Page 1 of Sloth: The Fallen Earl
Chapter 1
London, England
Bang-Bang-Bang
Miss Cressida Alby tried to figure out the source of the pounding that’d roused her from sleep. The world rocked and pitched and bounced under her, and she attempted to open her eyes.
It took several attempts to lift her seemingly weighted lashes. When she did, she was greeted by a shroud of darkness and biting chill. Considering Cressida lived in a hovel that served as her home in Ratcliffe, some of the most dangerous streets in England, it wasn’t an unfamiliar way to find herself.
This pitiless chill, however, proved even more unforgiving than what she’d become accustomed to over the years. That, combined with the jolting oscillation, put her somewhere else.
Cressida blinked slowly.
At some point, she’d fallen asleep in the corner of her brother’s once-grand chariot. Adorned in gilded paint, panels, and upholstery its chipped paint had long since faded to a sickly shade of yellow.
Why was she—?
Her gaze collided with a vaguely familiar lady. Between the woman’s classical Grecian-inspired coiffure, diaphanous gown, and graceful but voluptuous figure, a beauty such as her would only find someone like Cressida wanting. Why, with the lady’s creamy white complexion and her features, she may as well have been the Divine Lady herself—Emma, Lady Hamilton—resurrected.
The stranger—Cressida attempted to recall the exquisitely beautiful woman’s name—yelled and simultaneously poundedon the ceiling.Bang-Bang-Bang.“Would you hurry, you stupid dolt?”
Where was Cressida going and why was this nasty stranger accompanying her?
Something nagged at Cressida. Her sluggish mind struggled to recall her heated exchange with her brother Stanley Alby, Baron Newhart. He’d often struck her in the head, and her brain would become clouded afterwards. This fog felt very much like that.
At one point, he’d lifted his hand to strike Cressida, but Stanley’s recently wedded wife, Lady Marianne, had intervened and saved Cressida. What had her sister-in-law said?
Cressida grappled with the memory.
“…if you mark her, you’ll cost both of…”
She was close. So close to making out the details around that angry spat between the new husband and wife.
There came the crisp snap of a whip. “Hyah!”
As if she felt Cressida staring, the satin-cloaked lady’s gaze flickered Cressida’s way.
Then like a hideous and oppressive nightmare, the memories came, but in drips and drabs…
Cressida recalled being roughly yanked from a sound sleep by her brother’s man, Fellowes. The pockmarked, broken-nosed bastard, who served the baron in every role from footman to valet to guard to a grain bag for his employer to beat on, had dragged her through the cold, dark halls.
At nearly a foot taller than Cressida’s brother, Fellowes had a scrawny frame compared to Stanley’s bulk, but each man taught Cressida that, regardless of size, all men could pack a punch. She’d not put up a fight when he’d manhandled her or when she was deposited before her brother in their single furnished parlor.
She’d been forced to join Stanley and his wife, Lady Marianne. At that point, Cressida discovered the latest evil her brother had been up to this night.
Why couldn’t she remember? Why?
Something about the ancient Duke of Harrowden.
Concentrating, however, proved a strain to Cressida. She felt like she was floating, hovering outside of and above her body, staring down at the strange, nasty woman shrilly issuing orders while Cressida sat mute.
Bang-Bang-Bang.“Hurry, you bloody dolt!”
Flecks of gilded paint chips sprinkled down like specks of shining dust before her eyes, which had never felt heavier than they did in this moment.
What a rude thing.Everything about the lady marked her as high-born.
Only after the passing of a distant relative a few years earlier had Cressida’s family been elevated to the peerage; but she’d been inhabiting thenobleworld long enough to have ascertained thatactual politeness, when it referred to Polite Society, was nothing more than an empty word.
