Barbara Metzger Read Online Free Page B

come-out that spring. Rosellen had nothing to look forward to but at least two score more years of drudgery and disrespect. She'd grow old and ink-stained, her gnarled fingers permanently curled around a pen, her voice coarsened by a lifetime of carping, “Ladies, mind your uprights."
    But Susan had an idea. Her mother was an invalid, especially when it suited her to cry off from dreary musicales and mandatory morning calls. The Dowager Viscountess Stanford was still a leading light in the belle monde, but she was not up to accompanying her young daughter to museums and libraries and shops, picnics to Richmond, or boat rides to Vauxhall. Susan was going to need a companion, and who better to fill the position than her own dear Miss Lockharte?
    Rosellen was in alt. Not only would she escape the penny-pinching of her employer and the petty meanness of the other instructors, but she'd have hope again, hope of a life for herself. She'd be in London, where anything was possible. Oh, she didn't dream that some wealthy peer would take one look at her turquoise eyes—her only claim to glory, actually—and declare himself smitten.
    No, Society gentlemen were too far above her touch and too low in her esteem, after her last encounter with the breed of care-for-naughts. She thought only to find herself in the vicinity of a clerk or a secretary or a younger son, anyone who might wish a good housekeeper, a loyal wife, a loving mother for his children. He needn't be wealthy or titled or well placed in the ton. Rosellen's requirements were simple: the gentleman had to be kind, with a modicum of learning, and he had to be able to afford a wife. Was that asking too much? Rosellen didn't think so, and neither did Susan, who promised there were scads of such likely candidates in the vicinity of Stanford House, Grosvenor Square. Her brother had contacts with the War Office, with his investment bankers, with his estate managers. Her mother knew everyone else.
    If not, Susan swore, if every man in London was deaf, dumb, or poor, Rosellen could stay on with her as the young lady's paid companion. Then she could be governess to the five children Susan wanted, after Miss Alton found her own Sir Lancelot. He, naturally, would be everything Rosellen's humble parti was not: well born and well breeched. And devastatingly attractive, Susan insisted. Rosellen wasn't sure about the five children, or the emphasis her friend was putting on the gentleman's outward appearance instead of his inner character, but she didn't care. So long as he could afford to pay her fair wages, enough that she might have a pension and a cottage of her own someday, Susan could marry a troll. A nice troll, of course, for sweet Susan deserved no less.
    Rosellen was like a parched wanderer lost in the desert. Susan was the guide pointing toward the oasis. Except the water hole disappeared when Rosellen approached it. Was Susan's affection just a mirage then? Rosellen didn't want to believe so. It was easier to accept that Miss Alton was a pretty widgeon with more hair than wit. Susan hadn't foreseen any problems, but she hadn't an ounce of intellect. Rosellen hadn't remembered that when she gave her notice to Miss Merrihew and packed her bag. And Susan hadn't remembered that she needed her brother's approval before hiring a companion.
    The viscount had arrived to fetch his sister home from school in a great flurry of outriders, with Miss Merrihew curtsying so low, her brother had to haul her back to her feet. With one wave of his manicured hand, the viscount ordered the bags packed. With another wave he declined to take tea with the toadying twosome. With a third and final flick of his lace-edged wrist, he dismissed his sister's new companion.
    "Absurd” was all he said, with a sneer, before turning his caped back on Miss Lockharte and all her aspirations. She might have been an ant on his picnic cloth, a speck of lint on his elegant superfine sleeve. She might have been the dust