The Last Hellion by Loretta Chase Read Free Book Online

midafternoon, however, when he was sober and the worst of his ill temper was abating, and Sarah was in the alley playing with a neighbor's child.
    "I found something Mama wrote," Lydia told him. "Is it true she was a lady once upon a time? And you acted upon the stage once? Or was Mama only making believe?"
    He had started hunting in the clothespress for something, but paused and gave her a faintly amused look. "What does it matter what she was?" he returned. "It never did us any good, did it? Do you think we should be living in this hovel if she'd come with a dowry? What does it matter to you, Miss High and Mighty?
    Fancy yourself a great lady, do you?"
    "Is it true that I take after Mama's ancestors?" Lydia asked, ignoring her father's sarcasm. She had learned not to let it upset her.
    "Ancestors?" He opened a cupboard, shrugged at the meager contents, then slammed it shut. "That's a grand way of putting it. Is that how your mama explained it? "
    " She wrote it in a book — a diary, it seems to be, Lydia persisted, "that she was a lady from an old, noble family. And one of her cousins was a lord — the Marquess of Dain. She wrote that she ran away with you to Scotland," Lydia continued. "And her family was very angry and cut her off as though she was 'a diseased branch of the Ballister tree.' I only want to know whether it's true.
    Mama was… fanciful.
    "So she was. Papa got a crafty look in his eyes, much worse than the mockery and even the dislike he sometimes forgot to conceal. "
    Then, too late, Lydia realized that she shouldn't have mentioned the diary. "

    Loretta Chase - The Last Hellion
    Then all she could do was want to kick herself. But she hid her feelings — as usual
    — when he said, "Bring me the book, Lydia. "
    She brought it and never saw it again, as she'd expected would happen. It vanished as so many of their belongings had vanished before and continued to do in the following months. Lydia had no trouble figuring out that he'd pawned her mother's journal and would never reclaim it, or had sold it outright. That was how he got money. Sometime he lost it gambling, and sometimes he won, but Lydia and Sarah seldom saw much of it.
    Neither did the people John Grenville owed.
    Two years later, despite numerous changes of name and residence, his creditors caught up with him. He was arrested for debt and consigned to the Marshalsea Prison in Southwark. After he'd lived there for a year with his daughters, he was declared an insolvent debtor and released.
    Freedom came too late for Sarah, though. She'd already contracted consumption, and died not long thereafter.
    What John Grenville learned from the experience was that England's climate was unhealthy for him. Leaving thirteen-year-old Lydia with his uncle and aunt, Ste and Effie, and promising to send for the girl "in a few months," he set sail for America.
    On the night of her father's departure, Lydia began her own journal. The first sadly misspelt entry began: "Papa has gonne—for ever, I fervantly hope — and good riddents. "
    Normally, Vere would have fobbed off Trent's offer of a drink as easily as he shrugged off the fellow's thanks.
    But Vere was not feeling like his normal self.
    It had started with the ferret-faced Jaynes's preaching about carrying on the line Loretta Chase - The Last Hellion
    —when it was obvious to any moron that the Mallory line was cursed and destined for extinction. Vere had no intention of getting sons, only to stand by helplessly a few years later and watch them die.
    Second, the virago of the century had to come rampaging across his path. Then, when Her Brimstone Majesty was done with him, his so-called friends had to debate who she was and where she came from and the technique she'd used to fell him. As though they actually considered her—a female—his adversary . At fisticuffs!
    Trent, in contrast, offered a courteous and calm much obliged and the sporting reward of a drink.
    This was why Vere let Trent follow him