A Heart Too Proud by Laura London

Author:Laura London
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction / Romance / Historical / General, Fiction / Historical, Fiction / Romance - Erotica, Fiction / Romance / Historical / Regency
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 2014-02-04T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eleven

I woke the next morning with my mattress swaying under me like the lurchings of a small craft on a rough ocean. With effort I opened my eyes and blurrily beheld one large violet eye, not two inches above my face.

“All right, Christa, you can stop bouncing. She’s awake,” instructed the eye. Groaning, I thrust my head under a goose-down pillow only to have it wrenched mercilessly from me.

“Go away, you Furies.” I rubbed my tender temples. “Christa, stop bumping the bed! If you two had lived during the Spanish Inquisition, they would have given you jobs straight away, torturing Protestants.”

“Listen to her, Caro. I’ll tell you why she’s so out-of-reason cross this morning. Last night she must have got herself glorious oiled,” Christa pronounced knowledgeably while propping the pillows into an inviting heap behind me.

“Glorious oiled?” I repeated hazily. “Wherever did you learn that expression?” I sat up and leaned back against the soft mound of pillows.

“From Andy. He’s Lord Dearborne’s second junior footman, and full of gig too. There’s hundreds of servants here. Well, perhaps not precisely hundreds but many, many.” Caro came to sit on the other side of me and began to drag a hairbrush firmly through my tangled curls. “If you’d had any sense, you would have brushed this mop last night before going to sleep, then it wouldn’t be so hard to comb out now. Have you forgotten that Christopher is going to take us to the Tower of London today?” Caro’s eyes met mine reproachfully.

“Er, no, no. Tower of London? What fun.” I tried to infuse my voice with enthusiasm. “And isn’t that friend of Lady Anne’s with daughters your age to come over later this afternoon? Lady Anne is very kind, isn’t she?”

“Yes. And yesterday she told us that we were almost family, because Lord Dearborne is Christopher’s guardian and he’s ours too—so that makes us like sisters to Kit and so to Lady Anne. What do you think of that?”

“I think that’s tossing genealogy out with a vengeance,” I laughed. “Who was that plump little lady that you went walking with yesterday? I saw you go out with her after we came back from Lord Elgin’s, when I was supposed to be resting up for the ball.”

“So. You were gazing out the window instead of resting,” noted Caro, shrewdly. “That was Mrs. Jameson, who is Lady Anne’s dresser. Do you know that all she does is look after Lady Anne’s clothes and fix her hair? And she gets paid a monstrous fat salary for it, too. Anyway, she took a liking to us and guided us on a walk through Hyde Park. It was at five o’clock, which is the most fashionable hour, and the park was simply crawling with The Elegant. Do you know that we saw Beau Brummell and Lord Petersham! And guess who was riding with them?” Caro’s voice was pregnant with mystery.

“Um, let me see. Napoleon Bonaparte? No? Was it William Shakes—oww! Caro, that’s quite a brisk touch on the hairbrush.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.