Free Her Ladyship's Companion by Joanna Bourne Page B

another of these minor ailments with which she amuses herself. Anna will take her something—Spanish oranges, I think—as my deputy. Good training for her. Giles has to make the trip anyway. Some estate business. You will go and see that he doesn’t murder Anna.”
    “Thus my treat. I see.”
    “There’s more. Robbie goes with you. If I recall correctly, the youngest Edgewater is of an age. In the absence of a governess Robbie will also be your charge.”
    “Delightful,” Melissa assured with a straight face.
    “You will abominate it, as you well know. Amelia is so high in the instep you’ll probably find yourself eating belowstairs. I tell you in advance, you see, to spare your feelings.”
    “Thank you,” Melissa said meekly.
    “I must be near my dotage. I nearly apologized to you for the trouble. You will enjoy the drive, I think. And keeping Anna out of mischief will allay any pangs of boredom you might feel.”
    Melissa flicked the quill feather back and forth across the bridge of her nose, a nervous habit she indulged in during heavy thought. As if on cue, Anna fluttered into the parlor. She wore a morning dress of resplendent turquoise, trailing ribbons, and carried a ridiculous little pagoda-shaped parasol tucked under one arm. A lozenge-shaped reticule dangled from her wrist, more than completing the outfit. For a seventeen-year-old girl in a lonely country house, this was certainly attention to dress on a grand scale.
    “If that’s to my cousin Sarah,” she said breezily, pointing to the letter on the table, “tell her I send my love and all that.”
    “You’d do better to write her yourself, Anna,” her aunt replied mildly enough. “You owe her more than one letter, you know.”
    “She’s so unbearably dull.  Don’t be tedious, Aunt Dorothy. Anyway, I can’t this morning. I’m off to town to look at silks. Anything to get out of this musty old house. If I’m cooped up any longer, I shall go mad.”
    “Waste of a good morning,” Lady Dorothy replied coolly. “You’d do better to take that dock-tailed gray of yours out for a run. This is market day. So crowded you can’t move, and the streets full of sheep. Not the day I’d pick for shopping. Go out riding with Giles. He wants a look at the preserves anyway.”
    “He’s out already,” Anna said. “He went off with Adrian to devastate the wildlife in the park again. He probably misses the chance to shoot people.”
    Lady Dorothy laid a letter aside. “That’s a most unseemly way to talk.”
    Anna pouted prettily. “It’s only logical that after being in the army for so long he would have got used to shooting things. I suppose it’s a hard habit to break.”
    “Giles’s service under Wellington bears little resemblance to hunting in the north preserve, Anna. The less said about subjects of which you know nothing, the better.” The dowager’s voice was more than tart.
    Anna fidgeted under Lady Dorothy’s basilisk stare. She began to pull the flower arrangement in the middle of the table out of its careful, intricate symmetry, crumbling the petals between her gloved fingers.
    “Harold will drive you to town, I suppose,” Lady Dorothy said.
    Anna laughed lightly and unconvincingly. “La, what does that have to say to anything, I’d like to know? As if I couldn’t go driving with Harold anywhere I liked in broad daylight in an open gig. Too Gothic by half, Aunt Dorothy.”
    The dowager snorted. “No business of mine, chit, if you choose to make a cake of yourself over a man old enough to be your father. There’s no chance of your marrying him, you know.”
    Anna sputtered. “It’s no such thing! Can’t I carry on a perfectly normal friendship with a man who is, after all, a member of my family without being accused of ... of setting my cap for him in the most vulgar way possible?”
    “I’m relieved your interest is so platonic,” Lady Dorothy said dryly. “You would please me by demonstrating your tepid feelings