Nicola and the Viscount by Meg Cabot

Author:Meg Cabot [Cabot, Meg]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780061971846
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2011-10-20T08:12:47+00:00

PART TWO

CHAPTER ELEVEN

There was nothing in the world—at least the world as it existed in 1810—quite as irreparably damaging to a woman’s reputation as a failed marriage. The only thing that came even remotely close to the shame and degradation of such a disaster was a broken engagement. Madame Vieuxvincent had warned her girls most strenuously on the subject, urging them to think very, very hard before breaking off a betrothal, as such an action could result not only in public humiliation, but also actual court action. Some jilted lovers were not above suing the parties who dropped them for breach of promise.

What Madame ought to have instructed her pupils in, Nicola could not help thinking now, was not the dangers of breaking off an engagement, but the dangers of entering imprudently into one in the first place.

For she might have avoided the current situation in which she found herself had she stopped to think, even for a moment, what marriage to the God might actually be like. In the girlish daze into which his proposal had thrown her, she’d been incapable of thinking of anything save the ermine she would wear once she became viscountess, and how nice it was going to be when finally she was allowed to touch Lord Sebastian’s eyelashes, as a wife, by her station, had every right to.

She had never stopped to think how little the two of them, she and the God, had in common. She had never wondered, What will we discuss over the table at suppertime? Really, the God but rarely spoke at all at mealtimes, except to ask for the butter, or occasionally to tell a long and, to Nicola’s ears, frightfully boring story about a horse he had or had not happened to bet upon. Certainly the God was, upon these occasions, terribly nice to look at. But his conversation was somewhat wanting. He could not even be trusted to know a single current event, as he opened a newspaper but rarely, and then only to look at the sporting pages. And heaven knew he had never read a single novel, much less a collection of poetry.

Why Nicola had not thought of any of these things before accepting his marriage proposal, she could not fathom. She only knew that there was no possible way she could marry the viscount after all.

And so she had set out for the safest place she could think of—the arms of Lady Sheridan, who had always been so kind to her and from which she hadn’t the slightest inclination to stir. Instead, after Eleanor and her mother soothed and petted her enough to get the full story out, Nicola sent, with a footman, word to Martine that she was to pack immediately and join Nicola at the Sheridans’.

Further, and with Lady Sheridan’s help, Nicola sent an apologetic note to Lady Farelly, thanking her for her hospitality, but explaining that a marriage between Nicola and the viscount was quite impossible. She accompanied this note with the ring Lord Sebastian had given her.

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