A Breath of Scandal: The Reckless Brides Read Online Free Page A

him. You only have to be engaged to him. For a time. For long enough for us to get Cassandra a suitable husband. Six months at the least, but a year if you can manage it.” Her mother had turned away, and began to pace, a dark, birdlike silhouette before the light of the windows, the long skirts of her charcoal dress swooping and swirling at her feet in agitation. “It will be three months before you can decently attend a ball, but we can use the time to plan and arrange. We must be introduced to Lady Barrington, before she leaves the country for the London Season. Yes…”
    Antigone felt upended, as if the rug had shifted beneath her feet and loosened gravity’s grip on her knees. She tried again—she had to try again to make her mother listen. “Mama, Lord Aldridge does not seem to me the sort of man who will stand for being taken so lightly. Do you not think it is wicked to try and use the man so? Not that I care particularly about his finer feelings—though frankly, I can’t see that he has them—but Lord Aldridge strikes me quite particularly as a man who is not to be trifled with.”
    “Then you shall not trifle. You will be all that is proper and good and reticent. Especially reticent. None of your outrageous hoydenish behavior, or frank talk.”
    Antigone scrambled to find a logical argument to counter her mother’s dogged, unthinking determination. Anything to keep her mother from sliding them any further down the slippery slope toward Thornhill. “Mama, look at me,” she gestured to her muddy boots and messy, windblown hair. “You ask the impossible.”
    “It is not impossible,” her mother snapped. “If you would just trust me. Trust me to know what is best for you. For all of us.”
    “Trust? Mama, you can’t expect me to wager my future—all my happiness—against something over which you have no control.” If Antigone had felt the rug pulled out from under her before, now it felt as if the earth were tilting under her feet and she was sliding inexorably down, away from everything she knew and wanted.
    “I do expect it.” Her mother whirled back at her, as sharp and relentless as a raven. “I promise you, it will be as I say. You must do this, Antigone Preston, do as you are asked, and for once in your life not try to be cleverer than everyone else. Accept Lord Aldridge’s suit. Accept his gifts, whenever he might give them. Accept your unlooked-for good fortune. You will do this.” Mama’s eyes were aglow with determination. “You will do it for Cassandra, if you will not do it for yourself. You can do no less.”
    The words the vicar had spoken less than a hour ago came back to Antigone afresh. I held my tongue, and spake nothing, but it was pain and grief to me.
    And as she could not bring herself to agree to so ruinous a plan, Antigone spake nothing.
    No. Though her throat was raw and her head ached from the pressure of the tears that did not fall, Antigone Preston did not cry. She wasn’t made for weeping.
    She swallowed down the jagged stone of her grief, and set herself to endure.

 
    Chapter Three
    More than endurance was going to be needed.
    Because she was wrong. There really was no money. None.
    For a mathematician who had always delighted in creating equations full of variables and unknowns to explain natural phenomena, her father had proved to be woefully bad at basic arithmetic. In his ledgers of the household accounts, the plusses continuously under-balanced the minuses. There was only the barest and most haphazard of incomes. Throughout the years, every so often a lump sum would appear from some unknown source to keep the books, and with them the Preston family, afloat just as it seemed they would be dragged down into the River Tick. But what those sources of income might have been were never noted.
    Antigone pored over the books, looking and looking. But there was nothing.
    And if she did not know from whence that income had come, Antigone had no hope of making it