Page 4 of Lessons for Marquesses
Georgiana St.Clair was in possession of a little-known fact: The seventh Marquess of Eastwick was…
“A handsome devil,” her cousin Oliver St. Clair announced as he strode across the study, a finger jabbing the dust motes floating in a shaft of sunlight.
Oliver, the consummate parliamentarian, could sell a bridge over dry, flat land. Besides, Georgiana knew the Eastwicks were rotten through and through. And the latest Marquess of Eastwick was…
“Just the sort of man to help you,” Oliver said.
Georgiana fell back in the chair and crossed a booted ankle over her knee. She flicked her thumb against the penknife’s edge, the knife she had unstuck from the Marquess of Eastwick’s caricature tacked to the wall opposite before Oliver had entered the room.
Kitty Babbington, the portrait’s artist and Georgiana’s friend since they were in leading strings, stood against said wall, hiding the unflattering rendering. At barely five feet, Kitty was forced to her tiptoes.
Six feet from her boots to her wig, Georgiana thought she really should relieve her friend. She pressed her hands to her doeskin-encased thighs, ready to rise.
“Lord Acomb,” Aunt Charlotte ventured over her tea, using Oliver’s courtesy title, “perhaps you could tell us more about the Marquess of Eastwick.”
Georgiana dropped back to suffer more on the marquess while Oliver cast a curious glance at Kitty as he paused in his travels over the carpet. Like daggers, his eyes stuck on her friend’s black curls just barely covering the marquess’s caricature. “What are?—?”
At Georgiana’s diverting cough, Oliver looked to Georgiana with a squint. “I was saying, the marquess is…”
Narrow-shouldered?Georgiana thought.With protruding ears, a paunch, and spindly legs? Perpetually dabbing his hooked nose with a lace handkerchief?
“Capable,” Oliver concluded firmly.
Georgiana matched his resolve. “I am not selling Farendon.”
“He is tall.”
“Well, good for him.”
“Wealthy.”
“Obviously.”
“You could marry him,” Oliver said. “And save Farendon.”
Georgiana smacked the penknife to the worn table that served as a desk because she had been forced to sell the actual desk to pay a fraction of her debt. She knew what was expected of her. Complete surrender of everything she was, everything she loved.
She had been blissfully ignorant of expectations, apart from her parents’, until the formidable, beloved William St. Clair had dropped face-first into his winning hand and departed the world. Foul play, said the gossips. Heartsick, said the coroner. The magistrate had closed the case before it had begun, leaving Georgiana shocked, bereft. And as her dearest mother had passed when she was seven, an orphan. An insolvent orphan.
That too, smacked of foul play.
Farendon and her racing horses were on the brink of ruin. The estate yielded far less than her creditors demanded. Oliver had sold four properties, her stock on the exchange, and her portions in shipping, steel, and textile businesses. Chedworth, the haunted home of her childhood, had been for sale for months, and no one would buy it. Cursed, it was.
She still owed near thirty thousand. It didn’t seem like a real number.
Georgiana pressed to her feet, towering over the room’s occupants. “No man, even if I wished it—which I do not—would marry me.”
Oliver nodded eagerly. “True. True. But that is why your aunt is here.”
A painful lesson learned. Her parents had allowed her to be what the world had swooped in upon his death to rectify.
Her.George.
Her parents had often remarked that Georgiana had been a better daughter than the finest son in England.
Miss Charlotte Philips, her mother’s sister, had arrived from York three months after her father’s death. Standing at Farendon’s sitting room door with Oliver, Charlotte had turned the color of bran mash fed a colicky horse when she had spied Georgiana splayed upon the sofa in breeches.
She had frowned at Georgiana’s spread legs and scoured the length of her suit of mourning black up to her wig. “At the request of your cousin, I am here to make you a lady.”
