Page 3 of The Viscount and the Vicar’s Daughter

He felt a twinge of remorse. It was a novel sensation. A deuced uncomfortable one, too. “I’m two and thirty,” he informed her. “Practically in my dotage.” He paused before adding, a tad roughly, “I beg your pardon if I have offended you. My only excuse is that, in the past, when confronted with a female in tears, I have often found incivility to be a great restorative. I suppose with you I must try some other remedy.”

“Pray don’t.”

“You’d prefer I go?”

“Yes.” She looked like she would have said more, but a slight breeze stirred the crumpled paper at her feet. Recalling its presence on the ground, she paled. She moved to pick it up, but Tristan anticipated her, reaching out and sweeping the crumpled paper up in his hand. “Oh don’t!” she cried.

“What is this, then?” he asked as he flattened out the paper. “A love letter?”

She held out her hand for it, but he moved it just out of reach. “Give it back!” she demanded. “It’s private! You have no right!”

“I daresay,” he muttered. But having smoothed out the paper, he realized that it was not a love letter at all. It was an ink smudged drawing and a few lines of text which read:

My beloved speaks and says to me:

Arise, my love, my fair one,

and come away;

for now the winter is past,

the rain is over and gone.

There was more, but it was illegible. It looked as if the inkwell had spilled over it, obscuring not only the remaining words, but part of the drawing as well.

“Please give it back to me,” she begged him.

“What is this?” he asked, genuinely curious. “A poem you’re writing?”

Her slender frame stiffened with something that may well have been outrage. “A poem! How can you say so? Don’t you recognize it, sir?”

Tristan shrugged one broad shoulder. “I can’t say that I do.”

“It’s the Song of Solomon. From the Bible.”

“Ah, that explains my unfamiliarity.” He frowned, reading the words once again. “The winter is past. The rain is over.” He looked up at her. “What did the rest say? This part here where you have spilled ink?”

“I did not spill any ink!”

“No?”

She dashed away a fresh tear with the back of her hand. “The part that’s ruined—the part just there—it was an earlier verse.”

“Ah. I see.”

She cast him another reproachful glance. Clearly she thought he should know it already. As if he might recite a Bible verse as easily as the latest music hall ballad. As easily as she recited it to him now:

“Set me as a seal upon thine heart,

as a seal upon thine arm:

for love is strong as death—”

An unaccountable rush of warmth crept up his neck. He cut her off before she could say another word. “That’s from the Bible?”

“Yes.”

Tristan cleared his throat. “Well. It is rather…”