Seeing some confusion on her friends’ faces, Lady Featherstone said, “Not technically related, but I consider him so. Prudence is my cousin by marriage, somehow, and so you see…”
The duchess did not see at all, nor did she care. “I was thinking of Lord Lymington for Lady Isabel. He’s to be a duke.”
There were polite murmurs regarding that suggestion. At least, there were from most of the ladies.
Lady Heathway said, “But Lymington is a dolt. He tells the same story six times over and it’s always about some horse or other.”
The duchess was well aware of Lord Lymington’s deficiencies. But he was, after all, to be a duke.
“His proclivities can be managed,” she said firmly.
“When is she to come?” Lady Easton asked.
“I am to collect her in Hertfordshire,” the duchess said. “I insisted upon going myself.”
Really, she’d done no such thing, but it seemed the earl’s carriage was in disrepair, and he would not be put to the expense of hiring one to send the girl to London. Nor did she have a suitable escort, as there appeared to be no lady’s maid or other woman who might be employed for such a purpose.
“Very well,” Lady Easton said. “I will accompany you, Theodosia. It will give me the opportunity to see how my nephew and Caroline get on.”
The duchess had not asked for and did not want company. Based on her various letters exchanged with the earl, she was rather afraid of what she would find there. His last letter was so unintelligible that she and the duke had pored over it for more than an hour, and she was still not certain she’d untangled his meanings. She was hoping he’d written it while exceedingly drunk.
“I do not wish to impose upon the earl by bringing overnight guests unexpectedly,” the duchess said.
Lady Easton suddenly laughed, which was not a thing she did often. “Goodness, you cannot stay at Somerdon House. Bertridge says the place is falling down around the earl’s ears. We will stay overnight with my nephew, his drive is less than two miles from the earl’s estate.”
The duchess nodded. There was not much else she could do. If Clara were determined to get a look at the earl, she would find a way to do it. In any case, it sounded as if itwouldbe better to avoid staying the night as the earl’s guest.
“The earl’s house, though—can it really be so bad?” Lady Mendleton asked.
“Oh yes,” Lady Easton said. “Bertridge has told me you’d be very lucky to avoid being knocked out by a falling shingle from the roof as you stood at the front doors. My nephew has tried to counsel the earl on rectifying things, but he gets nowhere with it and has given up.”
The duchess had not perceived that the situation was quitethatdeteriorated. It seemed the earl was not, as she had thought, a bit of an idiot. He was a complete idiot. Who allowed one’s shingles to fling themselves from one’s roof? Well-ordered shingles understood where they were meant to be.
She shook out her skirts like a bird settling its feathers. “Just as we have rescued other girls from unfortunate circumstances,” she said, eyeing Lady Heathway specifically, “we will rescue Lady Isabel from her own situation. Forthwith.”
Chapter One
Lady Isabel Beauford,daughter of the Earl of Somerdon, carried a bucket into her bedchamber and placed it under a drip from the ceiling. It had been raining all day and it seemed the roof had sprung a few more leaks.
That done, she changed for dinner.
She did not have a maid to help her, nor had she ever. She did not have a wide selection of dresses to choose from, nor had she ever. What she did have, though, was skill with a needle to keep what she did own in good order and an absolute refusal to succumb to her circumstances.
Nobody in the house, least of all her father, would care whether she changed for dinner.Shecared, though.
She had scrimped and saved, mostly by way of an old aunt’s yearly birthday present of a little money, to purchase a book on how things ought to be done. She was determined to do things how they ought to be done, as close as could be managed given her circumstances.
Isabel had been well aware from examples of other young ladies in the neighborhood that a woman should be educated and accomplished. She’d also understood it would be up toherto turn herself out as the lady daughter of an earl, as there was nobody else to do it.
She had never had a governess as those other girls did, and so she had used her father’s library to teach herself. She listened to what the other girls studied and tried to find something similar amongst the earl’s books. If they spoke of the Greeks, she read of them. If they mentioned Shakespeare, she read the plays.
Isabel had been fortunate in little, but at least the earl had not sold off the books as he had so many other things. He read next to nothing himself and had not the first idea that anybody else would pay him good money for them. The books had been her grandfather’s and while her father had not added to them, he’d not taken them away either.
She had been thorough in her studies; she would not allow herself to be caught up short. She had been diligent in practicing her sewing with the help of Lord Bertridge’s housekeeper. One of their close neighbors, Mrs. Roydon, had been kind enough to include Isabel in her daughter’s pianoforte lessons and, while her own instrument had been forever out of tune, she practiced on it daily. Mrs. Campbell had included her in her girls’ riding lessons and often lent her a horse for outings. The neighborhood had propped her up where her father could not.
Isabel was determined to do well in life, somehow. There was nothing her heart more longed for than to be settled in a marriage built on a substantial base. Her experience so far had been one of creditors and shortages, lack of candles for light, not enough wood for heat, and sometimes even a scarcity of food on the table. She never really knew what would happen next.
Her father did not worry about tomorrow, only what could be had today. He maintained a strange sanguine attitude that the future would work itself out. Something or someone was bound to turn up.
