CHAPTER ONE

London, 1810

"Oh, Nicky."The Honorable Miss Eleanor Sheridan sighed. "I would give anything to be an orphan, like you. You are so lucky."

Miss Nicola Sparks, far from taking offense at her friend's remark, looked thoughtfully at her own reflection in the great gilt-framed mirror before them. "Aren't I, though?" she agreed.

Eleanor's mother let out an indignant harrumph. "Well, I like that!" the Lady Sheridan said as she handed a pile of Eleanor's undergarments to the girl's French maid to pack. "I'm terribly sorry your father and I have been so unobliging, Eleanor, in not perishing in a more timely manner."

Eleanor, who stood behind Nicola at the dressing table, examining her chestnut brown curls in the mirror with the same critical eye Nicola was applying to her glossy black ones, rolled her eyes.

"Oh, don't be tiresome, Mama," Eleanor said. "You know I don't wish you and Papa dead. It's only that lucky Nicola gets to pick from a horde of invitations where she'll go now that school's finished, while I have no choice in the matter at all. I've got to spend the rest of my life —until I'm married, in any case —with you and Papa and wretched Nat and Phil."

"I can arrange for you to spend the rest of your life with your great-aunts in Surrey," Lady Sheridan pointed out dryly, "if our household is so offensive to you. I am sure they would love to have you."

Eleanor's hazel eyes widened, and she spun from the dressing table to face her mother. "Surrey!" she burst out. "What in heaven's name would I do in Surrey?"

"I'm sure I can't say." Lady Sheridan closed the first of her daughter's many trunks, then moved to the second. "But I can promise you'll find out if you don't start showing a little more sense. Nicola, lucky to be an orphan, indeed!"

Nicola, roused by this remark from an examination of her new, upswept coiffure —the first she'd ever been allowed by Martine, her own very strict French maid, who did not believe it was proper for girls younger than sixteen to wear their hair up —turned around on the tasseled stool upon which she sat, and said to her friend's mother with some gravity, "But I am lucky, Lady Sheridan. I mean, it isn't as if I ever actually knew my parents, so you see, I cannot miss them. They died a few months after I was born. And though their deaths were tragic, at least they perished together…."

"So romantic," Eleanor said with a sigh. "I hope that when I die, it is like Nicky's parents did, drowning in the river Arno after a sudden storm."

"And though Father hadn't any money to speak of," Nicola went on calmly, as if Eleanor hadn't spoken, "he did leave me the abbey, which provides me with some income —not much, of course, but enough for a maid and school and new lace for a bonnet now and then, anyway."

Nicola turned back toward her reflection, which, though by no means the prettiest one at Madame Vieuxvincent's Seminary for Young Ladies —Eleanor surely had the distinction of being the most beautiful girl at school —no one, with the exception perhaps of Nicola herself, would dispute was anything but pleasing. Nicola found the fact that her nose bore traces of a powdering of freckles, left over from an injudicious river expedition the summer before with neither hat nor parasol, a dreadful shortcoming.

Still, freckles notwithstanding, she was forced to admit, "So really, Lady Sheridan, Eleanor is right. I am lucky. At least I have been, up until now. What shall happen to me next…" Nicola bit her lower lip, and watched in the mirror as it turned a deep scarlet. Rouge was strictly forbidden at the school —as, unfortunately for Nicola's freckles, was powder —and so the girls were forced to resort to pinches and bites if they hoped to achieve the effect of blooming health, though Nicola, with her ivory complexion and ebony lashes and hair, usually managed quite well without such tricks. "I haven't the slightest idea. I suppose now that I'm finished with my schooling, I shall be blown about by life, like a thistle in the wind."

"Well, if you should ever tire of being a thistle," Lady Sheridan said, shaking out one of her daughter's sadly crumpled shawls before handing it to Eleanor's maid, Mirabelle, to press between sheets of tissue, then fold into the trunk before them, "you are always welcome to stay with us, Nicola, for as long as you like."

"As if she would want to," Eleanor cried, turning away from the sun-filled window she'd gone to stand before. "Why, Nicky's had invitations to come and live with some of the richest girls at school! Sophia Dunleavy's asked her. Oh, and Charlotte Murphy. Even Lady Honoria Bartholomew's asked her. Her parents have a town house on Park Lane, and Lady Honoria's got her own curricle… not to mention an entire wardrobe copied straight from the fashion plates of La Belle Assemblée, just for her first season out. And her father's an earl —the Earl of Farelly —and not a measly viscount, like Papa."

"Good Lord." But Lady Sheridan was not, as one might have thought, commenting on the grandness of Lady Honoria Bartholomew's lineage. "I can't imagine what Lady Farelly could be thinking, inviting a girl like Nicola to stay during her own daughter's first season out. The woman must be mad."

Nicola, hearing this, felt her eyes suddenly fill with tears. Why, Eleanor had been her most bosom friend through their years together at Madame's! How many holidays had Nicola spent at Sheridan Park? How many weekends had she passed at the Sheridans' London home? She had always rather fancied that kindly, comfortable Lady Sheridan looked upon her as a second daughter.

So why on earth would she ever say such a thing?

"A girl like Nicola?" Eleanor, much to Nicola's gratification, was quick to rush to her friend's defense. "Why, Mama! What a thing to say! And right in front of Nicky, too!"

But Lady Sheridan only looked annoyed. "For heaven's sake, Eleanor," she said in her no-nonsense way. "I only meant that Lady Farelly must not have the sense God gave a goose to invite a girl as pretty as Nicola to stay at a time when her own daughter —who is no picture, mind you, for all her money —will be angling for a husband."

Nicola realized that what she'd thought to be an insult of the worst kind had actually turned out to be rather a nice compliment. So she blinked back her tears and, feeling a rush of affection for her friend's mother, leaped from the tasseled stool and ran to embrace her.

Copyright © 2002 by Meggin Cabot