Barbara Metzger Read Online Free

unruly, undisciplined brood. Besides, Gwen already had her own woman to care for the unattractive, unappealing trio, thank goodness.
    As for Belinda, she was no relation to the Crofts whatsoever, and Clarence refused to accept responsibility for her at all. Gwen refused to speak her name out loud. Delia, however, could no more throw Miss Gannon out of the house than she could Nanny or Aunt Eliza, for as long as she had the house. She supposed she ought to be thankful to Clarence and Gwen for letting them stay on until the baby arrived. Theirs was stone-cold charity, however, refusing to enter their new inheritance while it was under such a cloud.
    After the birth? Delia could not imagine what was to become of them. Without George, she had almost no options left. She was a mere woman, without income, without a profession. Heavens, she no longer had a home to call her own. Marriage was a wisp of a possibility, since she still had her dowry—or Clarence did—if Aunt Rosalie could find a gentleman willing to marry a tarnished bride, with such encumbrances. No, Delia thought, any man so willing would merely want a bed warmer, a brood mare, an unpaid bondwoman. Miss Croft would rather be paid for her labor, she decided, and she’d rather clean chimneys than cater to any such man. If she married, a rapidly fading dream, she’d wed for love or not at all. Hadn’t she turned down Lord Dallsworth numerous times? She could have had security, a home, a settled future—at the cost of sharing them with Lord Dallsworth. She shuddered, and not from the cold seeping through her cloak. Not for a minute did she regret refusing the baron when George was alive to support her and her decision. Dallsworth would not have supported her dependents now.
    For the millionth time, Delia wondered how George could have left them like this, how they were to go on. The daffodils would bloom, the trees would unfurl new leaves, a baby would come into the world—the ultimate miracle—and she’d have another mouth to feed.
    Exhausted from worry and work, Delia sank down onto the hard bench beneath the bare-branched lilacs, glad of the solitude. Inside the house she was alone in the midst of the other women, more alone than she’d been in her life, but having to be strong for their sakes. Now, out here, she could confess to herself that she missed her mother, dead these six years, and her father, gone for two. They had always sheltered her, cared for her, guided her. She missed dear bacon-brained George, despite all his faults, the worst of which, of course, was dying.
    Delia dabbed at her eyes with the mobcap she’d taken to wearing in a vain attempt to appear more respectable, as if a cap were going to prove her decency when over twenty years of virtue had not.
    Foolish, foolish girl, she chided herself, tears would not pay the piper. She pulled the cap back on, over the long coiled braid she wore for simplicity these days. She tucked a few errant red locks beneath the brim, and rose from the bench. Enough of privacy and self-pity, she told herself. She had things to do, preparations to make. The baby would need clothes whether it had a father or not.
    On her way back toward the house, Delia paused when she heard a horse on the high road. She waited to see if the rider passed on, although heaven knew she was not expecting company. The horse trotted to the gates to Faircroft, slowed, and turned up the drive. Delia saw the big horse, so pale as to be snowy white in the sun, and the rider in a scarlet coat.
    George had come home after all! The army was wrong, they’d buried the wrong man! “Mindle,” she shouted toward the house and her waiting butler, her father’s old valet, “Mindle, get Aunt Lizzie, get everyone. Come see who has—”
    It was not George, of course.
    The bare-headed rider had fair hair, Delia could see now, not George’s flame-shaded red. He was bigger, bulkier than her slim brother, and he had a deal more gold trim and ribbons