Her raven hair flowed loose in beautiful silken curls, not frizzing as it usually did in the salty winds. Her ivory skin glowed, unmarred by the blemish on her chin that had popped up overnight.
“Henrietta, I mean, Arabellina. Don’t do it. I love you!”
Arabellina turned. Towering high above her on the rocky cliff’s edge stood Lord Blackraven, who looked suddenly like Mr. Edward Watson. A black cape billowed in the wind behind him. His beautiful mahogany locks blew about his face, and the moonlight illuminated those intense, heavily lashed green eyes that made her heart flip-flop.
“How can you say you love me when you never wrote? Every day I waited for a letter that you were safe in London and not robbed by some highwaymen, left to die alone on a deserted road. One small poem of how you dreamed and yearned for me every moment we were apart. But nothing! I’m so devastated. How could you leave me in this barren place?” Arabellina looked at the waiting waves, swirling and foaming about her.
“Stop! Don’t take your life! I wrote you every day. Poems and poems.”
“I never received them.”
Lord Blackraven paused, biting his index finger as Edward was prone to do. Then he said, “It was the Royal Mail Service! That villainous Royal Mail! Why I could crush him—it— with a—a large rock.”
“A large rock?”
“The Royal Mail is quite huge. It carries 500,000 letters a day. They employ 150,000 horses each year.”
“Never mind the mail service! You said to wait, and for weeks I’ve waited and waited!”
“The mail’s come,” interrupted Mrs. Potts.
The rotund housekeeper stood at the parlor entry, drying a large wooden spoon with a rag, an infuriatingly knowing look in her eyes. Beyond the window, the mail coach rattled and crunched up the cobblestones past Henrietta’s house. Passengers clung to the top and edges. How could she have missed it?
Henrietta feigned a bored yawn. “Already? My, how late the morning has grown.”
“Hrmph,” the housekeeper said and left. Cruel woman.
Henrietta willed herself still until Mrs. Potts’s footsteps echoed in the back of the house. Then she flew up to her chamber, threw on her pelisse and bonnet and rushed back down, slowing to a casual saunter as the massive front door thudded closed behind her. All of the neighbors were leaving their homes, as well, and heading up the street. The arrival of the post was the most exciting part of everyone’s day.
The mail carriage paused before a dirty, narrow pub that seemed to sag under the weight of four floors of filthy, shuttered windows. The hunched postmaster, pub owner and sometime barber limped out with the village mail. A young mail boy high up on the perch threw down a knotted yellow bag and waited. The postmaster heaved his small bag into the air three times before an exasperated passenger, hanging off the side, snagged it. The carriage jerked to a start and thundered down the road, kicking dirt and loose cobbles behind it.
Everyone followed the postmaster inside the ancient pub that smelled like a thousand years of bad fish and hops. He dumped the mail onto a battered old table, then held each letter to the tip of his nose, slowly reading each address and putting it into the correct pile. The villagers looked on, speculating which child, grandchild or physician had sent a letter. It was the same conversation every mail day of every year.
Henrietta lingered about the entrance, trying not to appear eager.
The door swung open and the reek of livestock and mud assaulted her nose as her neighbor’s tall form ducked under the doorframe. He wore his usual ensemble of muddy doeskins and a worn green coat. Shaggy chestnut curls sticky with perspiration and in terrible need of a barber fell into his gray eyes. Fuzzy side-whiskers softened his otherwise hard, lean face. Judging from the dirt under his nails, one would think he hadn’t a passel of farmhands and tenants and was reduced to planting crops with his fingers. His hound Samuel, a big boned, thick brown dog of no obvious breed, trotted in behind him, sniffing about the floor.
When Samuel saw Henrietta, he scrambled around his master’s boots and jabbed his nose under the hem of her skirt. She knelt, letting the happy hound give her wet licks on her cheek. She looked up. Kesseley stared down at her, unsmiling. His face wore that tight expression again, chin high, eyes hard—the look she always pretended not to notice. If