Free The Deception of the Emerald Ring by Lauren Willig Page A

sleep if I'm to set my cap at a new prospect tomorrow. Good night."
    Letty found the door neatly closed in her face.
    There was very little she could say to a door, especially when she didn't know what she wanted to say in the first place. Please don't hate me? I'll make it right? She had been so sure that Mary's feelings for Lord Pinchingdale went no deeper than his title and fortune. Admittedly, there was a good deal there to love, but it wasn't the sort of love that drove susceptible maidens into a decline. If she barged back in, demanding answers, Mary would merely smile her enigmatic smile and reply in stinging commonplaces, turning Letty's questions back against her like a mythical hero's enchanted shield. It was impossible to tell whether Mary was speaking the bald truth and mocking herself for it, or hurt and hiding it. Either way, the acid tone was the same. Either way, she kept Letty on the other side of a door harder to breach than wood.
    It had always been that way, too.
    Well, nothing was final yet. If Mary wanted him, she could have him. One hand on the banister, Letty hurried back down the stairs in search of her father. There had to be some way around this ridiculous situation. It was ridiculous, as ridiculous as one of the Greek tragedies of which her father was so fond, where the hero inevitably managed to charge straight into whatever doom he was trying to evade. Letty had never had much patience for those heroes. Yet here she was, having tried to thwart an elopement, winding up having accidentally eloped herself.
    Accidentally eloped. The very words made Letty wince. One didn't accidentally elope. One accidentally picked up the wrong book at Hatchards, or paired a dress with the wrong-colored shawl. One didn't accidentally find oneself in a carriage at the dead of night with a member of the opposite sex, bound for matrimony.
    She supposed Oedipus hadn't exactly intended to kill his father and marry his mother either.
    Letty nearly barreled into her father, who was just starting up the stairs, nightcap on his head and candle in hand. "I must speak with you."
    "Must you?" Mr. Alsworthy stifled a yawn. "As much as I hate to agree with your mother, the hour is, indeed, unnaturally advanced."
    "Papa " Letty said warningly.
    Mr. Alsworthy bowed to the inevitable. "If you must."
    Letty's breath released in a long rush. "Thank you."
    Mr. Alsworthy led the way into his book room, a tiny square of a room filled with the boxes of books he had insisted on bringing down from Hertfordshire, augmented by his purchases since their arrival in London. The volumes filled the shelves and tottered in uneven stacks along the corners of the room. With the ease of long practice, Letty edged between two tottering piles and removed another from the room's only extra chair.
    "How did you get yourself into such a pickle, my Letty?" inquired Mr. Alsworthy kindly, as Letty lowered the tower of books to the floor with a decided thump.
    "With the best of intentions," began Letty irritably.
    Mr. Alsworthy wagged a reproving finger at his favorite child. "That should cure you of those."
    "I thought we were being robbed."
    Mr. Alsworthy grimaced at the dust furring the edge of his desk. "A most undiscriminating burglar, to be sure."
    Letty had long ago learned that the only way to conduct a conversation with her father was to ignore his little asides. "Instead," she continued determinedly, "I found Mary packing for a midnight elopement."
    "Unsurprising," murmured Mr. Alsworthy. "Unfortunate, but not unexpected."
    "I went downstairs to talk some sense into Lord Pinchingdale," Letty hurried on before her father could interrupt again, "and was accidentally carried off. It was all a ridiculous mistake. And now " Letty frowned at a battered copy of Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France.
    Mr. Alsworthy steepled his fingers in front of himself. "Shall I begin for you? You," he said, "wish to remove yourself from this hasty arrangement.