Free Her Heart's Captain by Elizabeth Mansfield Page A

changed within her . Some innocence that had made things seem light had died, and nothing was the same.
    Perhaps her earlier cheerfulness had merely been childishness. Perhaps this new awareness of the darkness underneath the smiling surface of things was a symptom of adulthood. Was this what was happening to her—was she growing up at last? If that was so, it was really too bad. Life had been more pleasant before.
    Two tears that had managed to rise from her throat trickled down her cheeks. With a quick brush of the back of her hand she rubbed them away. How foolishly she was behaving! Such maudlin self-pitying thoughts were quire unlike her and wouldn’t do at all. She would simply not indulge in them. This was merely a mood, an attack of the vapors, a slight aberration. She would not make too much of it. With a spurt of energetic determination, she jumped to her feet, put on a pleasant smile and went out to join her mother for tea.
    Dulcie Allenby, Lady Rowcliffe, pacing about the sitting room of her lavish London townhouse, was also ready for her tea, but her son had not yet made his appearance. She’d been waiting for him for fully a quarter-hour and was growing impatient. Lady Rowcliffe was not a woman to suffer impatience for very long. With a grunt of decision she turned on her heel, strode to the door, marched down the long hallway to the library and burst in without knocking. There, reclining on the sofa—his booted feet callously resting on the striped satin cushion—was her negligent son, engrossed in one of the dozens of newspapers that were piled in stacks on the floor beside him. “Must you put your boots up on my loveliest sofa?” she asked in mock annoyance.
    â€œSorry, Mama,” Captain Allenby said with a sheepish grin, swinging his legs to the floor and sitting upright. “I’m so accustomed to reading in a bunk bed that I forget myself.”
    â€œAnd did you also forget about tea? I’ve been waiting for you for an age.”
    â€œHave you? I am a beast.” He put the paper down and got to his feet. “Are you completely put out with me?”
    â€œI should be,” his mother muttered.
    He strolled over to her, leaned down and planted a kiss on her cheek. “You’re wishing me back on shipboard, I shouldn’t wonder. It’s better having me at sea than lounging about in your library, upsetting the schedules and muddying up the upholstery, isn’t it?”
    â€œRubbish!” She thumped him affectionately on the chest. Only a bit over five feet tall, she barely came up to his shoulder. “I love having you home, and you know it. You’re probably put out with me for interrupting your perusal of the news.”
    â€œNo, as a matter of fact, I’m not,” he admitted, stretching out his arms and yawning. “There’s devilish little news worth reading in these sheets. Much too much debate about your eccentric Lord Byron’s self-exile, and too much fuss about the Regent’s desire to erect a monument to the Stuarts in Rome. I’m more interested in plans for the new docks, about which I can find nothing, and in what Parliament is doing about repealing the Corn Laws, about which there is precious little. Why don’t the papers stir up some concern about the general distress of the population over the price of grain? There’s very little printed in these tittle-tattle pages about that .”
    His mother frowned at him, all the while adjusting his neckcloth and smoothing his hair (which was just beginning to show a touch of grey at the sides) by standing on tiptoe and reaching up as high as she could. “You sound like a reformist Whig, my love, interested only in the plight of the poor. We rich have our heartaches, too, you know. And ‘my’ Lord Byron is as worthy of your sympathy as any indigent farm worker.”
    Having made her son presentable, she pushed him to the door. He