Maggie would have leapt between them as she always did, verbally eviscerating Fred for attacking someone that he knew very well wasn’t permitted to fight back.

Not that that had ever stopped Fred before.

In Maggie’s absence, Fred had no qualms about cuffing Nicholas on the head and ears, brutally shoving him to the ground, or striking him on the back with his riding crop.

Nicholas was taller than Fred and broader of shoulder, but he was lanky and thin whereas Fred was as stocky and muscular as a bulldog. Nicholas liked to think that in a fair fight he could best his lifelong rival; however, the fights between him and Fred had never been fair, and as Fred was the heir to a baronetcy and Nicholas was a servant, he knew that they never would be.

“Master Fred’s your better, Nick,” Jenny said whenever he appeared with a bloody lip or a newly blackened eye. “You’d best stop provoking him.”

But this time, Fred hadn’t been provoked.

He simply pokered up, and in a fair imitation of his father, Sir Roderick, scolded Maggie for consorting with servants and conducting herself in a manner unbecoming to a young lady. “I shall inform your Aunt Daphne of your behavior,” he told her sternly. “And when your father returns from London, I’ve a mind to speak to him as well.”

And then he turned on his booted heel and strode away, pausing at the edge of the clearing only long enough to lock eyes with Nicholas.

There was murder in his gaze.

“How dared he threaten me?” Maggie seethed an hour later as the two of them lay stretched out on the grassy banks of the stream that ran through Beasley Park. “The jealous arse. Tell my father, indeed. As if Papa would ever hear a word against me.”

“Your aunt would,” Nicholas replied grimly.

Daphne Honeywell, the squire’s widowed sister-in-law, had come to live at Beasley Park only two years before for the sole purpose of turning Maggie into a lady. Nicholas despised the woman. Because of her, Maggie’s days were taken up with needlework and dancing lessons, and her head had been filled with thoughts of balls, routs, and assemblies. Because of her, Maggie no longer wore breeches and rode astride or stripped down to her underclothes to go swimming with him in the lake.

Now she dressed in pretty gowns, made of fabric so fragile and fine that Nicholas feared to touch it, and her thick mink-colored hair, which had once cascaded in a luxurious tumble down her back, was bound up in soft curls and silken ribbons. Even her complexion had changed. Carefully shielded from the sun with parasols and hats, it no longer glowed with a golden tan but had reverted to its natural hue: a flawless, creamy porcelain.

Two years was hardly any time at all, and yet the difference between a fourteen-year-old Margaret Honeywell and a sixteen-year-old Margaret Honeywell was as vast as the ocean.

More and more often, Nicholas found himself staring at his lifelong friend with a peculiar ache of longing in his chest. He’d never liked to be away from her, but now, whenever they were apart, he brooded over her to the point of melancholy.

And that wasn’t the worst of it.

He’d been dreaming about her, too. Vivid dreams that surely no gentleman ever dared dream of a lady.

“Miss Margaret’s not for the likes of you,” Jenny had taken to warning him whenever she caught him sulking. “She’s for Master Fred or some other fine gentleman. Ain’t nothing going to change that.”

Nicholas had never believed it. He and Maggie were soul mates. And yet, as he watched her slow transformation, there were times when he was stricken with an awful pang of sadness, a nagging worry that the day was fast approaching when Margaret Honeywell would take her rightful place in society and be lost to him forever.

“I shan’t stop teaching you to dance merely because Fred and Aunt Daphne object,” Maggie said as they lay by the stream. “I’ve always shared my lessons with you, haven’t I? And dancing is really no different from reading or writing, I feel.”

Nicholas levered up on his elbow and looked down at her. “When you taught me to read, you were seven years old. And we weren’t required to touch each other.”

“Why shouldn’t we touch each other?”

He arched a brow at her.

She only laughed. “What hypocrisy. I’ll wager no one would think it unladylike if I had been dancing with Fred. And he wouldn’t have behaved half as gentlemanly as you do.”

“Wouldn’t he?” he asked, all of his senses instantly alert.

“You know he wouldn’t. He always holds me far too close, and he’s forever staring down at my bosom.”

Nicholas suppressed the now familiar swell of jealousy and rage. The primitive urge to find Fred, and any other gentlemen who dared to look at Maggie, and beat them to a bloody pulp. “If anyone ever so much as lays a finger on you, I’ll—”

“You never do,” she interrupted, a hint of accusation in her eyes. “When we’re dancing, I mean.”

He was briefly diverted from his anger. “I never do what?”

“Stare at my bosom.”

Heat rose in his cheeks. He looked at her a moment, dumbstruck, before giving her a crooked smile. “What bosom?”

Maggie responded to his teasing with a rare blush of her own. At sixteen, she had the beginnings of a figure that promised to one day be as glorious as that of her late mother, a lady who had often been referred to as the Somerset Aphrodite. “Naturally you wouldn’t notice any of my endowments. You’re too busy paying court to Cornelia Peabody.”

“What?”

“Jenny told me so.”

Nicholas scowled. “She wishes I would court one of the baker’s daughters. I daresay old Peabody’s offered to give her a discount on hot cross buns if I take one of them off his hands. Though how the devil either of them think I could keep a wife on less than five pounds a year is a mystery to me.”

“It’s not impossible,” Maggie said.

“No, not impossible.” He affected to give the matter a great deal of thought. “I suppose Miss Peabody could always find employment. Perhaps your father might even give her a job scrubbing out chamber pots up at the main house?” His smile reemerged. “Then there’s the issue of lodging her, of course, but I’m sure she wouldn’t mind living with me in that godforsaken little room of mine above the stable. Cornelia Peabody has always struck me as the sort of girl who longs to set up house in a small, rat-infested cupboard.”

Maggie wasn’t diverted by his teasing. “Then it’s not true?”

“Gad, Maggie, what in blazes would I want with Cornelia Peabody?”

“She’s very pretty.”

Nicholas plucked a dark blue wildflower from the grass and twisted the stem idly between his fingers. It was a forget-me-not. The hearty little flower ran rampant at Beasley Park, decorating the grounds in a wash of blue every spring. The same arresting shade of blue as Maggie Honeywell’s eyes. “So are lots of girls in the village. What does that signify?”

“And, by all accounts, a soft-spoken, well-behaved little lady, even if she is a baker’s daughter.”

He tickled her face with the forget-me-not, drawing its petals along the bridge of her nose, over the bow of her rosy-hued lips, and down to the delicate cleft in her stubborn little chin. “Do you mean she doesn’t go about telling people to ‘piss off’ and calling them ‘jealous arses’ and ‘confounded swine’?”

Maggie snatched the wildflower out of his hand. “I am sure she doesn’t.”

“Then more fool her,” Nicholas said, lying back down on the grass. “Everyone knows high-spirited termagants are the only sorts of ladies I fancy.”

“Such compliments. I believe I shall swoon.”

A foolish grin spread over Nicholas’s face, and as he gazed up at the clear blue sky, he reached out his hand halfway between their two bodies, turning it palm up in unspoken invitation. Almost immediately he felt Maggie’s small, slender hand sliding into his.

“Can you get away tonight after supper?” she asked softly.

He shook his head. “I’m already behind in my chores. I’ll have to catch up this evening if I’m to have any hope of meeting you tomorrow.”

Maggie twined her fingers through his. “Tomorrow, then.”

“Tomorrow, then,” he’d echoed.

Tomorrow.

Nicholas squeezed his eyes shut against the oppressive darkness of the loose box. His chest burned with the effort it took to stave off an onslaught of angry tears.

There would be no tomorrows.

He was never going to see Maggie Honeywell again.

Within the next hour, Fred would return with the magistrate. And then Nicholas would be hauled off to jail. From there, he imagined Fred would see that things proceeded with the utmost haste. The Burton-Smythes had a great deal of influence in the West Country. There would be no delays in judgment, no last-minute reprieves.

How soon would they hang him? A week? Ten days?

Nicholas covered his face with his hands, feeling as if he’d been cast into a black pit of despair.

And then, the sound of creaking wood rent the darkness.

He sprang to his feet, instinctively backing as far away from the doors of the loose box as he could get.

Another creak.

Fred had returned with the magistrate.

Nicholas listened hard, ignoring the sound of his pulse pounding in his veins and the cold sweat that caused his torn linen shirt to cling to his back. Any moment now, the bolt would be thrown open and they’d try to take him.

Would he fight to his last breath?

Or would he go with them meekly and quietly, like a lamb to the slaughter?

He clenched his fists.

There was a soft rap at the wooden doors of the loose box. “Nicholas?” a voice whispered urgently.

Nicholas stood stock-still, not able to believe the evidence of his own ears. “Maggie?”

The bolts slid back and the doors to the loose box swung open.

Maggie Honeywell stood there, the dearest sight in the whole world.

She was wrapped in a red woolen cloak, and her dark hair, unpinned, tumbled about her shoulders in magnificent disarray. She held a lamp aloft in one hand, illuminating her pale, fiercely determined face.

He closed the short distance between them.

She set the lantern on the ground as he approached. And then her arms were around his neck, and Nicholas was embracing her so tightly that he feared he might crush her.

When he at last loosened his hold, she drew back just enough to bring her hands to his bloodied face. With excruciating care, she inspected him for injury, her hands moving lightly from his forehead, to his jaw, to his broad shoulders and chest.

“My God,” she breathed. “What has he done to you?”

Nicholas caught her busy hands and held them firmly in his, preventing her from delving beneath his torn shirt. To his mortification, he felt tears stinging at the backs of his eyes. No one, not even his mother, had ever shown him the tenderness and concern that Maggie Honeywell did. “How did you know where to find me?”

She gave his hands a reassuring squeeze. “Do you remember my telling you that Mrs. Applewhite was coming to supper? Well, Aunt Daphne invited her to stay the night, and after I retired to bed, the two of them must have dipped into the sherry. I could hear them laughing and carrying on all the way upstairs. And thank heaven I did, for when I went down to the drawing room to see what all the noise was about, I overheard my aunt talking about what had happened with you, and Fred, and my jewelry. I came as fast as I could.”

“I swear I didn’t steal anything from you. Fred must have taken your jewelry and hidden it in my room. How else would he have known where to look for it? He wanted to catch me with it. To get me out of your life once and for all. I saw it in his eyes when he found us dancing in Burton Wood. He wants me to be hanged or transported for life, anything to—”

“There’s no time for that,” Maggie said. “I’ve come to set you free. To help you get away before the magistrate comes.”

Nicholas took a step toward her, his grasp on her small, slender hands tightening. “You have to believe me. I’d never steal anything of yours. Say you believe me!”

“Of course I do. And if I thought it would do any good, I’d proclaim your innocence to Aunt Daphne and the magistrate and anyone else who would listen. But they won’t listen to me. You know they won’t. They’ll say our friendship has blinded me to your true nature, or some such nonsense. And then they’ll accuse me of impugning Fred’s honor by doubting his word as a gentleman.”

Abruptly Nicholas let her go, not trusting himself to touch her any longer. “A gentleman. Your future husband, you mean.”

Maggie’s eyes blazed. “Why do you always bring that up? As if I want to marry Frederick Burton-Smythe.”

“Look at what he did to me tonight.” Nicholas drew aside the collar of his shirt, revealing the deep gash of blood running from the side of his neck down to the top of his chest. “I ask you, is this the work of a gentleman?”

Maggie’s eyes widened. “Good grief! Did Fred do that?”

“Who else?”

“But why?”

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