Jennie About to Be by Elisabeth Ogilvie Read Free Book Online

the end would be, and in the meantime she was hard put to keep herself out of her eyes when she looked at him; she felt as vulnerable as Charlotte, as fragile as the jonquil that would die in a late snowfall.
    To escape from him, if not from his arms, she looked everywhere and saw the children crouched on the landing, watching through the railings. She pointed them out, and he bounded up the stairs four at a time and gave each little girl a spin around the landing, leaving them all dazed but luminous. He saved Charlotte for the last.
    â€œThank you, Miss Higham,” he said formally at the end of her turn, and kissed her hand. “You should be downstairs. You will be, soon.”
    She couldn’t speak but looked past his arm at Jennie with such happiness and gratitude that tears came into Jennie’s eyes.
    Then he rumpled Derwent’s head and said, “And you practice your dancing with your sisters, old man. You’ll need it before you know it.”
    â€œEven if I’m going to be a soldier?” It was his new ambition ever since the Captain had been coming to the house.
    â€œ Especially if you’re going to be a soldier. Dev’lish important. Colonel gives balls, you have to attend. Orders, you know.”
    â€œI’d rather catch Napoleon,” Derwent said pugnaciously.
    â€œWho wouldn’t?” He laughed, took Jennie’s hand, ran her down the stairs, and danced her back into the drawing room.
    One moment she thought that if the sun were removed, she would die, and in the next she would concede that one couldn’t die at will. But having lost all that had mattered to her in her life so far, she would be tougher, far less timid about taking risks. What worse could happen to her? Now she wouldn’t scheme to run away; she’d simply tell the Highams that grateful as she was for all they had done for her, she was leaving London for good, and if it meant being a spinster all her life, so be it.
    He rode beside the barouche again; he began appearing at affairs which she attended with her aunt and uncle, danced the two dances allowed an unengaged couple, sat out others with her, brought supper to her. She was nearly suffocated with embarrassment, knowing how they were watched and discussed behind fans. She hated Aunt Higham’s tightly guarded but avid satisfaction, wanting to say, “Can’t you see he’s just amusing himself with the poor little country girl? Condescending to her so she’ll have this shiny memory to keep?”
    Jealousy scalded her throat and twisted in her belly when she saw the familiarity of other women with him, the moving lips and significant smiles of his partners while she sat beside her aunt with her gloved hands folded in her lap. Which one had been, or still was, his lover? She brooded over his beauty, so maliciously paraded within her grasp yet not for her, as if it were all a vast, complicated, and vicious practical joke played on her and her ambitious aunt.
    That some women flirted with all their partners meant nothing to her; she saw only how they behaved with Captain Gilchrist. For her to dance with anyone else, even the most gallant and obviously admiring youth, was merely to go through a set of motions to music which jangled out of tune in her head. She resented the girls of her own age more than the married women; these London girls were years ahead of her in sophistication. Bitterly she admired their ease with him and wondered which was the heiress who would get him. How could Aunt Higham be so naïve as to believe he was serious about her niece?
    The new riding habit was finished: bronze kerseymere almost the color of her eyes, with a velvet collar and three rows of small gilt buttons crossed with bronze silk cord. The narrow-brimmed white beaver hat with its short white feather was especially admired by all the children; even Derwent wanted to try it on.
    The shoemaker had sewn boots of russet Spanish leather