Marquesses at the Masquerade Read online

  “Once Upon A Ball” © Copyright 2018 Emily Greenwood

  All rights reserved. No part of this book/novella may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems—except in the case of brief quotations or excerpts for the purpose of critical reviews or articles—without permission in writing from Emily Greenwood, author and publisher of the work.

  “Only Unto Him” © Copyright 2018 by Susanna Ives

  All rights reserved. No part of this book/novella may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems—except in the case of brief quotations or excerpts for the purpose of critical reviews or articles—without permission in writing from Susanna Ives, author and publisher of the work.

  “The Governess and Norse God” © Copyright 2018 by Grace Burrowes

  All rights reserved. No part of this book/novella may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems—except in the case of brief quotations or excerpts for the purpose of critical reviews or articles—without permission in writing from Grace Burrowes, author and publisher of the work.

  Published as a three-novella compilation, Marquesses at the Masquerade, by Grace Burrowes Publishing, 21 Summit Avenue, Hagerstown, MD 21740.

  Cover design by Wax Creative, Inc.

  ISBN for Marquesses at the Masquerade: 978-1-94-141958-8

  Table of Contents

  Note from the Authors

  Once Upon a Ball Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  A Note from Emily

  From A Rogue Walks into a Ball by Emily Greenwood

  Only Unto Him Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  A Note from Susanna

  The Governess and Norse God Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Epilogue

  No Dukes Allowed

  My Own True Duchess

  Note from the Authors

  * * *

  What’s next? Vanishing Viscounts? Barons Behaving Badly? We’re not sure!

  For these novella anthologies, we kick around a premise until something pops up that feels interesting, but flexible enough to take off in a lot of directions. For Marquesses at the Masquerade, that’s pretty much all we had: Three marquesses, one masquerade where each man crosses paths with his true love. Go!

  Off we went to our separate writing caves, to emerge weeks later, happily-ever-afters in hand. Some interesting similarities emerged: All three heroines have suffered loss of a loved one, though one lady still has plenty of family. Two heroes are widowers, only one recalls his wife with uncomplicated loving fondness. Two heroes have to deal with an old flame complicating matters, two have to deal with helpful/meddling family. All three novellas drew upon myth or fairytale, but our choices were Norse gods, Cinderella, and Greek legends.

  Despite some similarities, we were struck by how unique each story is to the author who wrote it. Susan’s hero has the intensity she conjures for all of her protagonists. Emily’s is a perfect gentleman, and yes, that would be Grace’s hero confiding in his horse. (One of these days, Grace is going to write a hero with a ferret. Don’t laugh. It worked for Judith Ivory.) Our heroines went in similarly distinctive directions, as did the supporting casts, the settings, the authorial voices.

  We hope you enjoy our Marquesses at the Masquerade. We had great fun writing them, and comparing our results from a simple shared premise. We do believe the Vanishing Viscounts have some potential, but aren’t so sure about Barons Behaving Badly. Let us know what you think!

  Happy reading!

  Grace, Emily, Susan (and Lord Tyne’s horse)

  Once Upon a Ball

  * * *

  Emily Greenwood

  Chapter One

  * * *

  “Mundie, you’re taking too long,” came an irritated female voice from the doorway of Rosamund’s room. “How am I supposed to make the final adjustments to my attire for the Boxhaven masquerade ball when you are taking so long to complete my gown?”

  Rosamund, who hardly remembered the last time she’d used her surname and at age twenty-two was years beyond the sensation of cringing at the detested nickname, merely said, “I’m just finishing the final stitches, Aunt.”

  She would not, of course, mention that it had taken her longer to finish the adjustments to the gown because the alterations required her to do far more than “just sew on a few ribbons to refresh the look,” as Melinda had ordered when she’d handed the gown to her. Melinda had put on a significant amount of weight, which no one was meant to mention, but it was a fact of which Rosamund, effectively Melinda’s personal seamstress, was well aware.

  Melinda’s eyes traveled over Rosamund’s small room, which was on the top floor of the Monroes’ London town house, as far away from the main family quarters as possible, and came to rest on Rosamund’s untouched lunch tray, which contained a piece of toasted cheese and an apple.

  “You’d have more time to do what little is asked of you if you weren’t always eating.”

  Rosamund managed, from long practice, not to laugh. Since Rosamund was kept constantly busy sewing for the household—and with Melinda and her daughters, Vanessa and Calliope, there was always mending, and her two cousins being out, new dresses to sew—Rosamund undoubtedly made up for her keep in what they would have spent hiring a seamstress. And as she was rarely invited to join the family for meals, she was not costing them a great deal in food. She knew from the housekeeper, Mrs. Barton, that the kitchen staff had been instructed “not to be lavish” with Rosamund’s trays.

  “Of course, Aunt.” Rosamund might have pointed out that if she was not allowed to consume food, she would eventually run out of energy and be of no use, but she’d learned, from the moment she’d come to the house at age fifteen, that it was best to agree with Melinda and say as little as possible.

  “I don’t know why I should have to remind you of your responsibilities, Mundie. One would think you’d be grateful for being taken in and cared for as you have been.”

  This was a familiar refrain.

  “I am very grateful, Aunt.” And she truly was. She had a roof over her head, and meals, such as they were. More important, she had the company of Melinda’s uncle Piggott, who lived in a room down the hall from Rosamund’s little cell, and of the housekeeper, Mrs. Barton. Sometimes of an evening, the three would take a mug of tea together in Uncle Piggott’s room. Rosamund called him Uncle Piggott even though he wasn’t actually her uncle, but Melinda’s uncle by marriage. From the first, he’d insisted that Rosamund was the sort of person anyone would be proud to have as a niece and that he’d be delighted if she wished to call him uncle, as his real, “less pleasing” nieces did. Uncle Piggott, despite having been a vicar or, he
would say, because of it, preferred blunt speaking.

  Melinda peered closely at Rosamund’s work and offered a brief snort in judgment, then leaned into the hallway and called for Mary, one of the maids. Mary arrived in the doorway with an armful of fabric, and Rosamund’s heart sank. The Boxhaven ball was only two days away, and she’d foolishly hoped both her cousins would wear the gowns they’d worn to their last ball. But Mary was holding Calliope’s favorite gown from the previous season, which would never fit her without letting out the bust.

  Melinda plucked the gown from the maid’s arms and dropped it on the small table next to Rosamund. “You know what to do, Mundie, and she wants crystals sewn along the neckline as well. You’ll need to finish it tonight, because you’ll be working on Vanessa’s gown tomorrow.”

  Which meant more rushing to finish in time for any last-minute nips and tucks before the ball. Rosamund had often suspected that Melinda took special pleasure in seeing how fast she could make her sew.

  “I’ll make certain the gowns are ready in time.”

  “See that you do.” Melinda gestured to Mary. “Take this tray away. We don’t want Rosamund to be distracted while she works.”

  With an apologetic look that Rosamund returned with a quick, understanding smile, Mary removed the tray.

  The hour was late when Rosamund finally finished the last stitches on Calliope’s gown, but she knew Mrs. Barton had brought up Uncle Piggott’s evening tea and was lingering in his room to chat. Rosamund hung Calliope’s gown neatly on the hook in her room that had been installed for just that purpose and crept down the dark corridor toward the light of Uncle Piggott’s room.

  Uncle Piggott’s living had been a poor one. Now nearly eighty, his financial circumstances necessitated accepting the charity of his niece Melinda, who’d offered him a room and meals in exchange for the right to let all her acquaintances know how charitable she was.

  “I’m her ticket into heaven,” Uncle Piggott liked to tell Rosamund with a wink. As the stairs were now too much for him, he passed all of his time in his room, contentedly. The tall stack of books that stood on his night table and was frequently refreshed by Rosamund accounted for a large part of his contentment, along with his beloved pipe. If his body had betrayed him in age, though, his mind remained sharp.

  “So, Melinda has you working your fingers to the bone so those awful daughters of hers can be paraded before the ton in the hopes of catching husbands,” Uncle Piggott said when Rosamund joined him and Mrs. Barton in his room.

  “This will be the first time madam and the young ladies have been invited to Boxhaven House,” Mrs. Barton pointed out.

  “Not surprising, as the Marquess of Boxhaven is surely too sensible a man to want anything to do with either Melinda or those chits,” Uncle Piggott said cheerfully. “It’s actually quite remarkable how rotten they are, considering how nice they look. I have often observed to our Lord that if He only made everyone look on the outside as they are on the inside, so many of our human problems would resolve themselves.” He shook his head. “Lemon-suckers, the pair of them.”

  “Shh,” Rosamund said, giggling. “They might hear you.”

  “What, all the way up here in the Outer Reaches?” Uncle Piggott liked to refer to the fourth floor as the Outer Reaches. His room was comfortable but modest, a chamber obviously meant for guests of little importance. At the far end of the corridor, in a dark, perpetually chilly spot, was Rosamund’s own tiny chamber.

  “Melinda would have to be a witch to hear that well,” Uncle Piggott said, filling his pipe. “Though I have not discounted the idea that she might be some sort of devil’s imp.”

  “I despair of your sense of decorum,” Rosamund said, “though I like it more than I ought to when you speak badly of Melinda. My own relations, and they’re providing my meals and shelter.” She shook her head. “I am shocking.”

  “They’re the shocking ones,” Uncle Piggott said around his pipe stem. “For your mother’s own sister to treat her niece so shabbily is appalling.”

  But they all knew that it was the very fact that Rosamund was her mother’s daughter that had doomed her to the position she now had in the Monroe household. Melinda had never forgiven Rosamund’s mother for marrying “a penniless sailor.” Her sister marrying beneath her, Melinda believed, had dragged down her own consequence, resulting in Melinda’s marriage to the “worthless” (and now dead) Mr. Monroe, instead of the viscount who had once pursued her.

  Melinda had clearly felt vindicated when Rosamund’s father, a captain in the Royal Navy, had been involved in a public scandal related to some men who had deserted their posts. Rosamund had never wavered in her faith that her father had done the right thing throughout the affair, but he had been court-marshaled, and their distinctive family name had been dragged through mud that stuck to it forever after.

  “If your mother hadn’t married a man with such an unforgettable name,” Melinda said on the day seven years before when Rosamund arrived to stay, “perhaps you could recover somewhat from the scandal. But no one will forget it, or his infamy, and I won’t have my generosity to you repaid by subjecting my family to derision. You will keep to yourself and not draw attention in any way. And you will never, under any circumstances, give anyone your last name.”

  Uncle Piggott poked the air with his pipe. “You ought to be attending the Boxhaven ball. As a member of the family, you were invited.”

  Rosamund had privately felt more than a few stings of disappointment while laboring over gowns for a ball she could not attend—because she couldn’t attend, she knew that. Melinda had never once included her in a social event in all the years she’d lived with the Monroes.

  “Why would I want to go to the ball when, with my aunt and cousins gone for the evening, the three of us can have a whole lovely evening together?” Rosamund said. “Perhaps we might even purloin some wine.”

  “Your ideas of a wonderful evening are truly pathetic,” Uncle Piggott said in a peppery voice, but Rosamund thought, for the briefest moment, that she saw a hint of moisture in his sharp old eyes.

  * * *

  “It’s the very thing for you, Marcus. I knew the instant I laid eyes on it. Him.”

  “Er, you did?” Marcus Hallaway, the Marquess of Boxhaven, said to his mother, Lady Boxhaven, trying to keep any note of dismay out of his voice. But she had just presented him with a small spaniel. A lapdog! She’d brought the dog, concealed in a basket, into the sitting room in Boxhaven House, his London home, when she’d come for tea that afternoon. She’d lifted the top of the basket with the flourish of one offering a wonderful treat.

  The dog, released from his confinement, now placed his two front paws on the top edge of the basket and yipped excitedly. With his chestnut and white coloring and enormous brown eyes, he would have looked at home in the arms of a well-dressed lady.

  The dog also looked barely past the puppy stage, and Marcus had visions of him tearing through the corridors of his house with servants trailing after him. He wondered dismally whether the creature was housebroken, though he supposed his mother would not give him a gift that would create disgusting messes in Boxhaven House.

  Still, he had plenty of dogs at his country houses, not that he was closely acquainted with any of them. Why had she brought him a lapdog, and with all this ceremony?

  His mother gave him a shrewd look. Lady Boxhaven was the mother of four grown children, and she was no stranger to parsing the nuances of her offspring’s demeanors. “I know you have dogs at Weldwood and the other estates. But you aren’t often in the country these days, and I hate to think of you... without a companion.”

  “A companion,” he repeated. Was the dog meant to be a new salvo in his mother’s longtime campaign to get him to find a wife? If so, he couldn’t comprehend her reasoning, because theoretically, if he now had a “companion,” then might not further companionship become a less pressing issue? As this line of thought in regard to a dog standing in for a wife quic
kly turned ridiculous, he abandoned it and mentally threw up his hands as to his mother’s motivation. His mother was not averse to eccentricity, but she was infinitely dear to him, and if she wanted him to have this small dog, he would accept her gift graciously, even if it meant the possibility of tooth marks in his best boots.

  “Exactly,” she said with a grand smile.

  He nodded slowly. “Well, thank you very much, Mother. Extremely thoughtful of you.”

  She beamed, and the dog took this opportunity to launch himself out of the basket. Marcus braced himself to save any number of breakable and bite-able objects the animal might make for, but it was not to the divan legs or the rug tassels that the dog made his way.

  “Oh!” cried his mother gleefully, “he likes you! I knew the two of you would suit.”

  The dog, ignoring even the plate of biscuits perched on a low table a few feet from his basket, had raced over to Marcus and was now at his feet, wagging his tail excitedly.

  “See, he’s already realized you’re to be his master.”

  “A veritable example of the forces of fate in action,” Marcus muttered.

  “Isn’t it?” she crowed.

  The drawing room door opened at that moment to admit Marcus’s younger brother, Jack, and their sister Alice.

  “Oh!” squealed Alice, who at sixteen frequently found occasion to squeal. She rushed over and dropped to her knees before what Marcus was privately already calling The Creature. “He’s darling! Or is it a she? Is this your dog, Marcus? It must be, why else would it be here? But why did you get a dog?”

  “A wonder she ever manages to draw a breath, isn’t it?” Jack observed, apparently not equally overcome at the sight of the dog. But then, Jack was a gentleman of twenty-seven, with interests that inclined toward horseracing and the sort of discreet carousing favored by young men who were beloved by their families and friends as good fellows but nonetheless not immune to the pleasures of, well, carousing.