The Duel by Barbara Metzger

Author:Barbara Metzger [Metzger, Barbara]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: (¯`'•.¸//(*_*)\\¸.•'´¯)
Published: 2005-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Fifteen

A man can live without love. A woman cannot.

—Anonymous

A man can live without love, but he’ll get horses and dogs, so he doesn’t know how wretched he is. A woman knows it every day.

—Mrs. Anonymous

One voice was raised in dissent. “No, she does not have to marry the clunch.” Ian would have rejoiced, but the voice was his sister’s, who had finally arrived. Dorothy’s happy declaration was unfortunately, to his ear, anyway, followed by, “She can come live with me.”

What, send Athena off to the spinster realm of raising lapdogs and roses and money for charity? He could not do it. Athena was too loving, too lively, too…marriageable. She deserved a home of her own, turquoise-eyed angel babies in her arms, a doting husband at her side. She deserved a man who would cherish her and devote his life to making her happy, because only her happiness would make his world complete. Miss Renslow would not find any of that living in Richmond with Ian’s sister. She might find the life of a reformer interesting, and the travel to coal mines and wool mills interesting, at first. She would cry to see the plight of the families, especially the children, and she would do her damnedest to see that their conditions were improved, like Dorothy did. But such a life was Doro’s by choice, not by constraint.

Lady Dorothy Maddox could stay in London as hostess for her brother, perhaps making more of a difference in the government’s policies by influencing those who voted in Parliament. A man was more inclined to listen to a female when his belly was pleasantly full, Ian had tried to tell her, than when he read her harangues in the newspapers before breakfast. But sweet persuasion was not in Doro’s nature. She was fervid in her beliefs, and anyone who disagreed was simply stupid, stubborn, and wrong.

She did not like the social values that held sway in town, either, the extravagant waste of the ton, while children starved in the gutters five minutes from Mayfair. She could not enjoy the lavish dinners, Dorothy had said, loudly and often, knowing so many others were going hungry. The members of the beau monde had breathed a sigh of relief when she moved to Richmond.

She could have taken up residence in Bath, keeping her mother company—at least, until they strangled each other. They had both been relieved when Doro decided to live at the earl’s Richmond estate.

Now, years later, and months since they had last seen each other, Ian’s mother and sister had started brangling almost the instant Dorothy came through the door. Lady Marden thought her daughter’s dress was unbecoming, out of fashion, and poorly constructed. Her hair was a mess, her posture was unladylike, and she had not been to visit in ages, while her poor mother was ailing.

Lady Dorothy thought her mother was dosing herself too heavily with that restorative, dressing like a woman half her age, and inflating her symptoms to make herself interesting and make her children feel guilty over their neglect.

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