Read Amy Lake for Free Online

to his eyes. 
    “Lady Celia Brompton,” I finished for him, before he was totally overcome.
    “Yes!  Oh, yes!  Sister, you cannot understand—before this moment, I knew not love.”
    I restrained a sudden urge to stand up and slap some sense into him.  Lady Celia Brompton—she is quite pretty, I will grudgingly admit—is the daughter of His Grace, the Duke of Wenrich.  A duke .  And Freddie, as the eldest son of an earl, is an acceptable match for such as Lady Celia, generally speaking, but the Brompton family is quite another matter.
    They are the stuffiest of the stuffy, the proudest of the proud.  Cassandra calls the duchess ‘the implacable one’.  And the three sons and daughter are well-known, in a society full of waste, excess, and spoiled children, as some of the most difficult of the lot.  Lord Brompton’s eldest son, the heir, is said to have had a footman whipped, and a valet turned off without reference after a wrinkle was discovered in one of his cravats. 
    “And does the young lady return your affections?” I asked my brother.
    He stood up, offended.  “La, Reggie, you sound like a spinster aunt!”
    The accusation stung.  I would not be so, I thought, if you would take some responsibility for your own life.  
     “She does, as it happens.”  Freddie turned serious.  “We have pledged ourselves to one another.”
    The sinking feeling turned into a hard knot in my stomach.  My brother is thoughtless and a wastrel—in matters of blunt.  And ’tis true he is accustomed to proclaim himself lost for love every other fortnight, but he does no harm, and I had never known him to be a rakehell with young ladies.  The only affections he toys with are his own.
    He had pledged himself to this girl?  I had no need to inquire if the duke’s permission had been obtained.  It had not. 
    “There is only one cloud on my horizon,” said Freddie, his eyes filling again.
    I would just bet there was.
    “The duke?” I said.
    My brother’s demeanor had circled from happy whistling all the way round to wretched despair.  “He will not allow it.”
    “Mmm.”
    “I have not asked, of course, but—Reggie, the man is impossible!”
    “He is with pockets to let, you mean.”
    Freddie looked up at me, and nodded.  “What am I to do?” he said.
    * * * *
     
    The Duke of Wenrich’s pecuniary tribulations were the scandal of the haut ton , and had been so for several years; it was one of the things I had been first informed of at my come-out.  Lady Helen, with her excellent resources, claims that his grace’s problems originated with the East India Company, where his father had been heavily invested, and which had suffered a series of major setbacks a generation ago involving a famine in Bengal.  Others—I’d heard all the stories—suggested that the Tea Act had been somehow involved.
    But what everyone knew was that my lord duke required funds, and plenty of them.  It was widely understood that his eldest son had married for money, and that Lady Celia was expected to do the same.
    Making Lord Wilfred Knowles, son of the Earl of Aveline, an unsuitable suitor.
    “It won’t do, Freddie,” I told him.  There was no need to equivocate about a cause so hopeless.
    “It must!  I cannot live without her.”
    Lud.  I was tempted to stand up and leave.  I’ve heard this speech before, albeit given to my parents. 
    My guests must have the finest wine.  I cannot live without it!
    I cannot live without a barouche!
    There was no end to the things my brother could not live without.  The only difference was that this time, the wished for item was a person, and the earl’s money was far from sufficient to buy her.
    Perhaps I should have realized at that moment that my life was about to change, and that the events which were to leave me un-chaperoned in Bath had already begun.
     

Chapter 6:  The Viscountess Requests
     
    Lord Davies did not yet know that Lady Regina was normally an