Betina Krahn by The Last Bachelor Read Free Book Online

flirt with an eligible MP after the session—a wooden screen had been erected along one side of the gallery to shield the fairer members of the weaker sex.
    It was behind that screen of spindles that Antonia Paxton sat, chafing at the restricted view and at the nonsense being bandied about on the floor below. Wielding her fan vigorously with one hand, she dabbed her heated face with the handkerchief in the other. She had chosen to wear her black-trimmed purple silk with its cuirass bodice, stovepipe skirt, and fashionable bustle, and as the afternoon wore on, she began to feel every prickly lump in her horse-hair-padded bustle and each unyielding stay in her corset. It was a struggle to keep the heat of the chamber and her discomfort from distracting her from her purpose in being there.
    She had come to observe the progress of the bill and to take note of which members of the House might be considered friends of the measure, and which were sworn enemies. A fortnight ago she had attended one of the parliamentary hearings on the bill and had come away from the proceedings incensed by many of the members’ attitudes toward marriage. As a result she had written impassioned letters to key members of the House of Commonsand had importuned one of her former protégées whose husband was an MP to secure gallery passes for her.
    She bit her lip and curled her fingers around the railing of the gallery, wishing she could demand to be recognized and speak on behalf of the women she knew would be securely married if not for that cruel and antiquated law. But the smells of stale smoke and exercised male heat billowing up from below underscored the fact that this was an exclusively male arena, and that however informed or powerful a woman’s views, she had to rely upon a man to express them here. The combination of her growing personal and political discomfort brought her to the edge of her nerves.
    “If old Pickering utters one more ‘thou shalt not,’ I swear I shall climb out of this balcony and have at him with my purse,” she muttered from between gritted teeth. Rearranging herself yet again on her hard seat, she cast a glance at Aunt Hermione, who sat beside her wearing a look of wilted forbearance. “The ripe old cod. Just look at him.” With a nod she directed her aunt’s gaze to the front row of the Opposition bench, where a portly, bulbous-featured old fellow sat looking like a dyspeptic bulldog.
    “Disgraceful,” Hermione agreed, tugging at her bonnet ribbons.
    When Sir Jerome rolled to his feet yet again, Hermione groaned audibly and Antonia narrowed her eyes and fingered the chain handle of the handbag in her lap. But the old knight yielded the floor to a hitherto unheard speaker, a young backbencher named Shelburne, who proceeded to take the debate in an alarming new direction.
    “One reason put forth in support of this vile bit of legislation,” the new speaker intoned, “is that permitting marriage between a man and his deceased wife’s sister would be a significant step toward reducing the problem of surplus women.”
    Surplus women.
That hideous term again. Antonia fought an almost irresistible urge to throw her purse over the railing at him.
    “But we cannot afford to change our law to suit the whims and caprices of social fortune.” He grasped his lapels and inflated his chest as he warmed to his subject. “We cannot abandon our most sacred principles of morality for the sake of providing husbands for a few women, no matter how poor and wretched the creatures may be.”
    There was a wave of reaction: “here, here’s” mingled with hoots of derision and rumbles of consternation. “I cannot speak to the fine theological points of this matter. But I can and must speak to the fact that there are better ways to deal with the unsavory imbalance in the numbers of eligible men and women. Let me read to you the suggestions of one more learned than I in this matter: Lord Remington Carr, Earl of Landon.” He