Lady Ann's Holiday: Epilogue - Finale!

Four hours later, Ann was still working on her embroidery while her mother and aunt twittered away, gossiping about the troubles with servants and the difficulties in finding a really first class seamstress.

Ann sighed heavily, looking about the room at the children playing on the floor: Reggie with his train, Felicity with a dolly – at Hattie still reading the same book silently – at Richard with his papers, making notes on his next financial gambit.

“I’ll tell you which servant does a terrible job around here,” he said, looking up. “That stable hand. I’ve never seen a more useless waste of air and water.”

The older women giggled.

“Not only is he lazy but he’s dirty and extremely limited in intelligence.”

The Countess and Aunt Geraldine laughed again.

Ann got to her feet. “Perhaps if you’d ever lifted a finger yourself then you’d be qualified to judge,” she said. “As it is, I suspect you’d have a heart attack if you had to face half a day doing Burt’s job.”

Richard’s mouth flapped open and closed like a fish, as did the mouths of the middle-aged ladies. Ann smiled politely and left the room.

She paused outside, listened to the hubbub of indignation coming from behind the door and smiled all the more broadly. She really wasn’t sure whether Lord Richard Hurley was man enough for her.

Still smiling, she left the house at the rear and wandered through the garden, slowly gravitating toward the side of the house and the path down to the stables.

There were no thoughts in her head specifically but she was drawn that way nonetheless. As she approached the stable building she saw Mavis coming up the drive and Burt emerging to meet her. Harry seemed to have gone home. Ann ducked back out of sight and spied on the couple as they embraced and kissed one another deeply. She touched her lips with her fingertips to remember what that had felt like.

To be a man and to have that kind of sexual freedom…

Burt and Mavis broke their embrace and walked round the side of the building toward the back stairs and Ann crept after, not sure why exactly, but thoroughly hooked by the thrill of spying on them.

The couple climbed the stairs and went inside, unaware that she was watching and immediately laughter and shrieks of playful pleasure came through the window.

Ann crept up the creaking steps, hoping they wouldn’t hear her above their hullabaloo. They didn’t seem to.

When she reached the hay barn door she nestled against it, peeping through the cracks in the wood, watching the pair disrobe and start to fondle one another; as they fell laughing onto the bed, already in a tight clinch.

Had she made the wrong choice she wondered? Should she have insisted they change back? Did Burt have a better life?

Or should she have accepted his advances, no matter how socially inappropriate they were?

“I love ye more deeply than you could ever know,” he had said. “I love ye inside and out. I know ow frustrated and trapped ye feel and ow much you want passion and excitement; because I used to be you. And I could give you that passion. You know that, don’t ye?”

I could give you that passion.

And suddenly Ann realised she wasn’t watching them make love wishing that she’d swapped back with Burt after all.

She was watching them, wishing that she was Mavis; wishing she could make love to that wonderful, virile, masculine man on equal terms, without any class barriers between them.

The realisation staggered her. It terrified her.

But after all... she still owned the pendant. That was a fantasy she actually had the power to achieve,

Ann chewed her lip, her eyes sparkling, as the beginnings of a plan started to form in her mind.

Surely she wouldn’t dare to do such a thing.

But how wonderful it would be? How could she resist such a thing?

She smiled and the smile became a grin.

She only wondered if she would have the gumption… and the recklessness… to go through with it.