Read True Story (The Deverells, Book One) for Free Online

Deverell was the father of six—
seven, if the rumors involving paternity of the mute boy he'd
adopted several years ago were ever confirmed. She'd heard that his
former wife now resided in Edinburgh, although the lady had enjoyed
a separate life away from her husband for a long time before they
were finally divorced.
    It was a terrible scandal, of course.
Slow and expensive to achieve, divorce was seldom attempted. Women
had no choice in the matter; they had no legal identity separate
from their husbands, and so if any suit was brought it had to be
initiated by the man. Olivia had some knowledge of the
complications involved, since her father was once a principal
partner in the law firm of Chalke, Westcott and Chalke. She had
taken great interest in her father's work and helped him with
correspondence when his eyes were very bad and his hand trembled
too much to hold a pen. With Olivia at his side, he had worked up
to the very day he died. Therefore she knew a vast deal about the
law, including the difficulties of divorce, which was a costly
enterprise— and not merely in the financial sense. It also ruined
the reputation of everyone it touched.
    If they had a reputation worth saving
in the first place, which True Deverell did not.
    "Livy, you wretched thing," her
stepbrother, Christopher, had exclaimed, "you cannot consider
living under the same roof as a man like that for six months. What
will folk think?"
    She had replied, "I must go where I am
needed. Besides all his children will be there and, no doubt, many
other people too. He is a busy man with a very full life." And, as
she might have reminded her stepbrother in his own words, True
Deverell would never look twice at a girl like her, so she ought to
be safe.
    "But you are needed here," he'd
argued.
    "I'm quite sure you can manage without
me." After all, sometimes he didn't even know she was in the same
room.
    "You are only just out of full
mourning. Again. Your reputation—"
    "Considering what happens to most
other men in my life," she pointed out, "Mr. Deverell has more
cause to distrust my company than I do to fear his."
    On his way out to a fitting with a
fashionable tailor whose services he couldn't really afford,
Christopher did not stay to worry long about his thrice-widowed
stepsister's reputation. "It is impossible to quarrel with such a
headstrong woman. I might as soon blow into the wind. You have
chosen to enter a den of iniquity, Livy. Since Chalke is aiding and
abetting you in this improper, foolhardy idea, for reasons known
only to him, I suppose I must tell everyone that you've gone into
the country to recuperate from some illness."
    She couldn't imagine who this
"everyone" might be, for she sincerely doubted she'd be much
missed. Besides, she had tried the ideas and pursuits considered
proper for a young lady and look what happened. Good men
died.
    Now she sat alone in the large kitchen
of Roscarrock Castle— the den of supposed iniquity— and realized
she couldn't hear another soul anywhere in the house. So much for
all those other people she'd expected to find surrounding her new
employer. From the surly butler's description, it seemed as if the
notorious fellow had become something of a recluse living on this
island.
    She thought how desperate Mr.
Deverell's wife must have been to get away, since she allowed her
husband to accuse her of adultery and thereby risked the whole of
grand society snubbing her for the remainder of her days. And while
that lady had theoretically chewed her own elegant foot off to
escape, she, Olivia Monday, had put herself voluntarily into this
eccentric fellow's company.
    Mad as a March hare– she had to be,
just as her stepbrother had proclaimed.
    Glancing upward to the
shining rows of copper pots and fragrant bunches of dried herbs
hanging overhead, she muttered wryly to herself, "I don't suppose
the fashionable Lady Charlotte ever spent much time in this
kitchen." Of course, as the daughter of an earl, Mr.