The Earl’s Mistletoe Bride by JOANNA MAITLAND

her—
    ‘Miss Beth! Miss Beth, wake up!’
    She screamed.
    ‘Miss Beth, wake up!’ A cold cloth was put to her brow and held firmly.
    She groaned and tried to open her eyes. Hetty was hovering anxiously, mopping Beth’s face. It was after dawn. There was light coming through the shutters, blessed light that Beth could see. The tunnel had gone.
    ‘You have one of your sick headaches,’ Hetty said flatly. ‘I will tell Mrs Aubrey and then I will make your peppermint tea.’
    ‘Hetty, don’t tell Mrs—’
    Hetty straightened and shook her head. ‘I have to, Miss Beth. You can’t possibly teach the children when you are in such a state.’ She nodded towards the basin on the floor. ‘I know you sometimes hide it when it’s only the headache, but you can’t hide this. Mrs Aubrey will want you to stay in bed until the sickness has gone. And you know it’s for the best.’
    Beth tried to protest. She began to push herself up, but it was more than she could manage. The nausea threatened to overcome her again. She sank back on to her pillows and willed her stomach to behave.
    ‘Lie still and breathe deeply,’ Hetty said gently. ‘I’ll be back with the tisane in two shakes of a lamb’s tail.’ She tried to smile encouragingly and then whipped out of the bedchamber.
    Chastened, Beth did as she was told. She had nochoice. Until this attack subsided, she was not going to be able to do anything. Except think.
    She had promised Jonathan she would do it. For the Aubreys, he had said. But when he was holding her hand, when they were touching, skin to skin, she would have agreed to anything he asked. She was being a fool, all over again. She had berated herself before, for thinking of him as her silver knight. Now she was thinking of him as a man—a living, breathing, desirable man—which was even more idiotic. He could be nothing to her. He was a great nobleman. She was a foundling with no past, not even a name of her own. If the terrors of her dreams were even half true, she had done something wicked in her past life, and her present sufferings were probably a just punishment.
    Perhaps the dinner at Fratcombe Manor was part of that punishment, an ordeal she had to undergo in order to be cleansed? That thought was oddly calming. The pounding in her head was even beginning to recede. It was a sign.
    She was going to have to find a way of meeting, and enduring, the trial to come. It was her only hope of overcoming the demons that haunted her.
     
    It was late afternoon when Jon strolled into his mother’s sitting room in the east wing of Portbury Abbey, his principal estate. She always sat here in the afternoons, to avoid the sun, she said, which was ruinous to a lady’s complexion. Since Jon had returned from Spain as brown as a nut, she had stopped adding that the sun was ruinous to a gentleman’s complexion, too.
    ‘Jonathan! At last! I had almost given you up!’
    He came forward to kiss her hand. ‘Good afternoon, Mama. I hope I see you well?’
    ‘Tolerably so, my dear.’ She patted the place by her side, but before he could sit down, she said, ‘Have you ordered tea? No, of course you have not. Ring the bell, would you, dear?’
    Nothing had changed. His mother was well-intentioned, but she did have a lamentable tendency to treat her sons as though they were still in short coats.
    He crossed to the empty fireplace to pull the bell. How long would it be before she drove him to distraction, all over again? He had told her he planned to remain at the Abbey for three weeks, to deal with estate business, but he had barely set foot in the place before he was wondering whether he might need to create an urgent summons back to the peace of Fratcombe. It was yet another reminder of the duty he had been trying to ignore. If he wanted to reorder this house according to his own lights, rather than his mother’s, he had to find himself a wife. This time, however, he was determined that the wife would be a lady of his