Regency High Society Vol 2: Sparhawk's Lady / The Earl's Intended Wife / Lord Calthorpe's Promise / The Society Catch. Miranda Jarrett

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       Portsmouth, England May 1787

      With growing panic, Caroline Harris stared at her reflection in the mirror as her mother’s maid tied the sash at her waist. Soon it would be time to leave the ladies’ retiring room and join the gentlemen in the salon, and then it would be too late.

      Why, why was there never enough money?

      “I can’t do this, Mama,” she whispered hoarsely. “I know you say we’ve no choice, but I can’t. I can’t.”

      “You can, and you will,” snapped her mother with the angry irritation that Caroline had come to know too well these past two weeks. “You’re all I have left to me, girl, and I won’t die a pauper.”

      Caroline nodded, not trusting her voice to speak. If she cried, she would be cuffed. She’d learned that lesson quickly enough. Tears would make her eyes red and puffy, and then no gentleman would want her.

      But what gentleman would want her anyway, dressed like this? Her flowered silk gown had been remade from an old one of her mother’s, cut down so far that her nearly all of her high, small breasts showed above the neckline, the darker rose of her nipples peeking shamelessly through the gauzy neckerchief. Her stays were laced so tightly she could scarcely breathe, and her feet were squeezed painfully into pointed, high-heeled shoes meant to give her a dainty, swaying walk.

      Her hair, usually as straight and fine as corn silk, had been crimped and set with sugar water into high, stiff, fashionable curls she’d been forbidden to touch. The jewels that glittered against her pale skin were paste as false as the rest of her, and when she looked at the masklike way they’d painted her face—black kohl around her eyes and rouged circles on her cheeks—she wanted to weep all over again. She looked like a cheap wax doll that no one would ever value, let alone love or cherish.

      And not even her mother had remembered that today was her fourteenth birthday.…

      Miriam Harris clutched possessively at her daughter’s arm as she, too, stared at the reflection, the resemblance between them obvious in the high cheekbones and the wide-set blue eyes. But that was all; the consumption that would soon claim Caroline’s mother had left her face tight and gaunt beneath the dyed black hair, her body bent and wasted, and the life she’d led, a Cypriot always dependent on the favors of gentlemen, had long ago destroyed the innocent charm that lit her daughter’s face.

      “You’re too weedy by half, Caroline,” she declared with a broken gasp, and coughed into the lace-trimmed handkerchief she was never without. Swiftly she wadded it into her reticule, but not before Caroline had seen the bright red blood on the white linen. “Look at you, half a head taller than me! I shouldn’t have wasted my money for all those years to see you raised in the country if this is how you turned out.”

      With a sharp pang of homesickness, Caroline thought of the thatch-roofed house in Hampshire where she’d lived until last month, of ruddy-faced Mrs. Thompson who’d treated her like one of her own children, of sunlight and fresh milk and apples and fields to run through and kittens in the barn to play with. She remembered, too, the careful dreams she’d nursed of her parents: her father a handsome officer in a fashionable regiment tragically killed defending his king and country before he could wed her mother, the kind, beautiful lady in London who sent money each month for her care and would, as soon as her circumstances permitted, come herself to fetch Caroline away.

      A lovely dream it was, a fantasy Caroline had played over each night before she fell asleep, and years and miles away from the reality of the ravaged, dying woman clinging to her arm. True enough, Miriam had finally come for her daughter, but not for the genteel family life that Caroline had always imagined. No, nothing like that, not in the mean lodgings that were her mother’s home now, with nearly everything of value stripped away and sold for food and medicine, and once again Caroline felt the tears smarting behind her eyes.

      “No weeping now, daughter,” warned her mother, lowering her voice so the other women around them, most dressed in the same expensive, revealing fashions, wouldn’t overhear. “Sir Harry will look to you to ease his troubles, not to be burdened with your own.”

      Caroline shook her head with a final, desperate show of defiance. “We don’t have to live like this, Mama. I could sew, or seek a position with a milliner. There must be other ways than this!”

      “What, and squander the one true gift that God gave us both?” Her mother’s laugh was short and bitter. “Your face is your fortune, girl, and with it you’ll earn more in a week than any squalid little seamstress in a garret could in twenty years.”

      “But Mama—”

      “Don’t gainsay me, you foolish girl!” hissed her mother, her thin fingers tightening on Caroline’s arm as she led her from the room. “You’re all I have, and this is all I know. I mean to see you launched while it’s still in my power. If you please Sir Harry Wrightsman tonight, he’ll treat you finer than you can ever imagine, far better than you deserve.”

      At the arched doorway Caroline shrank back. To her, the room before them was unbelievably grand, with gilded walls and mirrors and hundreds of candles. The beautiful women and the men who clustered around them terrified her, their gestures too free, their conversation and laughter too loud, nearly drowning out the musicians in the alcove. No matter what her mother said, she knew she didn’t belong here.

      “Oh, Mama,” she СКАЧАТЬ