The Golden Season by Connie Brockway Read Free Book Online

husband . . . ?
    “No,” Eleanor said with finality. “Lydia has her reputation to consider. For eight years she has been the beau ideal for every young woman who dreams of independence.”
    “Oh, fie,” Lydia said. “I never set out to be anyone’s paragon. If my decision to wed disillusions someone, that is their problem. I refuse to fashion my future to satisfy some romantic notion of me.”
    She was not being entirely candid. She liked her celebrity. She thrived on center stage; it was where she was most comfortable. She had spent her childhood learning how to please and entertain, to be witty and winsome and pretty and vivacious because that’s what people responded to, that’s what her parents had delighted in showing off, and that’s what she did best: enchant people.
    As a child, her reward for being so good at it was to be swept along in the wake of her labile, extravagant parents, taken on all their travels, shown off to princes and princesses, introduced to great men and women. In short, to live a fairy-tale life of opulence and excitement.
    The life she had been raised to lead. This life. Being Lady Lydia Eastlake was her profession as much as being the prime minister was the Earl of Liverpool’s. Besides, who would she be if this were taken from her? In the deepest part of her, she feared she might not like the answer.
    “You will simply have to marry a paragon,” Eleanor was saying. “Someone as wealthy as you are—were—and with as just much consequence. A gentleman of wealth, breeding, and rank, who will appreciate your independence.”
    “Easier said than done,” Lydia commented dryly, and at Sarah’s questioning look elaborated. “As it has lately been pointed out to me, those whom I refused are unlikely to ask again and those who have not asked for my hand are bound to be advised against lending themselves to a similar indignity. I have also been informed that once it is known that I am bankrupt, the mercenary reasons for my interest in them is bound to sit poorly with any proud, wealthy, suitable gentleman.” She gazed around at her friends.
    “Privately we may acknowledge that we wed for fortune and status, but no one wants the fact paraded publicly. We cleave to the notion that someone might actually want us for ourselves.” She spoke nonchalantly, but the words struck a tender note in her heart. “And the greater one’s status and fortune, the more it seems to matter. Gentlemen do not like to think their suit is being encouraged only because of the size of their purse.”
    How could one know another well enough to be certain they wanted to wed them? How could one know if someone was worthy of one’s respect and admiration, someone in whose company one would always find pleasure and interest? Her parents had fallen in love over the course of years of friendship and, despite what Society had whispered, did not act on that love or declare it until after her uncle’s death.
    If she was being honest, she would acknowledge that that question had much to do with why she had never accepted any of the marriage proposals that had been made to her. What if she made a mistake, as her mother had in her first marriage? Or what if she wed a man she found out later she did not love, as had Sarah? Or a man whom she despised, like Eleanor? Or a man like Emily’s husband?
    Yet there was no gainsaying it; Lydia did want to marry. She wanted the sort of companionship and affection her parents had known for each other, as well as the intensity of emotion she had oft glimpsed in her father’s eye as he watched her mother. She wanted to be regarded with a similar wealth of feeling, undisguised and wholehearted. But she had never felt confident that any of the men who had asked for her hand could provide her with these things. Or she, him. And so the years had slipped by while she waited, never feeling the necessity of having to make a choice, content, if truth be told, to enjoy the independence for