Anne Barbour Read Online Free

her eyes. The first thing she would do after being installed at Canby House as Lady Felicity Marshall would be to order roast beef for dinner every night. With good wine to go with it. No watered beer for her ladyship! Then, she’d have some of those little cakes she’d seen in pastry shops, all covered with colored icings. In the summer, she’d cool her tongue with sherbets and in winter she’d warm herself with hot, spiced punch. She would— She stopped abruptly. Good Lord, she’d better stop thinking about her belly and concentrate on her strategy. She had a long way to go before she’d have the ordering of dinner at Canby House.
    She contemplated the forthcoming meeting with the Marquess of Canby. Seth Pinfold had told her that over the years the old man had become almost obsessed with discovering his granddaughter’s whereabouts. Without his young friend, the Earl of Branford, to protect him, he would have embraced the first claimant to come down the pike, an enterprising actress, according to Pinfold, whose story had proved to be as full of holes as Martha’s oldest pair of drawers.
    Her own background, she thought with some complacency, should hold up under any but the most intense scrutiny. She had told the truth—in the most part—to Lord Branford. She’d merely left out one critical fact. She had, she told herself, a perfectly legitimate right to declare herself the granddaughter of the old marquess. One could almost say she was doing the man a favor. He wanted a granddaughter. Martha Finch stood ready to assume that position.
    Her eyelids grew heavy and her breathing deepened. After four days spent in relative idleness of travel in a well-sprung coach, she should not be tired, but she felt drained, as though her carefully contrived design was a leech, fastening to her flesh and gathering nourishment from her life’s blood. Just before she sank into sleep, however, an image floated from the back of her mind. A small face and fine curls, bright as fairy gold falling over a pale forehead. Dear God—Mary.
    “Mary. Please forgive me, little one,” she whispered. “I do you no wrong—and you know I would have . . .” Her voice trailed off and she slipped into the blessed darkness of sleep.
     

4
     
    “My boy, it is she! It must be she!” cried the Marquess of Canby.
    Bran stood in the center of Lord Canby’s study, an elegant but comfortable chamber that featured roomy leather armchairs glowing with the patina of age, and several massive tables littered with pictures, mementos, and items of everyday life. Canby House itself was a sedate mansion set in Grosvenor Square, and had been in the family’s possession since the first development of Mayfair some two hundred years ago.
    Though approaching his seventieth year, the Marquess of Canby stood straight and tall, his silver hair still waving luxuriantly. At the moment, he was nearly dancing about the room in his delight, and watching him, Branford thought his heart might break. He loved this old man more than anyone else on earth. Certainly more than his own parents. He shrugged. Perhaps he could not fault his father and mother for busying themselves so thoroughly in their own pursuits. Even the servants had virtually ignored him. It was Lord Canby and his family who had taken note of his unprepossessing self and seen the boy beneath, lonely and unloved. Bran had grown up more on the adjoining Canby estate than his own. The sun seemed to shine with more warmth there, and the sound of laughter filled his heart.
    His throat tightened now as he strove to answer the old gentleman. How many times had the marquess reacted in just this manner to the news that another female had turned up, declaring herself to be Felicity Marshall? It was always like this. The marquess’s hopes would flare almost to combustion point, only to be dashed on the rocks of reality when the claimant invariably proved to be an unscrupulous confidence artist.
    Branford sighed.