The Scarred Earl by Beacon Elizabeth

Author:Beacon, Elizabeth [Beacon, Elizabeth]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Romance, Historical Romance, fullybook
ISBN: 9781460312506
Publisher: Mills & Boon
Published: 2012-12-31T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Ten

‘Now tell me I’m imagining things,’ Corisande demanded of her audience of Lady Henry Seaborne and a very sleepy and ruffled-looking Hughes the butler. ‘Look at her all rumpled and undone and blushing guiltily if you won’t believe me. You wouldn’t accept my word when I told you she was meeting a lover, Cousin Melissa, but you can’t help but admit it now!’ Persephone’s not-very-fond cousin exclaimed shrilly, as if she wanted the whole world to hear her. ‘And since she’s still got the stink of him on her, don’t even try to tell me there was anything innocent about their sordid assignation in an unused room, away from sight and sound of the rest of the household and your guests.’

‘Stand aside,’ Lady Henry Seaborne demanded curtly, determined to cling to her dignity in the face of Corisande’s vengeful accusations, even if her daughter looked to be irretrievably tattered by her night’s work. ‘Have you two truly been meeting in secret all these weeks?’ she asked, as if even the thought they might be carrying on an illicit affair behind her back hurt her terribly.

‘No! And why on earth would we feel the need to sneak around so furtively to meet each other in secret, Mama?’ Persephone was stung into asking.

Lady Henry surveyed her daughter with a critical eye and Persephone was suddenly conscious they had never got round to relacing her bodice and her hair had fallen down. She must look as if she’d been outside in a hurricane, or thoroughly seduced by the Earl of Calvercombe.

‘Since you have clearly done so tonight, that’s a question I should very much like to have answered at a time when all three of us are a great deal calmer and more rational than we can be now,’ her mother said with such quiet dignity that Persephone felt hot colour flame across her cheeks.

‘You intend to cover it all up and pretend nothing out of the common way has occurred, your ladyship?’ Corisande exclaimed as if horrified such scandal might be swept under Jack’s ducal carpet when she’d been flitting about country houses in the middle of the night, intent on far more scandalous encounters than this one, since she was hardly old enough to be out of the schoolroom.

‘As we have been politely concealing your wilder misdeeds from the rest of the polite world for years, Cousin Corisande, we Seabornes have had plenty of practice at doing so by now.’ Lady Henry turned on the instigator of this scene with such icy self-control Persephone knew how angry she must be under that calm façade. ‘I suggest you do public penance for your own sins if you wish to start casting stones at my daughter. That way they will carry a little more weight when you throw them. I’m quite sure your Great-Aunt Augustina will supply you with the name of a suitable convent so we can arrange to have you smuggled across to France or Spain. There you can begin your new career as a pillar of outraged virtue as soon as may be.

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