Free Today's Embrace by Linda Lee Chaikin

before she told Rogan, she simply couldn’t. It wasn’t fitting. Had the doctor let it slip? He had said he wouldn’t, but Evy did not underestimate the wiles of Mrs. Tisdale, or Lady Elosia, for that matter. Had Mrs. Tisdale roused her curiosity? Evy knew the questions Elosia would ask her in the coach should her curiosity be aroused. “
Ah? Expecting, girl? Hmm? So soon!
”
    Mr. Bixby opened the door. Evy squared her shoulders and gazed up into the coach, where Lady Elosia was seated.
    Into the lion’s den.

C HAPTER F IVE

    Clouds, gray and drooping with rain, were swirling over Grimston Woods. The wind growled and chilled Evy with unfriendliness. She placed her foot on the step, and Mr. Bixby handed her up into the shiny black coach drawn by two Chantry horses of white and speckled gray.
    As she entered the coach, taking the seat across from Lady Elosia, Evy spied her face, as unsmiling as the autumn weather, and noticed her age showed more than usual, though a generous sprinkling of corn-powder had been applied. Evy thought the powder didn’t help. When a woman was older, her face should be painted more moderately, she thought. She liked Lady Elosia, and had even when a young girl, but there was no denying that she was an intimidating woman, even perhaps forbidding.
    Large-boned and nearly six feet tall, Elosia was what Evy thought of as “ferociously elegant.” Today she wore a satiny black skirt and white blouse with leg-of-mutton sleeves with cuffs and collars trimmed with some kind of fur. She’d been lectured while growing up not to try to hide the fact of her height, but to show pride. She wore her shoulders thrown back with a challenge that dared comment and looked as though she used a backboard when sitting. Her hair was her crowning embellishment—an unusual gray-gold.
    Lady Elosia had chosen not to marry. Rogan once spoke of a bittersweet romance that went afoul in her past. It was difficult for Evy to understand her motives, but it appeared Elosia found purpose for herlife by wielding authority, a miniature Queen Victoria over Grimston Way and Rookswood. She was, for all practical purposes, the real squire in the village, for her younger brother, Sir Lyle, had gladly yielded most matters over to her after the death of his wife.
    And that, thought Evy, precipitated a situation in which she might be perceived as a dark moon rising. Evy was in line to be mistress of Rookswood when Rogan eventually became squire after the death of his father. Perhaps Elosia envisioned the authority entrusted to her to be headed toward the lamentable throes of decline.
    Evy settled herself on the plush leather seat, adjusting her hat and slipping off her riding gloves. In the close quarters she turned her face to the side to avoid looking directly at Elosia.
    With a little lurch the coach started down the tree-shadowed road.
    â€œA dreadful afternoon to be out riding,” Elosia stated, glancing Evy over as though she’d had something nefarious to do with the approaching storm. “I’m surprised you’d permit yourself to be caught in it. I don’t know how Rogan has adapted to the insufferable weather in South Africa. Dreadful heat, I’m told; insects, too. Most disturbing. I can’t see why he wishes to return to that dreaded land. It must be your insistence on meeting your mother’s Boer relatives. Dr. Jakob van Buren, I believe is his name?”
    Evy tried to ignore the slight to her mother’s family. “Dr. Jakob is a medical missionary. He was acquainted with Robert Moffat and his Kuruman mission station.”
    â€œBoth fine gentlemen, I am sure, but with your spine you are hardly capable of following such mighty footsteps. Far better, if you simply must urge Rogan to the Dark Continent, to stay in Capetown and visit Arcilla.”
    It would have been fruitless to point out that it was Rogan who chartered his travels to South Africa and had