Distant Choices by Brenda Jagger

Author:Brenda Jagger [Jagger, Brenda]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pan Macmillan UK

Chapter Eleven

A matter of time? Garron Keith was not the only one to think so throughout that hectic winter and the very nearly frenzied spring and summer to follow, nor the only pair of eyes to watch with speculation as Kate – who had been in turn the nuisance, the rebel, embarrassing in her passion, limp in her despair – acquired the surface dazzle and allure of a diamond; with a fire beneath it at which there seemed no lack, at any time, of men both young and old, waiting to be burned.

Biding their time. Which would not be long in coming, according to an increasingly bitter Aunt Maud, for whom it could not come soon enough; to Evangeline who, as part of her game with Matthew, was more than ready to hasten it along; to Lady Merton who, as a woman of fashion, had become very virtuous since the accession of the prude Victoria; and to Lady Merton’s younger daughter, affectionately known from childhood as ‘Madcap Dora’, who apart from cherishing a certain fondness for her Cousin Francis, did not care to see her own reputation for wildness and waywardness suddenly eclipsed by his wife.

Not that Kate was beautiful, of course. No amount of diamond sparkle could achieve that, as Dora Merton well knew, her own attraction depending entirely on such things as her recklessness on horseback, her unpredictable ‘fits and starts’, her enthusiasm for organizing elaborate games of ‘hide and seek’ at which couples who wished to be alone were never found, and the simple fact – much talked of in Merton circles – that one really never knew what that Madcap Dora might get up to next.

And the suspicion that she was beginning to look little more than eccentric beside the flame and dazzle of this new Kate did not please her at all.

At Dora’s birthday dance that February Kate wore a scarlet satin dress which, towards the end of the evening, ‘fell off’her shoulders, a mishap serious enough to send any other woman scuttling for cover but of which Kate seemed so oblivious that one felt bound to conclude she had done it on purpose. Thin shoulders, too, with nothing that ought to have been enticing about them, nothing that ought to have caused so many gentlemen – Timothy Merton, Adela Merton’s new husband, and the young aristocrat with whom Dora herself was contemplating marriage prominently among them – to have behaved so foolishly.

‘Bees round a honeypot,’ Dora had muttered contemptuously, wondering how it was that the honey – from such a source – should not be sour.

‘The girl has turned out quite wanton. Who would have thought it?’ murmured Evangeline, highly delighted. Although Matthew Stangway, for whom all honey had lost its sweetness, merely nodded his head.

‘So it would seem.’

‘You have another daughter, Matthew. My daughter.’

He smiled, perfectly reading her mind. ‘Ah yes. But I have a granddaughter too, my darling – an entirely legitimate and, one supposes, wholly innocent Miss Celestine Ashington. Whatever happens

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