The Summer of Second Chances, page 1
The Summer of Second Chances
Copyright
Copyright © 2024 by Renee Dahlia
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by an electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review. No part of this book may be used for the purpose of training artificial intelligence systems. For permissions contact renee at reneedahlia dot com.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the authors imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual personas, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Cover by Sarah Paige at The Book Cover Boutique
Also by Renee Dahlia
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Love Wasn't Built In A Day
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The Summer of Second Chances
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Gamble Racing
Driven To Distraction
Driven By Passion
Driven By Ambition
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Great War
Her Lady's Melody
Her Lady's Fortune
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His Buxom Beauty
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Watch for more at Renee Dahlia’s site.
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Also By Renee Dahlia
The Summer of Second Chances (Desiring The Dexingtons, #4)
Foreword
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
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Also By Renee Dahlia
The Summer of Second Chances
Renée Dahlia
An addict and her nurse get a second chance at life and love.
Laudanum addicted Lady Hyacinth Walfingham is sent to the Soho Club to recover, but it’s not only the medicine that has harmed her. As she comes to terms with her old life, she slowly falls for her nurse.
Jane Bonklesford knows that life is tough, and she can only rely on herself. Her side hustle of making dentures forms a key part of her plan to get out of poverty. Working as a nurse at the Soho Club helps her keep her business costs low, and the last thing she needs is to fall in love with the beautiful aristocratic Lady Walfingham.
Can they overcome their assumptions and make a life together? Or will their class differences be too much of a hurdle?
About the author
An avid reader, Renée Dahlia writes contemporary and historical queer romance. Renée is a bisexual cis woman who is fascinated by people and loves to explore human relationships, with a side of humour, through her writing. Renée has a degree in physics and mathematics, using this to write data-based magazine articles for the horse racing industry. Her love of horses often shines through in her fiction, and she loves a good intrigue and to escape the real world in the pages of a book. When she isn’t reading or writing, Renée spends her time with her four children, usually watching them play cricket.
Foreword
Welcome to THE SUMMER OF SECOND CHANCES, the fourth novella in the Desiring the Dexingtons series.
Set during the Regency period, Desiring the Dexingtons features Humphrey Dexington and several of his seven sisters.
If you love sapphic romance with a class gap, and a character recovering from an illness, you’ll enjoy The Summer of Second Chances.
Please note this novella includes Laudanum addiction, spousal abuse (off page), dentistry (teeth), and reference to slavery. If you are squeamish about going to the dentist, please read this book with care. The historical context of dentistry in the Regency is outlined in the author notes.
This book is written in Australian English and some spelling and phrases may be unfamiliar to American readers.
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I hope you enjoy reading this book!
Renée
Chapter 1
March 1814
Jane sorted through her mail, placing them into business orders, invoices to be paid, and personal correspondence. The first pile was sizable and the latter non-existent. Business was brisk, with the wealthy seemingly confident in Britain’s economy and trade prospects, and that meant they wanted to spend money on luxury items. Most people assumed that Napoleon would soon be beaten on the Peninsula, given his recent defeat at Orthez, although the newssheets and their uplifting coverage of victories didn’t match the terse notes she occasionally received from her brother Steve who was in the Peninsula.
“My good servant. Would you help me with a drop of laudanum?”
“No.” Jane should never have agreed to watch Mr Dexington’s sister while she recovered from her sadly all too common addiction to laudanum. But she’d made a deal with the owners of the Soho Club.
“I have ... maladies imaginaries, a nervous disease. I must have some.”
Jane bit the inside of her cheek. Patience. “Mrs Skarsgard says no.”
“No, I do not have these issues, or no, I cannot have my medicine?” The woman placed her hand on her forehead. She was draped over the pillow, lying abed in a linen nightgown, occasionally feverish, sometimes talking nonsense as the laudanum wore off. She’d started to shake now in that unmistakable way her body showed it was craving another dose.
“You cannot have the medicine. You must let it all leave your body and then begin to heal.”
“I need laudanum to heal from my affliction.” The whine in her voice wasn’t personal. It was typical of those who craved the escape provided by laudanum. But in this moment, Jane wished she didn’t need the Soho Club as a base to run her business. The Mrs Skarsgards—all of them using the same pseudonym—gave her the space and confidentiality she needed and for the small fee of nursing any Soho Club members through any type of illness. She had the skills, and she was saving up for a small cottage in the country, so she needed to barter her time. It was better than the alternatives; women like her didn’t have many options.
Jane lifted her chin. “No.” She would do her job and deal with this spoiled rich woman who simply needed to listen to Jane’s boring advice and let her body heal so she could go back to her husband and her life. What a waste. Such a beautiful woman. Black Irish colouring with dark hair, pale skin, and a classic heart shaped face with straight nose. If she wasn’t so gaunt from too much laudanum, she’d be simply stunning. She had to be wealthy, given the clothes she’d arrived with, a whole trunk filled with expensive gowns and some of the most luxurious fabrics Jane had ever seen.
“No?” The whine turned into a wobbly teary plea.
“No.” Jane used her sternest voice. “You need to stop convincing yourself that you have hysterics. Too much laudanum will kill you. Your husband has sent you here to heal.”
The woman gasped. “My husband? No. He does not care enough to see me well. I am glad he’s dead.” She promptly rolled over and beat the pillow with her fists, and Jane’s stomach sank. How she’d misjudged this woman. So very much.
“I’m so sorry.” She sat beside the bed and started to reach out for the woman’s hand but folded her hands in her lap instead. After a moment, the woman slowly rolled over and stared at Jane with an unnervingly strong gaze. For the first time since she’d arrived, her eyes weren’t glazed over with the aftereffects of laudanum.
“I am not sorry. I rejoice in his end.”
Jane stood up to collect a napkin and wet it in the bowl of water on the side table, wringing it out. She walked over to the woman and sat again, slowly soothing her brow. “You are free from him now. No longer his property.”
“You understand.”
“Yes. My ...” Jane trailed off. No amount of empathy for this woman meant she needed to talk about her experiences.
“Did your mother have a nervous disorder too?”
“You don’t need that medicine anymore, Ma’am.” Jane ignored the assumption, although her heart skipped a beat as it always did on that topic.
“It’s Lady Walfingham, but please call me Hyacinth.”
“Hyacinth.” Jane understood not wanting to use the husba nd’s title, and it overrode the satisfaction in having guessed correctly that Hyacinth was rich. “My sister married a man who constantly belittled her, then beat her whenever he perceived that she had disobeyed him. Doctors prescribed her laudanum to ease her pain, agreeing with her husband that she had a nervous complaint. The medicine kept her quiet.” Jane had been employed in their household as a maid, because they weren’t sisters in the usual way, and this allowed her to stay close and nurse Betty as best she could.
Tears ran down Hyacinth’s face. “A long time ago, I was a sprightly girl. I had plans to be involved in my family business, and then I made the mistake of falling in love. Oh, I was so naïve. It wasn’t love. It was infatuation. He charmed me, told me wonderful things, until we married, and then ... he became a rat with a gold tooth. All that wonder was replaced with—”
“Meanness?” Jane whispered into the long silence.
“Yes. Slowly, over many years, until I believed what he said. That I was worthless, a bad wife who didn’t try hard enough to please him, who wasn’t pretty enough for him. Only my medicine made me feel better.” Hyacinth’s wobbly voice slowly grew stronger.
Jane swallowed. “Laudanum is an escape, a moment of freedom, but you weren’t truly free.”
“I am now.” Hyacinth breathed in deep and sat up straight and her eyes narrowed with a new focus. “He is dead. I am free from him. I refuse to take another drop of that medicine. His medicine.”
Jane wished it were as easy as a declaration. “A laudable goal.”
“Laudable...” Hyacinth shuddered. “This isn’t going to be easy, is it?”
“No. But if you’ve survived this much, you can do this too.” Jane had more business orders to fill than she had time. Could she afford to make her clients wait? Could her own goals wait a little longer while she helped a stranger with the same problems Betty had had? And yet it was for that reason alone that she wanted to help. Was she strong enough to nurse another person through this?
Chapter 2
June 1814
The constant noise of people parading and celebrating victory over Napoleon was beginning to wear on Hyacinth. It’d been several days since the news of Napoleon’s exile to Elba had reached English shores and been yelled by every street urchin attempting to sell a newssheet. Jane had been kind enough to bring her both the morning and afternoon editions, which were filled with advertisements for cheap prints commemorating the occasion.
It was hard to focus when the windowpanes rattled, not that Hyacinth had much to do bar writing to her siblings and reading their replies. And it was even harder to sleep with the Soho Club busy each night filled with celebration parties, not that she attended them. The temptations were too great—laudanum would likely be present—and her body was still regaining strength, still too weak to attend a grand social event, even after three months without laudanum.
A knock on the door had her stomach churning.
“Come in.” Today she would go outside for the first time in months. She’d done the hardest part of stopping needing laudanum and she’d worked hard to rebuild her strength, starting with small laps of this room, and building up to helping around the Soho Club. All week, she’d carrying linens and other things up and down the stairs and now she would take the next step.
“Are you ready?” Jane, sweet Jane, walked into the room. She wore a simple dark grey gown buttoned up to her neck and a basic straw bonnet framing her plain features. Jane was a lot smaller than Hyacinth, who was medium sized in all ways especially now she’d regained the weight she’d lost after Lord Walfingham died. With her light brown skin and black hair, Jane had the look of someone from the East India region and she had a gentle softness in her gaze that occasionally sharpened in the most interesting way. Jane wasn’t classically beautiful, not with such a crooked nose or pointed chin, although her round dark eyes were her loveliest feature. Hyacinth could get lost in her gaze; falling in and letting herself be saved.
She cleared her throat and pushed away the sentimental thoughts.
“Yes.” She was as ready as she could possibly be. Her heart fluttered with a blend of nerves and excitement, and she adjusted her bonnet for the hundredth time this morning. They were only going to the market down the road, a very small outing for her first foray in public. It’d been months since she’d been outside with people watching her and she wasn’t sure she could remember all her society manners.
The autumn air was crisp on her face as Hyacinth stepped outside the Soho Club. London felt different now. It could be the victory celebrations, or it could be that she was different. She’d fought off her malaise and won. That medicine and her dead husband would no longer have a hold over her.
“How does it feel?” Jane asked.
“Being outside?”
“How does it feel to be succeeding?” Jane didn’t need to explain what she meant. Hyacinth had listened to Jane’s stories about her sister Betty and realised many of things she assumed were true about herself weren’t real at all. They were things she’d been told so often that she’d come to believe them.
“Empty.” She breathed in deeply, the pungency of London’s dirty streets and coal smoke filling her lungs, and she nearly coughed, spluttering on it all. She was free—from her husband and from laudanum—and was left empty.
“Whatever do you mean?” Jane asked.
“For a decade, I’ve been told how to behave and who to talk to and who was a friend and who wasn’t, and what activities were acceptable for a commoner who’d married a Lord, and now I’m left with the realisation that none of that was real. It seems like everything he said was a partial truth designed to control me, and I’m left with nothing. An emptiness.” She did know one thing; she needed to be careful with how she filled that emptiness. Using laudanum to ease the pain of her husband’s cruelty had led to an unhealthy malaise, and she knew it would the easiest thing in the world to use laudanum to stop this feeling of nothing. She would always want that escape. The truth of that felt harder to reconcile than the initial pain she’d been escaping.
“You have time to figure it out. One day at a time.” Jane’s wisdom seemed sensible, if a little dull, but that was her role as a nurse, wasn’t it? To slowly guide Hyacinth back to health with no rash moves or sudden changes that might send her back to the bottle. They walked past a shop selling bottles of cures and she shuddered, turning her head away.
“How far to the markets?” She wasn’t familiar with this part of town, and suddenly realised she wanted to explore here, rather than return to her husband’s house in Mayfair. Her husband’s house. With a chill across the back of her neck she realised it wasn’t his house anymore. He was dead. His brother would be the Earl now, and so she didn’t even have a home to return to.
“Not far. I need to drop by a couple of other shops before we get the fruit Mrs Skarsgard needs.”
“Lead away.” Hyacinth had nothing better to do; no children, no husband, nowhere to go, and nothing to occupy her time except to do errands with Jane and write to her siblings about how much nothing she was doing. Emptiness. It surrounded her, leaving her faint.
They stopped by what appeared to be a jeweller’s workshop and Hyacinth watched Jane order a large quantity of piano springs and several lengths of thin wire, and some small screws. The man agreed to deliver them to the Soho Club and Jane paid him from her pin money, although to Hyacinths’ surprise, there were quite a few large notes exchanged. Next Jane ordered a case of unworked ivory at a fair expense before they headed off to the markets to acquire Mrs Skarsgard’s oranges.
She couldn’t contain her curiosity anymore. “What on earth are you making? Miniature pianos?”
“What gives you that impression?”
“Ivory and piano springs.” Hyacinth couldn’t imagine what else she might be making.
Jane blushed a little. Hyacinth found the flush of colour incredibly fascinating—it darkened Jane’s light brown skin—and sent a tingle across her own skin, and she didn’t understand what that meant. “I make dentures.”
“Goodness. What an extraordinary hobby.” Her mother-in-law had used them and struggled to keep them in her mouth when she talked, which led to some rather tense moments during tea. Hyacinth’s youngest sisters Linda and Maude always exchanged glances that would no doubt result in giggles later, and her own stomach had twisted with jealousy at their freedom, as they joked quietly about when the dentures might fall out.
