Penelope Goes to Portsmouth by M. C. Beaton Read Free Book Online

Then, when it seemed that he might be prepared to help Benjamin, her imagination had quickly raised him up to new heights and credited him with all sorts of noble attributes. When it looked as if he had no intention of saving the servant, she had damned him as totally useless. But now he had saved Benjamin, but in such a way! When it came to love-making, Penelope’s imagination through lack of practical knowledge did not go much further than kissing and hugging. She had first assumed Lord Augustus had been exhausted by his night with Lady Carsey because he had talked all night long in an effort to try to get her to believe Benjamin’s innocence. But when Lord Augustus had been telling the magistrate of his adventures, not only the magistrate but everyone else had looked shocked. Therefore it followed that Lord Augustus must have made love to Lady Carsey, and nowhere in the romances Penelope read did a hero make carnal love to a woman he obviously disliked. So Lord Augustus, she decided, belonged to a wicked and decadent world to which she did not want to belong. The other girls in the seminary had whispered of scandals, of how one must marry well, but how, if one was discreet, one could take a lover after marriage. All this had not sat easilyin Penelope’s puritan mind. To date, she had mostly lived through books. Her father, although a self-made man and a Radical, had kept her away from her peers in the merchant class of Portsmouth. Penelope’s mother, a small, quiet lady whose faded looks only occasionally showed that she had once boasted the same beauty as her daughter, obeyed her husband in every respect. Penelope had followed her mother’s lead, but now she felt the first stirrings of rebellion. What was wrong with the merchant class? She herself admired men who worked. Lord Augustus was travelling on the stage only because he had obviously gambled all his money away and was now hoping to coerce his aged uncle into either giving him some or to leaving him money in his will. She also thought that he drank too much. It was a hard drinking age, and yet Penelope had grown to despise drunken men and had no intention of marrying one.
    Unaware that Lord Augustus was watching her, Penelope’s face hardened. She raised her eyes at last, found Lord Augustus watching her, and quickly veiled them, but not before he had seen the slight contempt in her eyes.
    Lord Augustus was normally an easygoing man. But that look of contempt he had just surprised in Penelope’s eyes irritated him greatly. Had he not, for her sake, bedded a repulsive woman? He ignored a niggling voice in his head that told him that he would probably have done it anyway, for Benjamin’s plight had touched him as much as it had touched Hannah and Penelope. He thought haughtily that Penelopewas, after all, a trifle common with her little snub nose and total lack of the arts to please. And yet her very innocence and virginity struck him like a reproach.
    Hannah returned, slightly out of breath, with a package that she handed to Benjamin. She took out her notebook and wrote, ‘Put these on and join me in the coach.’
    Benjamin bowed and took the package. ‘I was lucky in finding a good second-hand clothes-shop,’ said Hannah to Penelope.
    The small group of passengers filed out and boarded the coach and then patiently waited for Hannah’s footman. ‘Are we never to move? Are we to sit here all day waiting for this criminal to favour us with his presence?’ demanded Miss Trenton acidly.
    The carriage door opened at that moment and Benjamin climbed inside, although it took all a few moments to realize it was Benjamin. He was wearing a suit of black-and-gold livery. His hair was powdered. He had washed and shaved and seemed very proud of his appearance.
    Lord Augustus studied Benjamin covertly as the carriage moved on. The man was too bright and intelligent to be a servant. Lord Augustus doubted that Benjamin had ever been a servant before his brief stay with