Forever Hold Your Peace, by Rue Allyn
Home from the wars, Captain Prescott Drake is shocked to learn that his fiancée plans to wed someone else. Can he reach her in time to prevent the nuptials? Will she want him, or has their treasured love died the slow death he nearly suffered in a French prison?
Desperate and believing the man she loved is dead, Miss Elizabeth Feddleston seeks rescue in the form of marriage to a kind friend. He knows she does not love him now but has hopes that once she has mourned the man who first won her heart that she will turn to him.
Meet Prescott Drake
Ensign Prescott Aelfwyn Drake, only son of an obscure country baron answered his country’s call to arms. What good was the comfortable life of a baron, if Boney ruled the world with his iron fist. Prescott had been on leave before receiving his first orders when a friend invited him to a local assembly. There Prescott met the woman of his dreams. He knew the charming Miss Elizabeth Eloise Feddleston was meant for him. Lacking in fortune, her stellar reputation and innate kindness were far more important to him. On the night before he was to leave to join his regiment he proposed. She accepted and they planned to wed as soon as Boney was defeated and Prescott could resign his commission.
Meet Elizabeth Feddleston
Miss Elizabeth Eloise Feddleston had expected to marry for convenience. Betts was the daughter of a widowed country squire, whose gambling losses had devastated the family. From the age of eight she’d managed the household and raised her twin siblings. The local vicar had helped where he could. Her father passed shortly after she reached her majority. His heir was a self-righteous, penny-pincing bigot who at their first meeting informed her she would marry as he pleased or be thrown from the house. Her siblings would be sent to a school for orphans sponsored by the religious sect he favored. She’d sought refuge with highly placed friends who offered shelter and safety for both her and the twins. Under a duke’s protection she attended her first assembly and fell in love.
An excerpt from Forever Hold Your Peace
A treasured locket open in her hands, Miss Elizabeth Eloise Feddleston sat by the window of the elegant sitting room—part of the suite assigned her at Leigh Chase. She stroked the pad of one thumb across the miniature within.
The handsome soldier depicted stared out at her with an intent moss-green gaze. His square chin framed a generous mouth. The resolute set of his broad shoulders spoke of the strength of his courage and determination. Captain Prescott Aelfwyn Drake had given her the locket as a remembrance on the day she accepted his proposal of marriage. A marriage that would never be, for darling Prescott was dead.
Betts sniffled back a tear. She had cried too much already. ‘Twas past time to lay Prescott and his memory to rest.
Outside the December day was gloomy and drear, entirely too close a match to her thoughts. The wind howled as it battled with the branches of the trees which more often than not fell to the snow, ice and cold of the windy assault. In Betts’ heart, fear and worry did battle with her every attempt at the calm control she relied on to deal with disasters big and small, since the day of her mother’s passing. That had been sixteen years ago. She’d been seven when she’d made her way from the nursery to her father’s study and found him mumbling into a glass, which she later learned was Scotch whisky. Strathnaver’s best—nothing but the best for Squire Feddleston, regardless of what economies were necessary to acquire said best.
“London gentlemen won’t respect a man who wears shoddy clothes, serves second rate whisky, rides ill-bred hacks…” the list went on.”
She pushed painful memories aside and tried to concentrate on the future. Tried to convince herself she was doing the right thing. The only thing. To save her brother and sisters from soul-killing lives planned by their cousin and new guardian, marrying Sir Tellus Leigh was the right thing, the only thing.
In a few short weeks, on Christmas Day, she would be married. Not to Prescott, the man of her dreams, but to a kind, warm, generous man, a friend who deserved better than the half measure of love that had been all she could promise him in exchange for the protection he offered her and her family.
She knuckled away a second tear. It should have been Prescott standing beside her in the church. However, Prescott Drake was dead, as were all of the dreams they had shared. In the wake of the news that he was missing presumed dead had come a string of disasters that had led her to this moment.
It was imperative she marry quickly. Her lips twitched with a failed smile. No, she wasn’t enceinte. It was her siblings’ welfare that necessitated her quick nuptials.
“Chinese, Your Grace,” he explained. “From the Tang dynasty. More than a thousand years old. ” It stood four square on a small marble stand, its neck arched and its bobbed tail proud. The colours were still as bright as the day it was fired.
Eleanor looked at the door as it closed behind the esteemed scholar. Perhaps she should have told him that Rose St Aubyn was away, and that the house was soon to be occupied by the daughters of the deceased Earl of Seahaven. But Eleanor remembered the eldest from her brief London season. Fiercely intelligent. Deeply interested in ancient civilisations. That had been years ago, of course, but Lady Elizabeth had not ‘taken’, and nor had she married since.
