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“Yes, my father has mentioned him to me. He died there, didn’t he?”

He seemed impressed that she should know the name. “Yes. It is most unfortunate. He was still quite a young man. But in the short time he had, he accomplished an astounding amount, including translating the Scriptures into many languages and dialects of the region. His will be a legacy of long duration.”

“He must have been very dedicated.”

“Yes, all of the missionaries over there are—they and their wives. Many have perished.” He cut a slice of his meat. “I would still be there if not for the recurring fever.”

“I’m sorry,” she said in a polite tone, although her spirits were sinking the more he spoke.

“I’m sorry, rather, to be boring you. I hadn’t meant to go on about being a missionary.”

“You weren’t boring me.”

His lips curved upward. “Your scowl suggested otherwise, unless it is something on your plate.”

She glanced down at the slices of roast beef on her plate. They were done to a turn, small roasted potatoes and onion beside them. “Everything looks delicious.”

“I am relieved. So, it must have been the conversation.”

She met his gaze, noticing the striking color of his eyes. His irises were a pale slate blue ringed in a deeper midnight blue. “No, it was not the topic of conversation. It was just that for a moment you reminded me quite forcefully of my father.”

He quirked a pale red eyebrow upward, but rather than explain, she picked up her fork and knife and began to cut her meat. It would do no good to attempt an explanation, since she didn’t fully understand it herself. All she knew was that she was dissatisfied with the life she had led up to now in her sheltered vicarage.

“You do not get along with your father?”

“I get along splendidly with my father.” That much was true as far as it went.

“Your tone of voice did not suggest a compliment.”

“It was neither a compliment nor insult. It was merely an observation.”

“I see.”

Out of the corner of her eye, she watched him chew his meat.

Unwilling to pursue the topic of her father, she took the moment to turn to her other dinner companion. He was a middle-aged gentleman who was eating with relish. As if sensing her attention on him, he wiped his mouth with the napkin tucked into his collar. “Delicious roast. Lady Marfleet has the best table in Mayfair.”

“Yes, it is delicious,” she agreed and took another bite to show her agreement.

In a lull in the conversation around her, a distinct female voice reached her across the table.

“The Parisian citizenry has welcomed Napoleon with open arms.”

“Silly frogs,” the man beside her muttered in a tone of disgust. “You would think they’d had enough war.”

Sir Geoffrey directed his words to the lady. “Louis certainly proved his mettle, turning tail and sneaking off to Brussels.”

The company around them laughed.

Knowing that Rees was on the continent, Jessamine had been following the news of Napoleon’s escape from the island of Elba a few weeks ago. The newspapers had filled everyone with alarm as they predicted what he would do with the remnant of his loyal soldiers.

“Knowing Wellington is in Brussels should reassure Louis no matter how hot things get in Paris. Louis knows there is no better man if things come to war,” the man beside her said in a loud voice.

Another guest raised his fork and pointed it at them all. “I wager Napoleon is going to attack the Allies before they attack him.”

The lady exclaimed in horror, “Is he mad? He can have no troops left!”

“The French are a rabid lot—all glory, regardless of how few men he has left. Napoleon is a madman,” Sir Geoffrey said in disgust.

“I’ve heard the troops sent out to arrest him dropped their arms and joined him as soon as he appeared in France,” the lady said.

“Fools!” harrumphed the man beside Jessamine. “They deserve him!” He put a forkful of roast in his mouth and chewed with a vengeance.

Jessamine glanced to see how Mr. Marfleet was reacting to the topic and found him listening to each speaker. He smiled slightly at her but said nothing. The same way her father would have reacted, she thought. He rarely engaged in political disputes.

“What we’ve heard from the Foreign Office is that Napoleon is struggling to form a new government in Paris. Let us hope he is kept busy with that and has no time to think of war,” another
gentleman said in a quieter, more reasoned voice. “Perhaps that will give Wellington time to get our army in order and join forces with the other allied troops.”

Jessamine remembered that Lady Bess had said members of Parliament would be present at the dinner, and she surmised that this gentleman was one.

Jessamine heard Megan’s voice. “My brother is in Brussels with Wellington.”

Jessamine’s breath caught. Rees was in Belgium? The last she had heard he was in Vienna with the congress. When had he gone to Brussels? She stared at Megan. How long had Megan known? Why hadn’t she told Jessamine?

Even as she realized why Megan would have said nothing, to avoid reminding her of Rees, Jessamine felt hurt. It was all Rees’s fault, she thought. He had come between her and her closest friend.

The lady who had started the conversation leaned across Mr. Emery and said to Megan, “La, my dear, if your brother is in Brussels, he’ll be having the time of his life. Brussels is nothing but a round of parties. Anybody of any consequence is there now. I have half a mind to cross the channel myself.”

“Then you don’t think there is any danger for him there? He is with his bride of a few months.”

“What is her name, my dear?”

“Céline de Beaumont, formerly the Countess of Wexham.”

The French name stabbed Jessamine’s heart, yet she couldn’t help straining forward to catch every word about the woman who had wrecked her dreams.

“Céline! I know her well, though I haven’t seen her since she left England for France. There was some talk at the time, but I’m sure that is all over. Who is your brother?”

“Rees Phillips. He is with the British delegation. He was working with Lord Castlereagh at the Congress of Vienna until Lord Wellington took over for him there.”

The lady nodded. “Your brother must be a special man to have won the Countess of Wexham.”

“He is. I haven’t met her. They have not returned to England since the peace.”

“Your brother is fortunate to be with Wellington in Brussels at the moment,” the lady said. “The duke is the darling of society from Vienna to Brussels. Your brother shall have a stupendous career—especially if he has Lady Wexham at his side.”

“I trust it is as you say.”

Jessamine strained to listen to their conversation about Rees and his bride, imagining the world Rees now inhabited, a world of parties and important world events among brilliant people, doing what he’d always dreamed of doing, with the beautiful countess at his side.

From the time she was seventeen, Jessamine had refused to look at another man, deciding she would wait until the day Megan’s older brother would notice she had grown up.

She had loved him since she was thirteen. The Phillips family had moved to their village when she was a young child. Megan and she had quickly become playmates, living next door to each other. Megan’s older brother, Rees, years older than the two of them, had been away fighting the French with His Majesty’s navy.

It wasn’t until he left the navy and begun working in London, when Rees was about twenty-five and Jessamine thirteen, that she had developed a
tendre
for him. He was such a handsome, good brother to Megan—kind and patient with his young sister, who was only eleven at the time. He was always bringing her a gift when he came home to visit, even though she knew from Mrs. Phillips that he didn’t earn much as a junior clerk in the Foreign Office and every penny he earned was for his mother’s and sister’s support.

Jessamine had grown to have the same respect and admiration for Rees that Megan had for her older brother, and wished her parents had given her an older brother too.

Jessamine’s respect and admiration had grown into love until she looked forward to Rees’s visits with a beating heart and trembling expectation that someday he might look upon her as more than his sister’s closest friend.

And that miraculous, longed-for day had arrived a few years ago. Rees had begun to look at her with a special something in his gray eyes.

She’d turned eighteen and he was well-nigh thirty. But to her he didn’t seem too old at all. On the contrary, he was grave and mature compared to the awkward, pimply young gentlemen at the local assemblies. Jessamine lived for Rees’s visits and for bits of news Megan read from his frequent letters home.

Her hopes had almost born fruition until that fateful day he’d met that Frenchwoman, Céline Wexham, an earl’s widow in London, under most suspect circumstances involving spying and intrigue, which she and Megan still didn’t know the half of. To the shock of them all, Rees found her again in France after the war.

He had put his career, his entire reputation at risk, since there had been rumors that Céline had spied on the British during the war. Jessamine could not imagine the serious, disciplined Rees throwing away all he’d worked so hard for for a woman, certainly not for Jessamine herself, she admitted with the same bitterness that had plagued her since she’d heard of his sudden marriage. Rees’s life had been one of self-denial and sacrifice as he toiled for years as a lowly clerk. What had this Frenchwoman done to make him behave like a madman? In less than a month, he had written from Vienna that he was married.

Jessamine stared unseeing as a footman removed her half-empty plate, as the familiar feelings of inadequacy flooded her. What could she, a nondescript country miss, have hoped to offer a distinguished man like Rees?

The conversation around her once more merged into a buzz of
voices while the footmen cleared the removes and laid out clean plates and cutlery.

She looked over at Mr. Marfleet, but he was engaged in conversation with the lady on his left. Would he leave everything for love of a woman? She couldn’t imagine so. His life was tied to the Lord’s work.

Her gaze traveled over the table, lingering on each gentlemen. Could any of them leave everything behind—their families, their country—for the woman they loved?

Her gaze came to rest on the lady who had spoken to Megan. Perhaps for a woman as beautiful, intelligent, and charming as she. She imagined this was what the Countess of Wexham must look like—dressed in a red gown with a low décolletage, diamonds glinting in her dark tresses. Had she enthralled poor Rees with her female allurements the way this woman seemed to captivate the men sitting near her?

Jessamine remembered Mr. Marfleet’s words earlier in the evening: “You look pretty tonight.” Dry, insipid compliments, just as Rees’s had always been to her—the few he’d paid her. What would it be like to have a man gaze upon one with admiration and more, the way the men did to this woman?

5

L
ancelot awoke early the next morning and lay a few moments thinking about the previous evening.

He was beginning to like Miss Barry more than he’d expected to. He’d only asked his mother to invite the two young ladies with the aim of putting things right, but the more he talked with her, the more she drew him.

Prickly one moment and keenly discerning the next, like a cactus in bloom. When he’d spoken of India, he’d felt for the first time real interest from a female—not the oohing and aahing of someone wanting to hear of tigers and cobras but the genuine interest of a fellow Christian.

Of course, it was because she was a vicar’s daughter, he told himself. She had grown up hearing the message of the gospel—or had she? He wasn’t sure if she had expressed approval or disapproval last night over the Clapham Sect, that evangelical arm of the Church of England, but he’d sensed a withdrawal in her at that point. She had not gone into detail about her father. He sounded like a pious man, but was he of evangelical leanings? Some of the strongest resistance he’d encountered from the pulpit both in an English village and among the English settlements in India was to
the message of salvation and God’s grace through the suffering, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

The church he’d grown up in was a comfortable place of tradition, where the church calendar was celebrated every Sunday with its cycle of holidays sprinkled throughout—Epiphany, Easter, Whitsunday, Trinity Sunday, Advent, Christmas . . . No rousing sermons were accustomed. Instead, edifying homilies were read from the pulpit and the Eucharist celebrated at certain services.

But did it mean anything? When he’d administered the bread and wine, did the people understand anymore the meaning behind them?

Lancelot had not realized how cold and indifferent he’d become to the meaning of the gospel until he’d gone one Sunday on the advice of a college mate to hear Charles Simeon preach at Trinity Church.

For the first time in his life, he’d been confronted with the message of a personal salvation and with his own inability to save himself because of his shortcomings and inherent sin.

What he’d scornfully dismissed as the emotionalism of the Methodists, Baptists, and other radical dissenters was coming from one of his own Anglican priests.

Lancelot had left that church service convinced he would not come back. But he’d returned Sunday after Sunday until he’d fallen on his knees in his room, asking for that salvation Jesus had bought for him on the cross.

There followed a period of euphoria and such peace as he’d never known in his life. For the first time he’d felt a sense of being justified—his life with the potential for true purpose and meaning.

New and deep friendships had arisen with the Reverend Simeon and those close to him—deacons, curates, and fellow divinity students of Cambridge, all like-minded men because they’d experienced the same transformation in their own lives.

They’d had ambitious dreams to preach salvation through grace
alone from the pulpits across England and to win the heathen across the seas. Up to then the Church of England had not considered its mission to take the gospel to far-off lands the way the Baptists were beginning to do.