The Nightingale Legacy Read Online Free

that you will come into your fortune tomorrow. However, it is also true that I will continue as your trustee until you wed.”
    “And just what are a trustee’s duties as opposed to a guardian’s?”
    “As a trustee, I will advise you on investments, oversee all legal matters, grant you a sufficient allowance to meet your needs, see to your continued well-being. I was your father’s cousin, Miss Derwent-Jones. He trusted me to care for you, to see you well placed. I am pleased there is no Mr. Duncan. Men aren’t always what they seem, you know. No, you don’t know, do you? You have been protected, sheltered from gentlemen who would take advantage of your innocence. I will continue to protect you, Miss Derwent-Jones.”
    Just as he’d protected her by sending her to Chudleigh’s Young Ladies’ Academy in Nottingham, whence she’d managed to escape only three years before. She’d believed a convent couldn’t be more stifling, more deadening than the echoing chambers at Chudleigh’s, with all its giggling girlswith naught on their minds but the dancing master’s dimples. The mistresses had been so unrelenting in their quest to make every single girl just like every other single girl, all of them to be stupid but somehow charming to men, to nod and pretend to listen until their brains quite froze through, and to stitch samplers until death would thankfully overtake them, after, naturally, they’d produced a suitable number of surviving offspring.
    Thus when she’d been sixteen, she’d come down with something akin to the plague that had scared even the headmistress, Miss Beemis, into near incontinence. She’d been packed quickly back to Honeymead Manor and dear Mrs. Tailstrop. The spots, made from walnut dye mixed with a thick gray clay and smashed oak leaves until it resembled oozing boils, had finally washed off.
    “Yes,” Mr. Ffalkes continued, “I will continue to guide you. Perhaps you will be content to remain here at Honeymead Manor, Miss Derwent-Jones. Owen much loves the country.”
    “I doubt that, Mr. Ffalkes. I doubt that very much.”
    “That Owen loves the country? Of a certainty he does.”
    She said nothing. She turned and walked back into the manor. Tomorrow she would shriek at him to her heart’s content and then she would order him off her property.
     
    It was Morna, the upstairs maid, who grabbed her sleeve, placed her finger over her lips, and hissed in her ear, “Come, miss, quickly, quickly!” She ran after Morna down the long first-floor hallway to the small estate room tucked at the rear of the manor, a quite ugly chamber that she avoided because it reminded her of too many men grown tedious and dull over the generations, all of them pondering and brooding in this room, doubtless worried about their groats.
    The door wasn’t quite closed. Morna nodded to her and gently shoved her closer. It was then she heard Owen’s voice low and clear. “Please listen to me, Father. I know you want me to marry her. You’ve wanted it all along, but just listen to me this once. Caroline isn’t an easy girl. She’s stubborn. She is well used to doing just as she pleases. She doesn’t dislike me but she thinks me a fool. She won’t agree to marry me. I’ve told you that again and again. She won’t change toward me.”
    “Yes,” Mr. Ffalkes said finally. “You have mucked it right and proper, Owen.”
    She stopped cold and leaned against the crack in the door. She could hear Morna breathing rapidly behind her.
    “I can’t very well rape her,” Owen said, sounding as petulant and sulky as a child, as he always did around his father.
    “Why the devil not?”
    There was complete silence, then Owen said slowly, “She is very strong. You know her well enough by now. She tries to jest her way out of things, but I know that if she had to, she’d fight me and I would have to hurt her, even tie her down to get it done.”
    “And?”
    “And what, sir? I don’t even know if I could