Free The Heiress Effect by Courtney Milan Page B

“There’s no need for anything
else,” he said airily. “By my count, you’re already at two.”

Chapter Five

     
    There were three skills that Miss Emily
Fairfield had found necessary in her current position in life:
lying, smuggling—and most important of all—scaling walls. It was
the last she’d put to use at the moment.
    After a tepid ten-minute walk around the
garden at midday, she’d been put down for a nap in her room as if
she were a child of four.
    She waited until the house grew quiet, the
servants departing to mop floors and go to market. Then she’d
hastily changed her clothing and scrambled down the stone wall
outside her window. She wanted to go away —anywhere, so long
as it was not here.
    She had an unapproved novel in one cloak
pocket, a handkerchief in the other, and a determination to spend
all two hours of her ridiculous nap outside.
    Titus Fairfield’s house sat at the outskirts
of Cambridge. It was a sad, two-story affair of graying stone
surrounded by drab bushes. She pulled her skirt close to avoid the
thorns of the gooseberry bush, squeezed through a narrow gap in the
back hedge, and obtained her freedom on the gravel track leading
away from town, across fields and over hills.
    This was behavior that Uncle Titus would call
foolish—setting out on her own, unaccompanied by a chaperone,
walking with real strides instead of taking the delicate steps that
befitted her status as a supposed invalid. Going out for hours
instead of minutes.
    And maybe he was right. A little bit . But the alternative—lying in bed when it was light outside, staring
at the ceiling, imagining bludgeoning her uncle with one of his law
books—was even more ill advised. That left her feeling
shaky, guilty, and almost feverishly restless. When she felt that
way, she’d watch him over breakfast, thinking idly of pulling his
bookshelf down around his head.
    Not the sort of imagery that made her proud.
She held her head high on the main road, nodding at passing
farmers. Her gown was a little too fine to make her anything other
than a lady escaped from chaperonage, but people saw what they
thought would fit in. She marched down the road, brushing the fence
posts and stone walls with the tips of her fingers, marveling in
the feel of wind on her cheeks, the taste of freedom. It was cold;
the wind bit through her gloves, and her cloak wasn’t thick enough
to keep off the worst of the chill, but she didn’t care.
    What if something happens? Her uncle’s
mournful voice seemed to drift to her on a memory. He could have
carved it in stone and set it above the mantelpiece, he’d said it
so often. What if something happens? He’d been worrying
about something happening to her for years, with the result
that nothing happened at all.
    Today, she was resolved to walk through
Grantchester. She’d seen Grantchester Road half a dozen times in
her stolen ramblings, and while a village might not be the stuff of
Mrs. Larriger’s exploits, it was something more than a handful of
goats. She would walk and smile, and nobody would know that she’d
escaped from the dreadful clutches of…of…
    Not pirates. Not whalers. Not the czar of
Russia.
    “I’ve escaped from the dreadful clutches of a
nap,” she announced to the road.
    Emily passed a farmhouse, then another,
then—a sign that the village was nearby—a grain mill. Students were
working industriously inside a grammar school. She nodded at a
smith in his yard as he examined a horse’s hooves.
    When she reached the main square, she thought
about buying an apple from a green grocer, just to prove she could.
But it seemed futile to waste her few coins on wizened fruit.
    She wanted so little—just the chance to do
the things everyone else did. Was it so much to ask?
    What if something happens?
    A bitter thought, that—that she had to fear everything, simply because of what might occur. A bitter
thought, indeed.
    And at that, Emily realized it wasn’t just
the thought that