Page 40 of The Baronet’s Bartered Bride

And brutal. Typhus was not an easy way to pass on to one’s Maker. For some reason, no one else in the household had caught it. Joseph had been on a holiday with his tutor, Amaranthe visiting a friend when the visiting soldier came through the vicarage, on home for leave and bringing with him, unknowingly, the contagion of his barracks. Both children had returned home to witness the fevers, the rash, the wasting away. The helplessness and the weariness and then the sudden, awful quiet when it was over.

“My mother caught the smallpox,” Inez said quietly.

“Ah. I’m very sorry.”

“It was a mercy. The smallpox killed her body. The Spanish disease was taking her mind.”

“The Spanish—oh.”

The Spanish disease was the great pox, syphilis.

Inez’s mother had supported herself the same way as the ladies of Dark Lane.

Inez was the daughter of a whore.

He probed his reaction to this. An upright, moral man who cleaved to chastity and cleanliness of body and mind ought to be horrified.

Instead he felt a great sympathy for what Inez had endured. He understood now her distaste at the idea of trading her body for coin. She’d seen, up close, the most punishing of consequences.

They were both of them orphans in the world, although he had the advantage of a duchess for a sister who still thought it her duty to smooth Joseph’s way. Just as he felt it his duty to smooth the way for Inez. She was safe with him, for the time being, but what came next for them, he couldn’t imagine.

He had learned his lesson, with a lash that still smarted when he thought of the fool he’d been. He would not be such a sapskull again, throwing his heart after the Susannah Pettigrews of the world. He would be careful and thoughtful in his selection of a companion. He would take the time to see a woman truly and know she was his match in temperament, in beliefs, in what she wanted from a shared life.

But first he had to put Penwellen in order.

And he had to decide what to do with the woman beside him, who baffled him, challenged him, was unlike any woman he’d ever met. And who lived in such a world apart from his, he didn’t know how—or to what—he was meant to return her.