Free Victoria and the Rogue by Meg Cabot Page A

had mentioned that his mother wished to hold a bridal picnic, Victoria had wondered—to
    herself, of course—if the woman was not perhaps unsound in the head. But now that she approached the
    series of white sheets spread out upon the grass, and saw the uniformed footmen, in their powdered wigs
    and coattails, standing about with silver trays of champagne glasses and bowls of fat ripe strawberries
    dipped in sugar, she saw that the word picnic, in England, meant something far different than it did back
    in India. In India picnics were hardly popular affairs, thanks to the heat, the constant threat of attack by
    tigers or bandits, and the throngs of impoverished beggars that gathered around the picnic blankets with
    their palms stretched out and their mouths opened hungrily. Victoria had never once attended a picnic
    where she did not end up giving away three quarters of her own food to the less fortunate, while her
    uncles had always insisted on embarking on such outings with an armed escort of no less than twenty
    men… an undertaking that made picnics in their area hardly a popular form of entertainment.
    Picnics in England were obviously something else entirely, if the coolly elegant scene before Victoria was
    any indication. There wasn’t a tiger in sight, let alone any armed militiamen. If there were beggars, they
    certainly ventured nowhere near. And as for bandits, the closest to them Victoria could detect was
    another group of well-dressed picnickers a few hundred feet away.
    Hugo guided Victoria toward a pleasantly plump older woman who had laugh lines radiating from the
    corners of her bright blue eyes, and a lot of very dark—surely dyed— curls peeping out from beneath
    her bonnet brim.
    “Mother,” Hugo said to the woman with a bow, “may I present at last my bride-to-be, Lady Victoria
    Arbuthnot.” Victoria, her heart beating wildly—for all she could think was, Supposing she doesn’t like
    me?—curtsied prettily and said, “So honored to make your acquaintance, ma’am.”
    The dowager Lady Malfrey, however, was not one to stand on ceremony, since she instantly reached
    out and seized Victoria by both shoulders and pulled her in for a long—and rather tight, to Victoria’s way
    of thinking— embrace.
    “At last, at last!” cried the dowager Lady Malfrey. Her voice was quite childlike in its tenor and pitch. “I
    have heard so much about you, Lady Victoria, I feel as if I know you already! But you are so much
    prettier than anyone said. Hugo, why did you not tell me she was so very, very lovely?”
    Hugo stood looking down upon them with a twinkle in his blue eyes—eyes that, Victoria saw now, he’d
    inherited from his mother.
    “I believe I did,” he said with a chuckle. “Did I not tell you she was fair as the evening star?”
    To be compared to the evening star was, of course, a compliment beyond all compliments, and Victoria,
    blushing with pleasure, thought she might actually die from joy… but first she rather hoped to extricate
    herself from her future mother-in-law’s embrace, as that good woman still held on to her with a
    surprisingly strong grip.
    “We shall be the best of friends,” the dowager declared, her cheek very soft upon Victoria’s. “The best
    of friends, I can already tell. Welcome… welcome, my child, to the family.”
    While this greeting was very nice indeed, it instantly set Victoria on her guard, for she knew very well
    that mothers-and daughters-in-law could never be friends. Allies, perhaps, against the men in the family,
    who would inevitably muddle things with their imprudent purchases and dirty boots. But never, ever
    friends. Victoria had listened as each of her ayah’s daughters wept after moving in to her husband’s
    home, only to find that the mother-in-law who had insisted before their wedding that they were the best
    of friends had turned around and spoken badly of her to the servants and all of her other
    daughters-in-law at the earliest