Page 2 of A Widow for the Earl
“It was not a debut!” Beatrice protested. “You could not think of anything else to do with me, and you would not be parted from your own entertainment, so you took me along with you. I was just thrown into it, expected to just stay silent in a corner untilyou were both ready to depart. Instead, I observed, and now you blame me for wanting to remedy some flaws in society? In the gentlemen, particularly. Not, I might add, that you have ever cared about my ‘japes’ before.”
“You had the meager decency to not do such things so publicly before,” her father shot back. “Well, you have played silly games for the last time, Beatrice. Your mother and I have decided that you will be married, and soon. Then, you shall be your husband’s concern.”
Beatrice laughed coldly. “You and Mother decided together? I find that hard to believe. For that, you would have to actually speak to one another.”
“Your father decided,” Unity spoke up, yawning. “I agreed. A husband will be good for you.”
“Yes, because it has been so good foryou,” Beatrice retorted, an unpleasant shudder beetling down her spine.
Unity shrugged, patting down an unruly curl at her temple. “Marriage has been very pleasant for me. I have barely noticed it.” A slight note of derision laced her voice as she added, “Perhaps, you will be luckier in producing an heir. Then, everyone will be happy.”
“I am not marrying anyone,” Beatrice said stiffly, wondering what it was about her that her mother disliked so much.
She could understand Unity feeling nothing but disdain for Henry, considering they had been a marriage of convenience, to tie two strong families together, but Beatrice had never understood why she received such indifference from her mother. Such cold disregard.
In her younger years, she had suspected it was because she wasnota son and heir, but that reasoning had not quite fit. Her father was the one who cared about that, not her mother. In truth, Beatrice got the feeling that, even if she had been born a boy, Unity would still have been entirely indifferent. Not maternal in the slightest, as if the mere fact of having a child had somehow ruined her fun.
How different things might be if I had just one parent who cared…
“Youaregetting married, Beatrice,” her father replied bluntly. “The gentleman has already been chosen, and it is to happen two weeks from now. Indeed, I think you will be pleasantly surprised by the match. Consider it my way of remedying a flaw.”
Beatrice sat rigid in her chair, her soft-boiled eggs now ruined completely, her appetite replaced with a roiling nausea. “Some honesty, at last,” she said quietly. “That is all I am to you. A flaw in your grand scheme. The mistake that stole away any chance of you having a son.”
“Do not be so petulant,” Henry chided, turning up his nose as if he had just smelled something foul. “You have your use, and it has just presented itself. Andwhenyou have an heir, I shall becontent enough that I was cursed with a daughter. Everything will be righted, at last.”
Beatrice leveled a cold glare at her father, forcing a bitter smile. “There are no fewer than fifty ways of escaping this manor, Father. I know all of them.” She picked up her teacup and raised it to him, as if in celebration. “Enjoy the wedding, for I shall not be there.”
“You will, Beatrice,” Henry replied with a steady calm that unnerved her far more than any shouting could have done, as if he had already considered an escape. “You will because you are my daughter, and, for once, youshalldo as you are told.”
Refusing to give him the satisfaction of seeing her afraid, she sipped her tea, granting herself a moment to gather herself. “I would not be too certain of that.”
Just then, the drum of hoofbeats perforated the stilted silence of the breakfast room. Beatrice’s head whipped around, squinting into the morning sunlight that streaked through the diamond-hatched windows. A group of eight riders were approaching, kicking up a cloud of dust as they charged down the bare trail that served as a driveway.
Even at a distance, some of the men were familiar: friends of her father that she had encountered intermittently throughout her life. Men who tended to pay her more attention than her parents, now that she was older, though of the unwelcome kind.
I am too late. The trap was already set before I came down to breakfast.She looked back at her father, a stone of dread sinking into the pit of her stomach.
“My insurance, Beatrice,” Henry said with a smirk. “You are not the only one with tricks up their sleeve.” He took a victorious sip of his weak coffee. “In two weeks’ time, you will be Lady Albany and, my dear, you will be grateful for it.”
CHAPTER TWO
ONE YEAR LATER…
“Honestly, I am impressed,” Beatrice said blithely, tying the ribbon of her dark red bonnet underneath her chin. She wore a garnet-colored gown to match, choosing to perform the part that society had decided she should play.
“Impressed? By what?” Teresa Deverell, one of Beatrice’s dearest friends, asked with a puzzled look upon her flushed face.
Beatrice forced one of her most wicked grins, so that her friend would not worry. “That my father is still able to find anyone brave enough to marry me. Either these gentlemen are eager to take on the challenge of surviving me, and gaining the accolade of being that sole survivor, or they are not very fond of their lives.” She heard her voice catch, covering it quickly with a snort. “Iwould not take the risk.”
“Oh, my dearest Bea,” Teresa murmured, shaking her head. “Why does he not relent? Why does he keep insisting upon this?”
Beatrice shrugged. “What use is an unmarried daughter? He will not have me back at Fetterton, I have been soundly dismissed from any other residences I might have escaped to, so I have nowhere else to go but to the residence of a living husband.”
Her cousin, Valeria, who had been making adjustments to a bouquet of dried flowers, looked up from her work. “What of your own fortunes?”
“What of them?” Beatrice replied, putting a finger to her lips and nodding pointedly at the door. “I have no fortune of my own. At this point, I am uncertain of whether I even have a dowry, or if my father is just handing the same one down to whoever volunteers to be my husband next.”
Valeria cringed, mouthing,I am sorry.
