He also can’t quite resist a poke at the first person to ever be bored to sleep by one of his sermons. He feels that he has heard something about the Countess of Wareham, but he can’t quite place it.

So yes, he noticed her.īut his sermon seems to have been well-received, and he braces to receive a barrage of embroidery-works featuring “Love Thy Neighbor” soon.Īs the congregation is filing out, Evie introduces herself and Henny to the vicar. And perhaps it’s his visage, perhaps it’s his voice, or mayhaps it’s the riveting content of his sermons, but never before has he put someone to sleep. Our vicar, Adam, of course, noticed the new ladies sitting in his congregation. And as Evie can’t really say no to Henny, she relents. She slept peacefully all through his sermon on Loving Thy Neighbor, and was ready to make a hasty escape afterward to her carriage, but Henny was much too taken with the handsome vicar, and begged Evie to introduce them. Her eyes closed the temptation was to bask in it.Īnd it’s that voice that lulls Evie into eventual slumber - there was something so peaceful about it, and after all, it was still early morning. His voice surprised her: a baritone with the depth of a bell and deliciously frayed at the edges, it was like stumbling into a patch of sunlight on a relentlessly gray day. She’d spent enough time with men to be cynical about all of them.īut she cannot deny that he is an excellent specimen, he just doesn’t affect her that way. She’d spent enough time in a theatre to admire stagecraft. She could have sworn that every pair of feminine shoulders rose and fell in a sigh when the vicar looked up, a smile, faint by warm, inclusive but impersonal, ready on his face, before he dropped his gaze to his notes. The congregation stirs and comes to life when the vicar walks in.

It seems as though she is met with a normal level of curiosity and no particular animosity. She and her maid Henny find a spot in the too-small pews and do not attract too much attention. A truly hateful and untrue nickname.Īs her carriage rolled through Pennyroyal Green, it seems as though the church bells ringing are calling out to her, and although she is not at all a religious sort, decided to attend the sermon.

It will certainly be different from London, but truly, now is an excellent time to be away from there, and away from the terrible rumors and the nasty nickname that the ton has given her - The Black Widow - a spider that Miles Redmond had discovered in America where the females killed the males after mating. But, newly widowed, she has at least been left a small manor in Pennyroyal Green, and she’s on her way to start her new life there.

Evie Duggan has fallen on hard times, but she’s certainly fallen on harder in her lifetime.

A notorious countess confesses