Not Quite A Lady by Loretta Chase

Author:Loretta Chase
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9780061796036
Publisher: HarperCollins

Charlotte’s unhappy wandering took her to Beechwood’s stables. They needed a great deal of work. The sloped paving was in the process of being replaced, she saw. The window shutters and the racks were undergoing repair. The old-fashioned building was being taken care of and the horses looked to be well tended.

She hadn’t come to inspect them, though.

She’d come because of the horses.

Horses, Papa said, were the animals to go to when one wanted calming. Pigs were good for reflection and talking over important matters but a horse was Nature’s great tranquilizer. Some people believed this was because the animal’s large eyes exuded a quieting energy. He doubted this was the proper reason. Whatever the true reason was, though, the effect was not to be denied.

Mr. Carsington’s groom being elsewhere at the moment, Charlotte had the tranquilizing effects all to herself.

She stood inside the stable door, leaning against the doorpost and inhaling the familiar earthy aromas while she waited for Mr. Carsington’s cattle to work their equine magic on her troubled spirit.

Her turmoil was beginning to subside when she heard his deep voice outside—and a heartbeat later, the boyish tenor, instantly recognizable. The stable offered only one way out, and that would bring her into their path. She moved farther into the building and pressed herself up against the wall, waiting for them to pass.

The voices came ever nearer, to the door itself. She edged yet more deeply inside, aiming for a shadowy corner where she might not be noticed when they entered.

“I understand you’ve had schooling,” came Mr. Carsington’s voice, so very near.

“Yes, sir. That is, not a public school, you know. Mr. Welton, the gentleman who took me in after my parents died, took pupils. He taught me along with them.”

“He must have been a well-educated gentleman, then,” Mr. Carsington said, “if you learned your speech from his example.”

“Mrs. Tyler says it won’t do me any good, talking like my betters,” the young voice answered. “She says I’m not to think I’m above anyone else on account of it. And I said ‘But I was in the workhouse, ma’am, and we were all the same.’ And I told her I was as glad and grateful as any of the others to get a place and get out.”

Charlotte pushed her fist against her mouth to keep from crying out. A workhouse? This child—not hers, no, he couldn’t be hers, but even so—this innocent boy consigned to a workhouse with the parish homeless, jobless, hopeless?

“It was not a long time you were in that place, I understand,” Mr. Carsington said.

One minute was too long, she wanted to cry. She made herself remain still, very still, looking straight ahead.

“It felt like a long time,” the boy said. “It wasn’t as long as some stay there, though. Mr. Welton died in the winter, and it was spring when Mr. Tyler took me on.”

“I’m sorry you were there for even a few months,” Mr. Carsington said. “But you had no one to take you in, I suppose, and it was that or an orphanage.

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