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

reappear. Without that money, without any firm financial ground, Antigone Preston had nothing on which to stand in opposition to her mother. Nothing.
    It was, as Mama had so succinctly put it, “Lord Aldridge or the poorhouse.”
    And while Antigone was impulsive and angry enough to want to take her chances in the world, and spit into the face of fate, it was winter, and it was bitterly cold. And even a cold house was better than none. And one long look at her beautiful, fragile sister was all it took to convince Antigone to fall into line and agree to her mother’s outrageous and utterly mendacious plan.
    But within little more than a week, her endurance began to run dangerously thin. Half an hour into Lord Aldridge’s second visit, Antigone thought she would go mad from simply having to sit in the drawing room and listen to him spout ridiculous opinions about everything from the proper conduct of a hunt to the proper way to amass a collection of expensive, and utterly useless, chinoiserie. Within the hour she was entirely sure she could die from a surfeit of self-inflicted sarcasm. Alas, if only it were possible. On she lived.
    A year, Mama had said. Six months at a minimum. She would go mad. She wanted to run screaming from the room. Because she was no damn good at being a decorative sort of girl. Or good. Or obedient. Or quiet.
    And the patience and selflessness of the saints themselves would have been exhausted by Mama’s incessant, nonsensical plans. With such insanity abounding, time could do but little to loosen grief’s tenacious grip. Antigone threw herself into creating a viable alternative to the plan to use Lord Aldridge. She wrote letters to the Analytical Society, sending them her father’s work. She badgered his solicitor for some assistance in naming the sources of her father’s income. She fell asleep with her head in the ledgers, searching, searching for some clue, some antidote to stave off their poverty. But there was nothing. And the aching pain of frustration only grew as the end of the first three months of mourning came like the month of March—roaring down upon them like a lion.
    Or rather, a lioness.
    “We shall have to have a ball,” Lady Barrington, Lord Aldridge’s imperious sister, decreed from the best armchair in Mama’s lovely, if cold drawing room. “This late in the season people will be making preparations to go to London. Nothing else but a ball will keep them in the country. A small ball, to be sure, in deference to your mourning. But Miss Antigone, such as she is, must be introduced to the neighborhood. And of course, beautiful and delightful Miss Preston, as well.”
    Lady Barrington was as ample as her brother was spare, but they shared the same sharp hawklike, flinty purpose of will. Mama dared not contradict her. And so a ball it was to be, laid on in all its festive grandeur within the copious ballroom of the Barrintgon country seat, Northfield, where the Prestons were invited to be her ladyship’s guests.
    Mama was in alt at the prospect of mingling with the best society West Sussex and the eastern reaches of Hampshire had to offer, but Antigone, such as she was, had entirely different feelings.
    Normally, she had no objection to a ball. She did love to dance. It was one of the few things—along with riding at breakneck speed—she did really well. She was not always quiet and she was not always exactly correct, but she was always known to be full of friendly enthusiasm. But Antigone’s experience had been limited to country balls set in the rooms above the White Horse Inn on the village High Street, which was a very different thing from a private ball at an influential, wealthy lord’s country estate, with people she did not know—lords and ladies and whatever other manner of gentry Lady Barrington and her brother had chosen to invite.
    And it was an especially different thing when that ball was given under the aegis of the likes of Lord Aldridge for the express