Adelaide Whitmore's Arc

Chapter 1 of 1

Adelaide Whitmore had danced with the moonlit lord once, last winter, and she had thought of little else since. He had blonde hair and a silver circlet, and he had bowed to her under the ballroom's high windows. Then he was gone, back to his castle across the moat. Now she wanted to marry him. The trouble was simple. She knew his single dance and nothing more. She sat at her writing desk in Westwood Manor and stared at a blank card. A marriage suit needed a plan. A plan needed knowledge. She did not know his favorite flower, his sister's name, or whether he liked her at all. To approach him now would be to approach a stranger. He would see it in her face. Her aunt swept in without knocking. She was a broad woman in gray silk, and she smelled of the rosewater she wore to every wedding and funeral. She dropped a folded paper on the desk. "Stop mooning and read," she said. "You've the look of a girl who wants a prince and won't say so." Adelaide's cheeks went hot. "I said nothing." "You didn't have to. I've watched you sigh at the window since the ball." Her aunt tapped the paper. "That is an invitation. His household holds a garden reception at the castle. Three days from now. Anyone of standing may attend." Adelaide unfolded it. The card named the castle by the moat, the one with red and blue towers rising over a yard of flowers. Her heart jumped, then sank. "I can't go," she said. "I don't know him. I'll stand in his garden like a fool and have nothing to say." Her aunt sat down heavily. "Then you learn him before you go. Not by staring at a card." She leaned close. "His late mother planted every flower in that yard. He walks the beds each morning and names them. The gardeners talk. Servants always talk." Adelaide set down the invitation. "You knew his mother." "I knew of her. That is enough to start." Her aunt rose. "Go early. Walk the flowers. Ask a gardener which bed the lord loves best. Then you are not a stranger. You are a woman who shares his grief for the same garden." Adelaide gripped the card. For the first time the goal had a shape. She would not arrive empty. She would arrive knowing one true thing about him, and she would let him find her among his mother's flowers. She called for her blue and white dress to be pressed. She would go two hours early, before the other guests, and find a gardener who would talk. But that evening a second note came, sealed in white wax. The lord's household had learned her name from the guest list. His steward wrote that the lord remembered their dance, and requested a private word at the reception. Now she had less time than she thought, and no idea what he meant to say.