Not Quite a Lady by Loretta Chase

Author:Loretta Chase [Chase, Loretta]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Historical Romance
ISBN: 9780061231230
Google: P-ZXL2pFWdoC
Amazon: 0061231231
Publisher: Avon
Published: 2007-04-03T17:00:00+00:00

“Ah, yes, how could I forget?” Lady Lithby said with that easy laugh of hers. “You are the animal expert.”

“It doesn’t want expertise,” Darius said. “One need only remember that they’re dogs, not children.”

The boy found the courage to rise to Daisy’s defense. “She’s a good dog, sir,” he said. “She came right away when I said, ‘Come.’ Didn’t you, girl?” He bent and rubbed Daisy’s head. She submitted happily to his attentions, tongue lolling, drool oozing out of the side of her mouth.

Darius recollected what the plasterer had told him. “Lady Lithby is busy at the moment, Pip. Since your master doesn’t want you underfoot, you shall help us by giving the dog air and exercise. I’m on my way to the stables. You and Daisy had better come with me.” 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.

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