Outshine Read online

  Garvis would ensure Miss Lovejoy remained found.

  The woman in question shifted her feet on the pavement below, craning her neck up at the house next door.

  Another knock sounded.

  “Come.”

  Collins entered with his normal polite fastidiousness.

  “Shall I have the carriage brought round in an hour, my lord? You are still engaged to attend Lady Haversham’s salon, are you not?”

  Daniel controlled his involuntary flinch at the thought of Lady Haversham—vivacious, widowed and over ten years his junior . . . every nobleman’s dream.

  She merely made Daniel feel old.

  That did not change the fact that he was committed to attend her intellectual soireé this evening. Lady Haversham fancied herself something of a scholar and attracted the best minds to her salons, particularly mathematicians. It had seemed prudent to attend.

  “Yes, Collins. Please have the carriage brought around.” Collins nodded and left the room.

  Of course, the broadsheets would read more into his attendance, assuming he was looking for a wife who would, in turn, provide him with an heir for his new title. He would be thirty-eight in only a few short months, and he needed an heir, not only because he was Lord Whitmoor.

  No, it was decidedly more than that.

  Through a twist of fate, Daniel knew himself to be his own eighth great-grandfather. It was a baffling time travel paradox that he was sure sent theoretical physicists into a collective frenzy. But as he hadn’t yet faded into nothingness—à la Back to the Future—his present course must be the correct answer to the problem.

  A hackney cab pulled up to the curb, the driver dismounting to open the door for Miss Lovejoy. She turned her head around as she climbed into the carriage, pausing to survey the front of his town house one final time, bonnet hiding her eyes but framing the elegant oval of her face.

  She shook her head. Once. Twice. As if . . . what?

  Pivoting, she disappeared inside the cab.

  Part of him screamed in horror that she was leaving, that he was allowing her to leave. His salvation walking away.

  But he was Whitmoor. He had vast reserves of patience to call upon. Garvis would hunt her. Daniel would persuade her.

  The driver climbed back onto his perch and drove off. A moment later, Garvis swung onto the street from the mews, discreetly shadowing the slow moving carriage.

  Daniel watched until the cab disappeared around the corner.

  Why had she shaken her head? And more to the point, why did he care?

  But the conundrum of Foster Lovejoy would not leave his mind.

  Her clever wit haunted him all through the soireé that evening, pinging around his skull as he half-listened to conversation about the East India trade and recent developments in South America.

  He found himself thinking about the fleeting fire in Miss Lovejoy’s eyes and the graceful curve of her jaw as he attended the theater and danced at Lord Follet’s ball.

  He considered Miss Lovejoy’s keen intelligence as he gave his maiden policy speech as the newest member of the House of Lords. Would she agree that child labor needed to be curtailed?

  However, thoughts of Miss Lovejoy turned to desperation a week later as he wandered his enormous townhouse, unable to sleep and clutching a well-worn wooden box to his chest.

  Promise you will keep it for me. Don’t forget.

  Guilt roared through him, turning the edges of his vision black, leaving him gasping for air.

  He needed to find redemption.

  Miss Foster Lovejoy and her mathematical wizardry had to be the source of his salvation.

  He would accept no other outcome.

  Chapter 6

  The road to Kilminster

  Dorset, England

  July 26, 1828

  Lord Whitmoor’s words would not leave Fossi alone. They rattled around her brain, lurching side-to-side with every jolt and dip of the poorly-sprung mail coach.

  Within you is a woman of incredible mettle and verve.

  She contemplated this as she bounced a crying toddler on her knee so the exhausted mother to her left could sleep. Did Lord Whitmoor truly think that? Or had he merely been attempting to manipulate her into helping him?

  She was inclined to think his words carefully calculated. Lord Whitmoor said and did nothing without first assessing all possible options, and flattery was an effective weapon.

  When you finally let that woman free, please return to me.

  Well, there was no danger of that. Even had she wished to return to Lord Whitmoor—which she didn’t, she truly didn’t—she had used every farthing of her meager savings for this trip. Another was out of the question.

  The child on her lap finally fell asleep, snuggled warm against her chest. Fossi relished the physical comfort of holding him.

  Sometimes Fossi thought that was the worst part of being an aging spinster. No one held you. No one touched you. Physical contact was rare.

  So Fossi clutched the toddler tight, drank in the measured rise and fall of his breathing, the heavy warmth of him. Mourned, yet again, the children and husband who would never be hers.

  That is a woman who could turn the world on its head.

  Fossi grimaced at the remembrance.

  Flattery, indeed.

  Fossi would never be anything more than her current circumstances. Women such as herself had very few options. And were she to lose the love and support of her father and siblings . . . well, that would reduce her options to practically zero.

  She didn’t need to be a mathematical genius to understand those odds.

  But . . . Fossi was an intrinsically honest person. Too honest, perhaps, at times. And so, because of this, she held Lord Whitmoor’s words up to the mirror of herself, rotating them, looking at them twenty different ways.

  Was she merely existing instead of living?

  It was an oddly unsettling thought. She had never considered there to be a difference between the two.

  Dreams had never been part of her inner landscape. Hope played strongly into dreams, and hope had always been in short supply in her life, particularly over the past sixteen years.

  Unbidden, Fossi’s throat tightened and her heart plummeted at least a hundred feet.

  How odd it was . . . that the pain of her mother’s death was ever fresh. The wound that never healed.

  Sixteen years without Charlotte Lovejoy’s kind voice and gentle persuasion. Sixteen years without the light and laughter of her mother’s intelligent mind, whether teaching Fossi the Italian of her maternal grandparents or showing her a new embroidery stitch.

  Sixteen years without her best friend.

  Remember your name, Foster.

  Her mother’s last words to her. Fossi had crept to her bedside when the rest of the house had finally fallen into an exhausted sleep. Her mother’s face etched with pain in the flickering candlelight. So frail.

  “Remember, my Fossi,” she whispered. “It’s what you were sent here to do—Foster Love Among Us. Never forget.”

  Fossi blinked furiously, stifling the rawness in her chest as the carriage rocked over a large rut. She looked past the sleeping child in her arms and the child’s mother slumped against her shoulder. Beyond the lady’s maid who couldn’t stop talking to the handsome cooper across from her, out to the countryside creeping along. She bit her lip, trying to swallow back all this . . . feeling.

  Such emotion would do her no good.

  Lord Whitmoor in his gilded palace risked nothing and asked her for everything. He played with them all, considering her simply one more pawn on his giant chessboard.

  The man could take his secrets and games off to another playground.

  Her life was fixed. Her father had made that excruciatingly clear over the years.

  Just take her involvement with the Society of Mathematicians as an example.

  Her eldest brother, Will, had been the first to bring the Society to her attention. Will was brilli
ant himself and had become a King’s Scholar, being granted a scholarship from the Crown to pursue his education. Will had passed that education on to his eager little sister with every school break.

  As they grew older, Will continued to help Fossi find an outlet for her mathematical ideas. This led, eventually, to Will putting her in contact with several members of the Society of Mathematicians that he knew from university. Though he now worked as a solicitor in Kilminster near their home, Will continued to act as a liaison between Fossi and the Society.

  Fossi’s father had caught wind of her involvement with the Society several years ago. After ranting about them for several days, he had (erroneously) assumed that Fossi wanted nothing to do with the Society and had let the matter drop.

  As he hadn’t technically forbidden Fossi from being involved, she continued to write and interact with members. But should her father find out how deep her involvement was, he would forbid any further contact.

  Employment with an aristocrat doing sums? Such unladylike behavior would send Reverend Josiah Lovejoy into an apoplectic fit. Her father would consider her immoral and fallen and disown her, her brothers and sisters following his lead. Once Lord Whitmoor’s employ ended, she would be cast out into the world.

  The only thing worse than a poor, aging, clever woman was a poor, aging, clever woman without familial connections. It was the only place, really, she had left to sink.

  And Fossi would prefer not to end up in that place before absolutely necessary.

  Such were Fossi’s thoughts as she finished her journey, transferring at dawn from the mail coach to the stagecoach and then a kind farmer’s wagon before alighting at the crossroads before Kilminster. She took her leave with a wave and trudged across the fields, arriving at The Old Vicarage just before dusk.

  Her father had purchased The Old Vicarage when her mother yet lived. As its name implied, the building had once been home to the local vicar, but the old church had burned down over a hundred years before, around the time of the Glorious Revolution. A new church and vicarage had been built across town, set picturesquely along the riverbanks. All of which left The Old Vicarage sitting alone next to crumbling, vine-covered ruins and an ancient graveyard.

  The building itself suffered from a crisis of identity. Former tenants had added on to its Tudor framework in a jumbled fashion, extending a gable here, adding a room there. The end result, of course, was a building that looked like everything and yet nothing.

  Smoke curled from the back chimney and threaded through the drooping branches of an enormous willow planted against the back fence. Two of her nephews wrestled with their dog in the garden—Prudence’s boys, which meant her sister was about as well.

  “Aunt Foster!” The high-pitched squeal came from the front door. “You’re back!”

  Two hurtling bodies collided with Fossi on the walk. Two more nieces and a nephew joined in from the front door, Strength’s children. Her brother must be here too.

  “Rapscallions,” she said fondly, rubbing their heads and dragging them all toward the house.

  Prudence appeared at the doorway, bouncing another baby in her arms. “You made it home.” Prudence handed off the child to Fossi. “It’s about time. We expected you at luncheon.”

  “I am sorry for the delay, Pru.” Fossi managed a polite smile, holding the baby close. “Though four coaching horses can roughly pull eight-times their individual strength, that does not correlate to faster travel, unfortunately. Force and speed are not, in the end, interdependent—”

  Fossi stopped right there.

  Prudence rolled her eyes. “Honestly, Foster, you say the oddest things.”

  Her sister whirled back into the house.

  The other children pushed past Fossi into the entryway. Dimly, she heard Prudence yelling at the kitchen maid, Betsy, to mind the children. Sucking in a fortifying breath, Fossi smiled down at the baby trying to stuff his entire fist in his mouth. Like the rest, he didn’t notice or care that her smile was strained.

  “Foster!” Her father’s voice boomed from the direction of his study. “You will attend me. I have been waiting to dictate my sermon these past few hours.”

  Home was never perfect, Fossi had long ago decided.

  But at least it was home.

  The Old Vicarage

  Kilminster, Dorset

  August 1, 1828

  The next few days passed in a blur.

  Fossi settled back into her usual routine . . . waiting on her father’s needs, transcribing his sermons in her confident hand, assisting Betsy in the house, tending nieces and nephews, ministering to others in their small congregation—Mr. Tally’s rheumatism, the birth of Mrs. Brown’s tenth child.

  And, slowly, her blessed state of numbness returned. Lord Whitmoor’s accusations retreated to mere background hum.

  Well . . . usually.

  Snippets did manage to punch through at the most inopportune moments.

  Such as when she sat listening to one of her father’s sermons and, instead of thinking upon the parable of the Good Samaritan, Fossi found herself occupied with the steely exterior Lord Whitmoor presented to the world. What would he look like if he was being amiable? Would she have been charmed by him?

  She spent the better part of a next afternoon quietly singing an Italian ballad that denounced the dangers of roguish men.

  Lord Whitmoor crept into her thoughts one evening as she worked on another variation of Monsieur Fourier’s Series in her small bedroom. How had Lord Whitmoor known about her work?

  She sat back, surveying the small space with its even smaller window, a narrow bed pushed against one wall, her tiny desk against the other. It seemed impossible that someone had stolen into her room and made copies of her notes.

  But, clearly, someone had.

  Was the spy a person she knew? Or was the agent more covert, entering her room through her little, paned window? She vacillated between feeling horror over her privacy being thus invaded and admiration for the Crown and its espionage abilities.

  The next day, as she crossed fields with a basket for Mrs. Brown and her brood, she wondered if Lord Whitmoor thought of her at all after her abrupt departure. There were a great many brilliant mathematicians in England, most of whom would leap at the chance to rub elbows with a man of Lord Whitmoor’s consequence. After her little tirade, Lord Whitmoor had probably relegated her to the shelf in his mind reserved for annoying insects and other tiresome things.

  The thought left her . . . restless.

  Finally, because she was in all things truthful, she admitted that she felt . . . unmoored. Untethered. Lord Whitmoor had shaken things loose and Fossi struggled to set them back to rights.

  Nearly a week after her return, Fossi found herself in her father’s study, transcribing yet another sermon, forcing down that itchy sense of energy and unrest.

  “Will that be all, Father?” Fossi asked, setting down her battered pen and stretching her cramped fingers. Her knees wanted to bounce with agitation.

  Her father stirred from his chair, standing to his full height and tugging down his black coat. Though his hair and beard were nearly entirely gray now, Reverend Josiah Lovejoy still projected the vigor of a much younger man, his dark eyes keen and perceptive.

  He picked up the sermon she had finished writing out from his dictation, surveying her work. “It will do, daughter. Did Mr. Miller say he would be joining our services today?”

  “Yes, Father. He seemed inclined to come when I spoke with him two days ago.”

  “Excellent. Has he ceased his acquaintance with Sir Peter Nobly?”

  Mr. Miller and Sir Peter had long been friends, much to her father’s dismay.

  “On that point I am unsure, Father.”

  Her father grunted, his expression a usual mask of malcontent.

  Josiah Lovejoy had left the Anglican church when Fossi was still an infant—claiming disillusionment with the fawning secularism in how the clergy interacted with the aristocra
cy. Her father had found similar minds in the strict teachings of Congregationalists, which led him to establish his own church. Fossi’s mother had brought a small monetary settlement into her marriage and between that, tutoring young men and what his parishioners could spare, Reverend Lovejoy kept a roof over their heads and clothing on their backs.

  “Well, I shall speak with Mr. Miller about it again.” Her father flicked a hand, dismissing her from his study. “I will see you during our evening worship service.”

  Her father tilted his cheek, a subtle demand for a kiss, which Fossi dutifully placed before bobbing a curtsy and retiring to her own room for a short rest.

  But the jittery energy wouldn’t let her rest.

  Finally, she admitted a single truth. In one thing, Lord Whitmoor was correct.

  She needed to demand more from her life.

  Not so much dreams, per se, but merely a sense of expanded expectations.

  To that end, Fossi pulled out a clean sheet of foolscap from her small writing desk and, picking up her pen, scratched a title—Things I Wish to Do. From there, she began to write. Her list of things was reasonable, if somewhat ambitious.

  Purchase new shoes for my nieces and nephews.

  Acquire a new pipe for Father.

  Pay for repairs on Faith’s cottage.

  At this point, she paused. She supposed the purpose of the list was to note things she wanted to do for herself.

  To that aim, she added a few more items:

  Go on a spring picnic.

  Ride in a well-sprung carriage, perhaps even a curricle or a high-perch phaeton.

  Flirt with a gentleman.

  She paused on that one. Flirting with a gentleman presupposed she knew how. Which, clearly, she didn’t. She would need to ponder it more.

  Attend a ball.

  Dance with a gentleman.