Jane Ashford Read Online Free

new thought. “Perhaps there is someone you are attached to and wish to marry? That would alter the case completely.”
    Laura shook her head; she was feeling rather stunned.
    “Well then, by birth, fortune, and education, we are well matched. I should do my best to make you happy. What do you say?”
    She stared at him blankly. “I… I have to think. I am not certain. Can one marry in such a way?”

Two
    Within a week it was settled; Eliot Crenshaw had returned to London, and Laura was left shaken and breathless. She was never certain afterward just what had made her agree to the preposterous scheme. Her aunts’ unwavering conviction that unless she married she would be irretrievably ruined certainly had some influence. A visit from Mrs. Crenshaw also swayed her. This kind lady, though full of apologies for the scrape she had unwittingly had some hand in, told Laura frankly that she was delighted. Laura was just the daughter-in-law she would have chosen, she said positively, and just the woman to make Eliot happy.
    On this point Laura had been most doubtful. But Mrs. Crenshaw’s insistence, along with her son’s calm assurance that he was well pleased with the match for his part, unsettled her. And the final straw was her sister’s attitude. Clarissa was the most vehement of all. She nearly begged Laura to accept. In fact the only surprise Clarissa showed during the whole affair was when she heard that her sister might refuse. This, she thought, was madness.
    “If you do not marry now, we are lost,” she had told Laura. “They will never let us go to London, or anywhere. We will never meet any eligible gentlemen. We will become spinsters like our aunts, Laura. You will run the household with great fortitude, just as Aunt Celia does, and I shall have to take up the vapors to conquer my boredom.” She sighed comically. “I suppose I should get some smelling salts and begin to practice. I do believe I feel a spasm coming on now.” She clutched her throat dramatically.
    Laura had laughed. “You never could have the vapors, Clarissa; do not be ridiculous.”
    But Clarissa was not to be fobbed off so easily. She looked squarely into Laura’s eyes and said, “ Now I could not, of course… but after twenty years shut up in this house with you and my aunts? Who can say? You must take this chance to get us free, Laura. I love Aunt Celia and Aunt Eleanor, but they do not understand… oh anything.”
    After this conversation Laura had thought long and hard. She knew very well what her sister meant; she too had sometimes felt hemmed in and desperate at Eversly and had longed to escape and live a different kind of life. Here, it seemed, was her chance, but what an unnerving chance it was. Could she marry a complete stranger? What did she know of the man, after all?
    In the end she gave in. The pressure from her family, the urge to adventure, and the longing to escape all combined to make her throw caution to the wind and accept Eliot’s offer. He set off for London to put an announcement in the Morning Post and find them a house, and Clarissa and her aunts plunged eagerly into the question of wedding clothes. The event was to take place in the country, at the church near Eversly, in a month’s time, and then the couple was to go down to London for the season, accompanied by Clarissa. Some might find this an odd honeymoon plan, but it was one of the things that had reconciled Laura to the scheme in the first place.
    ***
    The weeks passed rather more quickly than she wished. In her quiet moments Laura often had second thoughts; several times she nearly summoned the courage to change her mind. But each time, she was stopped by the very considerations that had led her to accept the proposition. What lay ahead for her, and for Clarissa, if she did not go through with it?
    And so she did. The Right Honorable Miss Laura Lindley, spinster, of St. Andrew’s Parish, Lincolnshire, was married to Mr. Eliot Crenshaw of London and