Free Lauren Willig by The Seduction of the Crimson Rose Page A

tall girls. It makes them feel small. You really must get in the trick of looking up at them, like so.”
     
     
Mrs. Alsworthy hunched her shoulders, stuck out her neck, and attempted to look dewy-eyed.
     
     
Mary wasn’t quite sure how impersonating a myopic turtle was supposed to help her secure a husband, but it was easier not to argue. “Yes, Mama.”
     
     
Mrs. Alsworthy squinted thoughtfully at her. “And perhaps a bit more trim on the bodice…Gentlemen do so appreciate a nicely trimmed décolletage.”
     
     
“I don’t think it’s the trim, Mama,” said Mary.
     
     
As she had known she would, her mother ignored her and carried on with her own train of thought as the ribbons on her own exuberantly trimmed bodice trembled in sympathy. “So fortunate that Letty has offered to fund another Season for you—but this will have to be the last, you know. To have five Seasons looks like desperation.”
     
     
“ Letty is paying for my next Season?”
     
     
“Why, yes. Isn’t it lovely of her to take such notice of her sisters now that she is a viscountess? A viscountess!”
     
     
“Just lovely,” repeated Mary flatly. It was one thing to make the same tired rounds a fourth time, batting her eyelashes at the same rapidly diminishing crop of men, but it was quite another matter to do so on the sufferance of a younger sister. To know that every shawl, every dress, even the food on the table had been magnanimously donated by Letty for the worthy cause of helping her older sister to a husband.
     
     
On those terms, she would rather remain a spinster.
     
     
Only she wouldn’t. Either way, she would be choking on her sister’s charity. She could accept Letty’s munificence now—and meekly submit herself to being organized as Letty saw fit—in the interest of one last, desperate bid for the comparative independence of the married state. Or she could remain unwed and be a perpetual dependent upon her parents. Which, in the end, meant being Letty’s dependent, since her father’s income was scarcely enough to keep him in new books and her mother in turbans. Between the two of them, they neatly dissipated the revenue from her father’s small estate before one could say beeswax.
     
     
It was rather galling to face a future as a petitioner in the house where she had thought to be mistress.
     
     
“And Lord Pinchingdale will be paying Nicholas’s fees at Harrow! Harrow! Can you imagine! We could never have done so much.”
     
     
“Nicholas must be overjoyed,” said Mary.
     
     
Nicholas would be miserable. Her little brother was the despair of the local vicar, who had been enlisted to teach him the classics. Fortunately for Nicholas, the vicar was as nearsighted as he was hard of hearing, as well as being prone to drifting off at odd moments, a habit Nicholas had done his best to encourage. Mary would be very surprised if Nicholas knew how to read, much less in Latin. Being sent to Harrow would do wonders for him—if they didn’t expel him first. It was undoubtedly the right thing to do. Letty always knew the right thing to do. But it set Mary’s teeth on edge.
     
     
She was the eldest. She was the one who was supposed to be magnanimously funding her brother’s education and using her social consequence to bring out her younger sisters. Not the other way around.
     
     
It wasn’t right .
     
     
“Have you tried the duck?” Mary cut in, just to put a stop to the catalogue of all the benefits Letty planned to confer on her family now that she was a viscountess—a viscountess! Her mother enjoyed the title so much that the word had acquired an inevitable echo every time she uttered it.
     
     
“Duck?”
     
     
Mary took her mother by the arm and steered her towards the refreshment table. “Yes, duck. I hear it’s very good. There’s also game pie.”
     
     
Unfortunately, she didn’t think food would do much to fill the hollow feeling that seemed to have settled into the pit of her