Apologies for those of you waiting with bated breath for WLMC... upload to follow with the next day or so. xxx
Chapter Three
Sebastian Bartholomew Weatherly could count the number of life-changing events he had experienced on one hand.
One of them sat dejectedly on a bench placed against the base of a large rectangular window that looked down upon the entrance of Weatherly House. Her molten red hair caught aflame as it glistened in the golden sunlight streaming in through the panes. He had never seen the like before despite his young years and he marvelled briefly at the extraordinary hue of it. It reminded him of rubies or the soft velvet of the draping in the gallery. Vibrantly deep, it came alive when the sunlight danced across her crown, hanging in one thick braid down her small back.
Over the past two years he had been vaguely aware of some child living with them, suddenly a part of the Weatherly family, but he hadn’t paid her much attention, so mired in his own churning grief that he could scarcely remember to feed himself. But now that he stood awkwardly on the precipice of manhood, his responsibilities had sullenly been laid out before him and that included the ward he had unwittingly inherited. A ludicrous notion there never was for the child appeared terribly young and he not much her older. How was a boy of thirteen to care for a girl of, what, six?
He gave his dark head a little shake as he studied her silently from where he stood at the bottom of the staircase, his hands at his sides. Her gaze was riveted to the streets below, watching intently for something or someone. A golden thread illuminated the contour of the cheek that was turned slightly away from him in iridescent light, illuminating her with an ethereal quality that moved the very core of his foundation. Nothing about her seemed grounded in reality- from the brightness of her hair to the creaminess of her skin, to the way in which she poised in a pool of shimmering mid-afternoon light.
If Sebastian recalled correctly, the young girl he had seen often in exactly the same position, keeping silent sentinel, day after day as he made his usual descent to breakfast or lunch. Casting a glance about the entranceway, Sebastian also noted that there was, oddly, more furniture than usually required in the area, which denoted that some form of entertainment or socialisation occurred here. Odd, that it was in the open hallway where one wouldn’t usually receive guests and Sebastian frowned at that. The furniture was arrayed in such a way that it did not interrupt one’s passage from the front door to the staircase or down the hall towards the first floor parlours and drawing rooms. Indeed, the couches, settees and tables had been pushed against the walls and coordinated in such a way that should one wish to sit, one could do so and converse with the young girl in the window… should one wish to do so.
Sebastian blamed Sophie for this stroke of insanity.
However, despite all this, he felt a sharp tug at his heart at the sight of her. Over the last few years he’d never paid much attention to her. In fact, he could scarcely remember her name, and upon further scrutiny, he came to the conclusion that she looked quite sad. It was evident in the way her shoulders slumped or inherent in her overall inner mood which seemed so prevalent he could sense it from across the hall. An even sheerer need to reach out to her beckoned him and he could hardly quell the urge to make himself noticed.
Sebastian cleared his throat.
The girl turned her head slowly, her wide-eyes swivelling and settling on him with an intensity that knocked the breath right out of his lungs. Her eyes were vividly green, decidedly striking against a fair complexion like hers and such potently bright hair. Hair like rubies and eyes like emeralds, he thought with more than a bit of awe.
“Hello, Sebastian,” she said in a small, beguiling voice.
Well, despite the fact that he hardly knew who she was, she certainly had an idea about who he is. “Hello…” Blast, what was her name? Emma? Eloise? Emily! “Emily.” He smiled with the satisfaction that he’d managed to recall it correctly and she returned his grin, albeit for different reasons entirely.
“Has grandmamma sent you?” she asked, again in the delightfully young and beguiling voice.
“Uh. No.”
A momentary flux of confusion washed over her face, but then that smile was back in place. “Oh. Do you need something?”
“No.”
“Oh.” Thoughtfully, the child considered him with a curious little tilt of her head before gesturing to the cushion beside her on the bench. “Would you care to join me?”
He hesitated imperceptibly as his mind struggled to come to a firm decision, but then his reluctance dissipated and he forgot about his initial purpose of coming downstairs in the first place (to locate his grandmother for some or other reason). Swiftly, he strode over to her and placed himself on the cushion she had previously indicated. “What are you looking for?” Sebastian asked her when her gaze swivelled instantaneously back to the street outside.
“My mother,” Emily responded swiftly.
“Really?” He glanced to where her gaze was fixed on the crowds of finely dressed people that were making their rounds and daily calls. “When did she say she would come?”
Emily was quiet a long moment before languorously dragging her green gaze away from the people she was watching and focused on him with a small frown puckering the skin between her eyes. “Two years ago.”
And although Sebastian was young, he was not unaware that the girl had been lied to merely to appease her child-like comprehension. Her words were spoken softly and in a dejected tone of wry disbelief, which severely indicated to him, at least, that she was well aware that her mother was indeed not coming, but she was yet not prepared to abandon her post at the window. After a moment, he said to her, “You know she isn’t coming back.”
Those glorious eyes of her suddenly filled with moisture and he instantly regretted his words. He thought the tears would spill, glinting like liquid crystals as they coursed over the curve of her fair, freckled cheeks and cling to her sooty lashes as dew would to grass come the early hours of morn. They never did come, though, and her chin lifted up a notch in the air with an inner strength and composure that astounded him. She was very young and very little, yet she displayed such outward courage… it seemed quite impractically unnatural, unthinkable. “I know,” she murmured. “I’ve known for a long time, you know.”
“Then why do you still watch for her?”
Those small shoulders lifted in a negligent shrug and Sebastian instinctively knew she was trying to negate from the weightiness of her next response. “Hope.”
It was one simple word yet its effect on him was nearly devastating. Hope- the one thing he was devoid of, yet this tiny slip of a girl embraced it despite being abandoned, despite being thrown in with a domineering fool of a grandmother and a distantly aloof young duke who hadn’t spoken more than two words to her since her arrival at Weatherly House. “Hope?” he repeated incredibly. “You mean you hope your mother will come for you?”
“Yes,” she told him guilelessly. “Don’t you hope your parents will come for you?”
“My parents are dead.”
The flatness of his voice made her cringe and then she smoothed her countenance and pinned a look of sympathy on her face that made his heart swell painfully in his chest. “I’m sorry,” Emily said contritely, laying her ridiculously petite hand on his arm in a soothing gesture. “It must be very hard for you.”
Hard was an understatement. If she knew of the nightmares, the blackness that would often swamp his mind, she would phrase her words more appropriately. As it was, Sebastian struggled with the images, fighting back the darkness that hovered at the edges of his subconscious, threatening to overwhelm and engage, rendering him motionless and contorted with agony. He’d been too young, too affected, and he should never have walked into his father’s study the day he had decided to insert the barrel of his pistol into his mouth and pull the trigger. As the memories began to overcrowd his mind’s inner eye, Sebastian knew he was no match against their strength and the resentment that always followed, leaving him bleak and desolate, incapable of human contact, reasonable thought and pleasantries.
“Would you like to play cards?”
Her voice came to him as if from a great distance, beckoning the shadows away and filling the darkness with light. It took him several moments to shake off the weight left by those images, by his emotions, and focus blurrily on the image of Emily emblazoned in shimmering golden light: an angel. An small, tiny angel, bequeathed with a mane of magnificent red hair and eyes as green as new spring grass after the first rain, armed with purity and hope to lighten the dark recesses of his mind and battle his demons with the simplest offer of a game of cards.
“Would you like to play cards?” she asked again, an auburn brow slanted cheekily above one emerald eye, as if she thought him quite silly and frivolous for losing concentration as he had done so. “We can play them here on the bench. That way we don’t have to move and I can still watch for my mother. You can help, of course. Do you want me to tell you what she looks like so you can recognise her if she does come?”
His throat felt raw, so he nodded quickly, jerkily. Lately, his voice had been doing strange things, as if it couldn’t quite decide between a husky, masculine baritone and the sweet notes of a high soprano. Mostly it would just emerge as an embarrassing croak that alternated between octaves, undecided. His valet had said it would pass and that it was his transformation from boy to man occurring, but that didn’t negate from Sebastian’s overall discomfort with the prospect. On top of his voice, his overall gawkiness seemed to make him clumsy and oafish. His limbs seemed too long and knobbly and he felt very skinny, but lately he had very little appetite. His eyes had a certain prominence in his face and his nose appeared oversized, attaining to a certain ugliness that he hoped he’d outgrow. Not that it mattered- Sophie had said the Weatherly men were handsome as sin, despite unappealing characteristics of their youth. She had said he’d outgrow all of this and that he was destined to be London’s most notorious rake, whatever that meant. Sebastian suspected it had something to do with ladies.
A lady like the one in front of him, sheathed in gold and smiling benignly while she summoned a deck of playing cards and fondly recited the general appearance of the mother she had lost two years ago. Although Emily was scarcely more than a babe, Sebastian tingled with the awareness that she would indeed make a fine lady, maybe even one day she could be his lady, when he was the notorious rake his grandmamma seemed to think he’d be.
Quietly, Emily began to dish out the cards for each of them, unaware that she was creating a pattern for them both to follow until the day she made her debut. For whenever Sebastian felt the shadows beckon, he’d only have to wander downstairs and find her, always on the very same bench by the large rectangular window that overlooked the street, and without preamble Emily would offer him a game of cards. Of course their interactions became more sporadic once Sebastian was sent to Eton for his studies and then to Oxford in his later years, but still he’d indulge in her company when he visited.
Another one of these momentous occurrences that could be classified as life-altering in Sebastian’s books was when she made her debut several years later, and then their interactions nearly stopped completely.