My Sweet Folly by Laura Kinsale Read Free Book Online Page B

Melinda’s tongue.
    “Are you not apprehensive to live alone?” he asked at length, while the fish was removed. “Two young ladies?’’
    “I daresay you mean it very kindly,” Folie said, a little mollified by being considered a young lady along with Melinda. “Perhaps things are done differently in India, but here it is quite acceptable.”
    One corner of his mouth tilted up in a wry grimace. “It’s perfectly true that things are done differently in India. They burn their widows, for one thing.”
    “How unprincipled of them!” she said lightly.
    “It is in regrettable taste.” He smiled slightly at her, which gave a strange new lightness to his arctic eyes. “My dear Folly. How fortunate that things are done differently here.”
     
     

 
     
    THREE

     
    “I will not endure it!” Melinda exclaimed, flinging her shawl across the bed in Folie’s room. Her stepdaughter had said nothing all the way out of the dining room and up the stairs, past the dragons and wyverns and carved beasties of all descriptions. It was no surprise when Melinda pursued Folie into her bedchamber.
    “I will not be cheated of my season, not after we have scrimped and saved and—”
    “Not even for forty thousand pounds?” Folie interjected, lighting another candle. It cast a pretty glow on the creamy gathers and folds of the bed canopy.
    “What good will forty thousand pounds do me, if I must live upon it as a spinster all my life?” Melinda sat down hard upon the dressing table bench, bouncing the stray curl that she had pulled artfully down on her cheek. “Besides, I don’t believe a word of that! You are perfectly right, Mama, the man is mad!”
    Folie smiled. “He does seem...eccentric.”
    “How am I to meet any eligible gentlemen if I am stuck away here?” Melinda wailed.
    “Well, he cannot keep us prisoners, darling. And he could certainly help us—help you—if only he can be brought to see that his ideas are not quite right.”
    “I wish you all the luck in the world at that. He appears to be tenacious! And I shall be nineteen, Mama. Nineteen! This is my only chance; I’ll be twenty next year!”
    “Come!” Folie smiled. “Perhaps other girls find themselves on the shelf at twenty, but your looks are not likely to wither so soon. If you don’t meet a suitable gentleman this season, then the next is soon enough, you may believe me.” At a scratch on the door, she opened it halfway. Their maid stood waiting in the dark passage, squeezing a candle nervously. “Go to bed, Sally,” Folie said. “You must be very tired! We shall take care of ourselves.”
    “Thank you, ma’am,” Sally whispered with a curtsy. “I aired your bedclothes; the sheets are quite dry.”
    “Excellent. Are you frightened to sleep alone?”
    “No, ma’am, they gave me a bed with a housemaid, just up the attic.” Sally’s mobcap dipped, a pale shape in the dimness as she looked back and forth. “But I don’t like walkin’ about with these awful creatures, ma’am, that I will say!”
    “You’ll soon grow accustomed,” Folie said. “They are only carved wood, and quite exquisite, really. Go on now.”
    “Yes, ma’am. Thank you, ma’am!” Sally curtsied again and vanished in the shadows of the hallway.
    Folie closed the door and turned, leaning back against it, looking at Melinda. “And I will just give you a hint, my dearest, that an overabundance of anxiety on the matter of a husband is likelier to drive the gentlemen off than anything. They can scent that sort of desperation from a mile away.”
    A faint familiar pout appeared on Melinda’s lip, an echo of the mulish thirteen-year-old. For an instant, Folie felt her old helplessness, the dismay of being a parent when she had never really had a parent herself, of feeling as young and sensitive and inexperienced as the girl in her charge. At any moment, Melinda might fling at her the old bitter incrimination, “You’re not my mother!”
    “Of course,” she