Refining Felicity Read Online Free Page A

hair cut in a fashionable Brutus crop, a strong body, broad shoulders and slim hips and fine legs, all in the glory of Weston’s tailoring. His arrogant high-nosed face briefly turned up to where Felicity stood. Beside him was a beautiful diminutive blonde, all in pink. The marquess glanced up at Felicity with a look of amused contempt and then turned back to his companion, who was laughing up at him.
    Felicity thought the marquess’s glance of contempt was because she looked like a guy. Her pleasure in her appearance fled. She felt gawky and clumsy. The fact that the marquess might have heard of all her exploits and had taken her in dislike did not cross her mind. She felt it was just like that awful time when she had put on that pretty gown and her father had sneered at her. All of this took but a moment.
    Felicity swung a leg over the polished banister and slid down the staircase, vaulted over the polished carved heraldic beast on the bottom post and landed lightly in the hall, to cries of shock from the ladies and roars of noisy approval from the hunting crowd.
    The evening was a nightmare for Lady Barons-heath. Not once did the marquess ask Felicity to dance. He was flirting with Miss Betty Andrews, the lady in pink. He took Miss Andrews in to supper, while Felicity was partnered by Tommy Lush, a hard-swearing, hard-drinking vicar who appeared to have forgotten that his wife was present.
    Felicity drank too much at supper. Her eyes were glittering and her thin cheeks flushed. She appeared to be having a marvellous time. It would have eased Lady Baronsheath’s distress had she known her daughter was feeling bewildered and miserable, but she did not. Felicity’s behaviour was so like the earl’s, the earl who was bawling with laughter and slapping everyone on the back and telling warm stories.
    The earl was to set out on the first stage of his journey to America in the morning. Lady Baronsheath would be left behind with the horrendous job of preparing Felicity for her London Season. She had prayed that Ravenswood might propose, that
anyone
might propose, so as to make such an ordeal unnecessary. But now she would have to go through with it.
    It was when a half-drunk Felicity started whooping her way like a Highland savage through a Scottish reel that Lady Baronsheath slipped away to the drawing room and took out the crumpled newspaper and smoothed out that advertisement. She sat down and began to write. One of the grooms would start out for London that very evening. Lady Baronsheath felt she needed all the help she could get.
    Amy was down in the dark pit of the kitchen, toasting cheese, when the letter arrived. A round of Cheshire cheese had been Mr Haddon’s latest present. It had arrived two days before, and already Amy and Effy were sick of cheese but felt, for reasons of economy, that they must try to eat it all.
    She heard the drawing-room bell jangle and looked up in irritation at the row of black bells on their wires over the kitchen door.
    It was typical of Effy to go on as if they still had a house full of servants.
    Amy climbed the stairs slowly. She was feeling very tired and her back hurt. That morning, when she had looked in her glass, she had found two large crow’s-feet stamped on the puffy flesh under her eyes. Amy needed spectacles, but felt that the getting of them would underline her age, and so she had sat up reading the night before, squinting at the pages of a romance by the light of one tallow candle. Hence the crow’s-feet.
    Effy was sitting before a blazing fire in the drawing room, attired in the thinnest of muslins.
    ‘I can see your garters,’ growled Amy, slumping into a chair opposite. ‘Christ! I’m tired.’
    ‘Language! Language!’ admonished Effy.
    ‘Slut on ye,’ said Amy with a massive shrug. ‘What’s in the letter?’
    ‘The shop kindly sent it round to us because they had a delivery to make in Oxford Street hard by. It is from the Countess of Baronsheath. She needs