Free The Hazards Of Hunting A Duke by Julia London Page B

yet you won’t allow them to eat more than a few potatoes —
    ”
    “I suppose I should give them your food, should I?” she responded, just as irritably. “Let her go,” she said again. “When Egbert r eturns, you’ll all be gone,” she added ominously, and turned on her heel, quitting the room.
    Her words sobered them all. No one spoke —they just looked at each other as the truth of Lucy’s words closed in around them.
    “I leave on the morrow,” Greer said q uietly. “Mrs. Smithington desires to begin in Hertfordshire and leisurely make our way west.”
    “Oh no,” Phoebe said, and a tear slid down her cheek. “I won’t be able to bear your absence.”
    “Dear God,” Ava sighed, giving in, and moved to embrace her sister . Greer joined them, and the three of them held each other tightly for some time, whispering that they would reunite, that this would all one day
    be behind them like a bad dream.
    That afternoon, as Ava walked across town to the parish poorhouse, she struggled to hold on to her
    belief that these were only temporary circumstances for them, that there would come a day again,
    perhaps soon, when their lives would return to what they had always known. Ava had to believe it, for she had nothing else in which to believe.
    And besides, she’d had another idea, something she’d been mulling over for several weeks now.
    No one could possibly understand the weight of the responsibility she felt a long with her grief of losing
    her mother, but she was keenly aware that as the oldest, she was the one who should look after Phoebe and Greer. She felt alarmingly unprepared to do that and terribly anxious about it—she fully expected
    Lucy was right, that her stepfather would want to rid himself of the three of them quickly.
    Worse, she had
    no doubt that she would be the first to be offered up in marriage.
    It was inevitable. It had been inevitable from the moment of her birth. But it had occurred to her—late one night as she lay awake worrying, as had become her habit —that if marriage was indeed inevitable, then wouldn’t she be wise to take advantage of her stepfather’s absence and shape her own destiny?
    In other words, if she secured an offer for her hand —a proper offer—before her stepfather presented one to her, she could provide for Greer and Phoebe and thereby prevent them from suffering the same
    fate as she, of having to marry before they were fully prepared to do so.
    She really had no other recourse. S he was a woman. It wasn’t as if she could suddenly take up a trade and earn their keep, for God’s sake —or buy a commission in the Royal Navy, or inherit her mother’s estate, or invest the thirty pounds she kept hidden in a porcelain box.
    Yet marriage! It seemed such an astonishingly huge proposition.
    Lord God, how she missed her mother! Her mother would know precisely what to do.
    Life had been so gay when she was alive —Mother embraced life and relished the soirées and dinners she attended, loved more tha n anything else to shop along Bond Street for clothing and accessories and
    linens and furnishings for her house. She was always laughing, delighting in the tales the girls would bring back to her from the many assemblies they attended, matching them with tales of her own.
    She’d been a good mother to them. She’d taken Greer in when she was eight, and while Ava’s father was alive, they had all lived at Bingley Hall.
    In the summer, the girls would play in the meadow amid wildflowers and grazing horses.
    During the long cold winters, Mother would organize plays for them to perform, and they would dance and sing for
    Father, who always clapped enthusiastically for each and every performance. If they did their
    schoolwork, they were rewarded with a trip to Mother’s closets to play among her many gowns and hats and shoes.
    “Mind your manners and be a proper young lady, and one day you shall have as many gowns as this,”
    she’d told them all, twirling