Free Lady Roma's Romance by Cynthia Bailey Pratt Page A

Dina.”
    “Certainly not. Even if you were at your last prayers, I wouldn’t inflict those children on you. Perfect hellions and their father without a penny that doesn’t go toward feeding them, clothing them, and their education.”
    “I meant . . . don’t trouble yourself to find me a husband.”
    “Why, I don’t know what you mean,” Dina said, belatedly.
    “When I am ready to marry, no doubt Providence will provide me with a suitable mate.”
    “I didn’t realize you had such faith,” Dina answered with a sniff.
    Roma did not tell her that she would rather trust unseen heavenly intervention than her relations to find a man she could imagine herself marrying. She fully realized that compared to many other girls, her position in this matter was enviable. She had no need to marry in order to keep herself from poverty, her father showed no wish to have her gone, nor had she any particular yearning for her own hearth, home, and children.
    On the other hand, to be an ornament merely to her father’s house for the rest of her life wouldn’t satisfy her either emotionally or intellectually. “I’ll tell you what, Dina. When the time comes, I may ask you to be the instrument of Providence.”
    Dina brightened and opened her mouth.
    “But not yet.”
     

Chapter Six
     
    Lord Yarborough walked in a crowd wherever he went. He could hardly take one step, especially in the south of England, without feeling jostled by ghosts. Julius Caesar was there and his lesser relation, Claudius. But not all his specters were of such high lineage. Lord Yarborough was as apt to be fascinated by the lowest pot thrower or meanest foot soldier as the great names of history. They had all come here, some for plunder only, others to stay, carrying the image and ideals of Rome with them. Even when Rome’s greatness perished, they stayed on, mingling their blood with the natives’, leaving traces of their glory buried everywhere they had dwelt.
    Bath especially thronged with phantoms. His father had been staying in Bath when they’d taken down the Abbey House and discovered the Roman bath that had hidden there through the long centuries. He’d often described to his son in after years the way rough stone coffins of lesser men had rested on the thick brick pillars of the ancient bath and how coins from Saxon kings had been found only a few feet above the far more sophisticated architecture of Rome.
    Lord Yarborough recalled with an inward laugh how he’d pictured history like one of the great layered cakes the household pastry chef would make for special birthdays and at Christmastide, small charms and trinkets scattered through the layers. Perhaps the fascination had started then, but it had been cemented on his wedding journey to Italy.
    The joy of discovering his bride had taken second place to the sheer giddiness he felt on beholding Rome herself for the first time. She was battered and worn, dirty and shorn of the worship once granted her by even her meanest citizen. Yet to him, infatuated, willing to garnish her in imagination with all the beauty she once possessed, she carried all the dignity and splendor of her most glorious hours.
    As he turned the corner into Hot Bath Street, drawn once more by the small display of locally discovered antiquities, Lord Yarborough sighed for those lost days. Gilda, poor soul, had never resented his passion for all things Roman, a passion so much stronger than any she’d ever inspired.
    They had married young, too young perhaps, urged into the match by their parents. He had a title which must be protected and passed on. That duty had been drummed into him for as long as he could recall. Gilda had acknowledged that duty as well. Lord Yarborough winced away from the memory of her deathbed, when she’d clung to his hand, begging him to forgive her for dying and leaving him only a daughter.
    He thought instead about the unknown geniuses of Roman engineering who had invented plumbing such as