The Emerald Duchess Read Online Free Page A

and she knew she had her answer. Interesting condition or no, Aunt Mathilda was going to come to her aid by fair means or foul. Somehow she knew instinctively that the lady would be delighted to assist in whatever was necessary to remove her, and the memory of her mother, from Berks forever.
    As if fate had relented at last, everything went smoothly from then on. With a great deal of relief, Lady Wyndham wrote a glowing reference, and to it Emily added another she wrote herself from a fictional Mrs. Salisbury-Jones, who, she claimed, was about to sail to India.
    As she waited to hear from the lawyer, Emily kept busy making over some of her mother’s more sober clothes, and stitching aprons and caps from some white muslin gowns.
    The news that the cottage had been sold came at last, and Emily went to the churchyard one showery October afternoon to say a final good-bye to her mother. Already the pain of her death and the betrayal she had felt at first at her mother’s way of life had faded: now she just felt sadness that such a beautiful woman had had to resort to such tactics in order to live in luxury , and regret that she had not been strong enough to try to survive some other way.
    As she stared down at the grave with its simple headstone, Emily made a silent promise, clenching her hands in the pockets of her cape. “No matter what it takes, I will survive, Mama, you may be sure of that. And I will do it without stooping to the role you played.”
    She raised her chin and stared with unseeing eyes at the rooks who were circling the stone church tower, crying to each other. She did not feel the chill wind that rustled the dying grass and stirred the leaves at her feet. Somehow, from somewhere, she felt a deep sense of peace, almost as if what she had planned was the right path for her, after all.

 
    1
    In November, in the year 1814, as Margaret Nelson, lady’s maid, made her way to Number Twelve Charles Street, Mayfair, she suddenly recalled the promise she had made to herself in the churchyard by her mother’s grave, and her lips twisted in a wry smile.
    It was true she had survived, but at a cost it was just as well she had not known would be required of her at the time. As she recalled the young innocent she had been, so sure of herself and so determined to make her own way in the world, she had to shake her head. Since that day she had been hungry, overworked, reviled by her employers, and ridiculed by her fellow servants. She had also been pursued, and it had taken more character than she had known she possessed not to give in to despair and take the easy way out.
    Heaven knows she had had plenty of opportunities. She had expected that she might have trouble with the male servants she encountered, but she had not thought the nobility — the sons and brothers and even the husbands of her mistresses — might also consider her fair game. Indeed, it was because of the younger son of the family in Yorkshire that she had left her latest post. Not, she told herself as she avoided a crossing sweeper, that she was sorry to leave Oak Park. Her attic room, shared with three other maids, had been unheated in winter and stifling in summer, and the poor, scanty food left her constantly hungry. Her mistress, a young lady about to make her bow to society, had been spoiled and ill-tempered, and given to temper tantrums if she had to wait even a minute for her maid’s services. The nights Emily had dragged herself up to bed, her feet and ankles so swollen from fourteen or fifteen hours of work that she could barely remove her shoes, were more than she cared to remember.
    Emily paused in a doorway to consult the piece of paper in her hand. She hoped that this Lady Quentin she was going to be interviewed by was a kinder woman, and that she would get the job. She had made too many trips to the Free Registry for the Placement of Faithful Servants already, and her money was running low. If she did not get the position, she would have