Lady Emma by Lady Emma's Disgrace (html)

Author:Lady Emma's Disgrace (html)
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Published: 2012-09-28T17:54:32.735000+00:00

Part Five of Seven

The picnic, in the grounds of Lady Carson’s villa beside the Thames, had dragged on for the entire afternoon and Emma was lamentably bored. It was always the same people at every event she attended, the aristocratic and the rich, those at the very pinnacle of society. Perhaps it was a lack in her that she found them all so very dull and their conversation, revolving as it did around the next ball and the laziness of the servants, to be so repetitive. Years ago it had not mattered to her. She had revelled in the privileges and pleasures of just such a life. Now she wanted more. She had tried to speak to her father and her brother about politics and current affairs, only to be firmly snubbed by them for showing an unfeminine interest in men’s business. She had expressed a desire to attend lectures and literary soirees but her mother had snubbed that too, saying that no woman should display any intelligence for fear of repulsing her suitors. She had suggested that she might undertake some charitable work but everyone had squashed that ambition, predicting that all it would achieve would be her early death as a result of catching some fatal illness from the poor. She was stifled, imprisoned in a gilded cage, just as Tom had said, and she could no longer pretend that it was worth it for the money and the clothes and the parties. They were shallow pleasures. She liked them but she needed something else, something more profound.

Emma hated that Tom had been right about her. She hated that he knew her so well, that he knew what she needed. She had lain awake all night after she had seen him at the ball. She was furious that he was alive. She was relieved that he was not dead. She was terrified he would ruin everything for her for a third time. She was secretly, treacherously excited that he had re-entered her life. She hated him. She loved him. She wanted him.

Her body was burning up with wanting him; it tormented her with all the frustrated longing that only he could satisfy. And the one thing that was certain was that she would not succumb to her desire for him because he was a low, deceiving scoundrel and she was better off rid of him.

She took another daintily cut cucumber sandwich and munched through it glumly. She did not know what to do about the future. Leaving aside her frustration at the emptiness of the life on offer to her, it was wrong to marry Lord Cholmondeley when she was already the wife of another man. She tried to tell herself that no one would know, that if ever it came out that Tom was still alive she could pretend ignorance but that was not good enough. She knew and that made all the difference. She was no longer sure she could go through with her second marriage. It felt wrong.

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