Page 5 of The Language of Love

Chapter 1

Twenty Years Later

The Village of Cocklesham

Annis kept reading and re-reading the letter from Mr. Pears, Grandmamma’s man of business, as if repeated readings might magically alter its contents.

“Annis, darling? Annis?”

She looked up. “Hmm?”

“What is it, my dear?” Lady Cecily reached out a thin, bone-white hand to feel the air around her.

“Um…” For a woman who’d taught languages at a young ladies’ academy for five years, Annis could not seem to string two words together in her native tongue.

Her grandmother’s cloudy eyes—once a vivid, periwinkle blue like Annis’s—blinked up at her, both blind and blindly trusting. She had trusted Annis to decipher this letter for her just as she had trusted Annis to manage the rest of her business since gradually losing her vision over the last eight years.

Annis had repaid her trust by bringing Richard Leech into their lives and giving him access to their house and everything they owned, not to mention her own person.

“Are you unwell, my dear?”

Annis gracelessly dropped onto the ottoman, no longer able to stand. “I am well,” she lied. “Just a little fatigued.”

“You sound breathless.” Lady Cecily rang the bell she kept beside her chair. A bell that probably even now belonged to the creditors referenced in the letter Annis was holding.

The door opened so swiftly that Mary, her grandmother’s maid, must have been listening on the other side.

And why not? Annis thought, I’ve destroyed her life as well. After all, what work could a servant nearing seventy find?

“You rang, my lady?” Mary asked.

“Please fetch the hartshorn for my granddaughter.”

Annis shook herself out of her daze. “No hartshorn, Grandmamma, really.” She smiled at Mary. “But tea would be lovely.”

Lady Cecily squinted her sightless eyes at Annis for a long moment before nodding. “Very well. It seems tea will suffice, Mary.”

“Very good, my lady.”

The door closed, and her grandmother turned to her again. “What does Mr. Pears have to say in his letter, my dear?”Annis opened her mouth to tell her grandmother the truth, but, as so often happened in her life, something entirely different came out.

“It seems there have been more losses than he expected, but he says not to worry as such Exchange fluctuations are common now that the war is over.” She bit her lip as she considered her next untruth. “He asks that I go to London at my earliest convenience to sign some papers as your proxy.”

And so I can fall to my knees and beg for mercy.

Her grandmother’s smile illuminated her delicate features. “Oh, you are so good to me, Annis,” she said, her words like knives. “I know how tiresome a journey to town can be, but you will see your friends—Lady Sedgwick, Honoria Keyes, and that clever woman who works with stone—what was her name, again?”

“Serena Lombard,” she answered woodenly. “But she no longer lives with Freddie—she is married and lives with her husband. So does Honoria, who is now Lady Saybrook.”

“Oh yes! That’s right. So many lovely weddings in such a short time.”

Annis could only imagine how the friends her grandmother was referring to would react if she were to confess how she’d been charmed by a scheming thief who’d forged her name on financial documents and robbed her grandmother’s friends.

Using Annis as his unwitting accomplice.

Annis squeezed her eyes shut, ashamed of how nightmarish and damning it sounded when she laid it all out like that.

Don’t forget to mention the fact that he robbed you of your virginity.