Free The Speckled Monster by Jennifer Lee Carrell

man nonetheless, already married, with a child on the way.
    â€œIt will do me no good—nor you either,” she said. “He’ll just disinherit you.”
    â€œHe can’t,” said Will with a wry smile. “Caught fast in his own favorite trap of entail.”
    She smiled back, in spite of herself. “Perhaps not disinherit. But he can make your life hell.”
    â€œHe has already delivered me there,” he said, looking steadily off into the distance. “Mary,” he began, scanning her face, “might there be . . . is there any other man—of smaller fortune, perhaps—who might make you happy?”
    â€œIt is impossible, Will,” she whispered, squeezing against the lump in her throat. “He is impossible.”
    He took both her shoulders in his hands. “However much Father is against it,” he said with fierce gallantry, “I will assist you in making you happy after your own way. You have only to ask.”
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    The rest of the family left to spend the Christmas holidays in London, leaving Mary and Frances behind at Thoresby, confined to the few small rooms that were all that their father would heat. She took refuge in her correspondence with Philippa.
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    12 December 1711
    Your obliging letters, Dear Phil, are some consolation to a poor distracted wretch of wretches. ’Tis yet dubious whether I go to Hell or no, but while I delay between doubting and choosing, here I stay, spending the irretrievable days of youth in looking upon withered trees and stone walls. A decayed oak before my window, leafless, half rotten, and shaking its withered top, puts me in mind every morning of an antiquated virgin, bald, with rotten teeth, and shaking of the palsy. I find I have a mortal aversion to being an old maid.
    Adieu. Don’t forget your quondam Sister in Affliction. Write often, long and comforting letters, to your poor, distressed, yet ever faithful friend.
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    Dorchester let his daughters stew till the middle of February, sending the coach to fetch them back to London just in time to help with preparations for another wedding: Aunt Cheyne had arranged for their sister Evelyn to marry John Leveson-Gower, Baron Gower, on March 13.
    She had thought herself resigned to Hell; then she glimpsed Paradise at the wedding. A few days later, when Dorchester summoned Lady Mary to give her final answer, her certainty surprised them both. “I prefer a single life, my lord, if you would be pleased to allow it.”
    â€œPleasing me,” he retorted, “is only to be done by obedience.”
    That afternoon, he sent a footman to her room. “Your father sends his regards, my lady, and the consequences of your answer,” he said, depositing a small valise in her hands with an ostentatious bow. “His Lordship suggests that you pack.”
    Standing alone in the middle of her chamber, she opened the valise. In the bottom was a note in the hand of her father’s secretary. You will shortly be confined where you may repent at leisure, said its neat lettering. Consider this case sufficient to hold all you need for your new life .
    She began to shiver as if the case had held all the cold that Thoresby’s unheated stone walls had gathered in thirty years of winter; it seemed to pour forth through her bones in a glacial flood. Later that evening, she wrote her father again, this time in a wavering hand: My aversion to the man you propose is too great to be overcome. Married to him, I shall be miserable beyond all imagining. I am, however, in your hands. You may dispose of me as you think fit .
    So pleased was Dorchester with this surrender that he strode to her chamber to embrace her as the prodigal daughter returned, allowing her to kiss his hand good-night. From then on, he proceeded as if she had given eager consent.
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    At the beginning of June, a letter arrived from Lady Jekyll. Inside lay a tightly folded enclosure in a hand Lady Mary