Only a Promise Read Online Free PDF

be a relief to everyone who loves you,” she said. “Oh, dear, I have come to the end of my ball of wool and have no other ready to go.”
    Chloe, who had just wound the last strand onto the ball, got to her feet.
    “I have one here ready for you, Your Grace,” she said, crossing the room with it held out in the palm of her hand.
    “Oh, how very thoughtful of you, dear,” Her Grace said. “And you have been sitting far from the fire to wind it, have you? Come closer and have another cup of tea to warm you up. Though I fear what is left in the pot must be cold. I wish it were not. I would not mind another cup myself.”
    “I shall ring for a fresh pot,” Chloe offered, moving toward the bell rope and having to pass very close to the earl on her way there.
    He was looking at her, she saw when she raised her eyes briefly to his. He appeared slightly surprised, as though he were only just realizing that he was not alone in the drawing room with his grandmother.
    Just thus must all ladies’ companions, paid and unpaid and unacknowledged, waft through their lives, she thought ruefully—unnoticed, invisible for all intents and purposes. But she was not going to sink into the dismals again over
that
sad fact.
    And if she did not like her life as it was, she had thought this afternoon, then she must simply change it.
    Ha!
Simply.
    Her life had seemed impossible to change this afternoon. It still did this evening.
    But nothing, surely, was impossible.
    Apart from all the things that were.
    *   *   *
    The sun was showing its face from behind a receding bank of clouds the next morning when Ralph’s valet drew back the curtains from the window of his bedchamber before disappearing into his dressing room. Two fine days in a row and this one perhaps even sunny? Though it was early yet. It might still rain.
    Before it could or did, though, he shaved and dressed and went downstairs. There was no sign of either of his grandparents. He had not expected there would be. He was not hungry. He would wait for them. In the meanwhile, he wandered into the morning room, which was flooded with sunshine, facing east as it was. He found the French windows already unlocked and ajar, a fact that ought to have alerted him. He pulled one of them open, stepped through onto the terrace, and stood looking across the freshly scythed expanse of the east lawn to the river in the distance. He drew in a deep breath of fresh air and released it slowly.
    He had not slept well. He had kept waking himself up from dreams that were not exactly nightmares but were bizarre nonetheless. He could remember only one of them, one of the more coherent. He had been in a ballroom he did not recognize, a room so long that even with a telescope he doubted he would have been able to see the far end of it. Along its full length, stretching to infinity, was a line of young ladies, all dressed in ballroom finery, and all of them plying a fan, though they were otherwise motionless. And he was marching with slow deliberation along the line, clad in his scarlet, gold-faced officer’s dress uniform, inspecting them, his mother on one side, Graham Muirhead in full clerical robes on the other. It was
not
one of those dreams that defied interpretation, though why Muirhead of all people should have popped into it he could not imagine.
    Ah. And then he could.
    He became suddenly aware of a flutter of movement off to his right and turned his head sharply to see Miss Muirhead standing a short distance away, bonnetless andclutching the corners of a shawl to her bosom, presumably to prevent it from blowing away in the nonexistent wind. He felt instant irritation. She had overheard that very personal conversation he had had with his grandmother last evening and had not had the decency either to clear her throat to remind them of her presence or to leave the room. He had been quite unaware of her, as one tended to be unaware of servants. Though she was not a servant, was she? She was