Read Online Jennie About to Be by Elisabeth Ogilvie - Free Book Online Page A

Charlotte quivered in her arms, a bundle of fine silver wires.
    â€œYou know Mama! She’ll have the wedding all planned out by tomorrow morning! May I be your bridesmaid, Jennie? Please? Has he kissed you yet? What was it like?”
    â€œYes, you may be my bridesmaid,” Jennie said. “No, he hasn’t kissed me yet.”
    â€œNot even when he proposed?”
    But he didn’t propose to me, Lottie, love. His mother did . There were warning signs of a fit of giggles, and she was afraid it would completely take her over if she allowed it. She said solemnly, as if announcing a death, “The park was really too public.”
    â€œOh,” said Charlotte in disappointment. “I should like to be proposed to in a forest glade or in a garden; at night, with moonlight and a sweet smell of flowers, and a nightingale.”
    â€œPerhaps it will be so for you, my darling,” said Jennie. “Now go to bed before your mother catches you, or Mrs. Coombes.”
    â€œNanny is snoring,” said Charlotte, “but you’re right about Mama. She’ll think I’m feverish and dose me again.” They kissed good-night, and she went out like a ghost in her childish white wrapper.
    Alone, Jennie sat on the edge of her bed, shivering but not from cold, because a fire burned in her grate. She felt as if she’d been snatched by the great third wave, whipped around, beaten, half-strangled, half-drowned, and then tossed up on a foreign shore: the great Eugenia Hawthorne, who’d sworn to take charge of her own life. The simple ecstasy of seeing Nigel come into a room, of hearing his voice, of being in his arms when they danced, or of riding with him mornings in the park—it was all gone, stolen greedily by their elders. They hadn’t had one kiss—even little Lottie was astonished by that—and already their future had been taken out of their hands, as someone would remove a precious object from a baby’s fingers.
    And if I wanted anyone, she wept, it wasn’t a soldier any more than a curate!
    The Blues seemed safe enough, as part of the household cavalry, but how could you be sure of anything? She’d heard the talk, some of it from him, of young men pulling all possible strings to be transferred into a fighting regiment. “Keen as mustard, those chaps. All cock-a-hoop to go fight Boney under Wellesley, you know. Dev’lish fine soldier.”
    Why hadn’t she the courage to ask him then if he was keen as mustard and all cock-a-hoop to go?
    I’m engaged to a soldier , she thought, engaged by his mother and my uncle. And he could be killed fighting Bonaparte, and they’ll have made me a widow before I’ve been married a year. Everything will have been arranged for me, even that .
    She cried herself to sleep. Once she awoke and muttered drunkenly, “I want none of it, not even Nigel.” She fell asleep again, comforted by the knowledge of her gold sovereigns. She would need them when she was cast out for her ingratitude.
    But when they had the garden to themselves the next morning, even though she knew the children were staring down from the nursery windows, the simple ecstasy came back; it wasn’t soap-bubble fragile after all. They kissed in a dark, shady nook between sooty laurels and the wall. A far cry from Charlotte’s moonlit glade with a nightingale, she told him, and they laughed against each other’s lips, and kissed again. It was as if she had always known how; the difficulty was in making themselves stop. . . . And perhaps he did not want to go and fight; how could a man want to make love and war both at the same time? If England were attacked, that would be different, but this Wellesley didn’t need Nigel to defend Portugal and drive the French out of Spain.
    She didn’t ask him; she only hoped. In the meantime they were given the leeway allowed an engaged couple, in between his duties and her visits to