The Savage Marquess by M.C. Beaton Read Free Book Online Page A

to back away. It was like watching a ballet. With many flourishes of scented handkerchiefs, they continued to edge backward, finally turning as one man and scampering away across the grass.
    Tight-lipped, the marquess helped Lucinda into the carriage, bowed to her, and strode away.
    Ismene was quite white. “Monstrous man,” she said in a shaky voice.
    “Shall I fetch the parasol?” asked Lucinda in a quiet voice. “It is pretty and can be repaired.”
    “No, no,” said Ismene, quite terrified. She called to the coachman, “Drive on! Drive on, you great lummox, before he comes back.”
    Fear kept Ismene silent for the rest of the outing.
    But her spirits rallied soon after their return. She instructed the servants to bring a bath up to her bedchamber and then told Lucinda, after the bath was prepared and scented with rosewater, to wash her back.
    There was something repellent, Lucinda reflected as she diligently applied a cake of Joppa soap to Ismene’s back, about being forced to touch the body of someone you detested. They were to go to the opera that evening. Lucinda felt if she did not have some time to herself, she would break down and scream.
    She knew Ismene was trying to humiliate her by her very nakedness. No lady bathed naked, even before a member of her own sex.
    “I am so glad we are to go to the opera,” said Lucinda gently. “I adore music.”
    “You do?” Ismene said, her eyes narrowing.
    “Oh yes,” sighed Lucinda. “It is my greatest pleasure and
Don Giovanni
is my favorite opera.”
    Ismene shifted irritably in the narrow coffin-shaped bath. “I have some sewing and mending for you, Lucinda,” she said. “It is better you remain at home this evening.”
    “Very good, my lady,” Lucinda said in a voice deliberately laden with disappointment, and then turned away so that Ismene should not see the smile of satisfaction on her face.
    After Ismene had left for the opera, Kennedy came into Lucinda’s bedroom and quietly removed the basket of sewing. “Have a bit of a rest, miss,” she said soothingly. “I like sewing and she’ll never know it was me who did it.”
    Lucinda felt a lump growing in her throat. “You are very kind, Kennedy,” she said, and added with a sudden burst of candor, “Your life cannot always be easy.”
    “No, it is not,” said the maid. “But it is hard these days for servants to find good positions—unless,” she added with a grin, “they want to work for the Marquess of Rockingham. He can never keep anyone.”
    “Perhaps the living conditions are too cramped,” said Lucinda, who knew from remembered gossip she had heard on visits to her rich relatives that aristocrats often kept their money for their country estates and rented only inferior accommodation in town for the Season.
    “No, ’tis not that, miss,” said Kennedy. “His lordship has a fine town house in Berkeley Square, Number 205, with plenty of spacious rooms, but he is so wild and so dissolute that they all give their notice sooner or later.”
    Kennedy bobbed a curtsy and left, taking the sewing with her.
    Lucinda settled herself in the battered armchair. She reached out to the table beside it, but the novel she had been reading had disappeared. With a cluck of annoyance she went through to Ismene’s bedchamber, confident that the girl had borrowed it. But there was no sign of the novel. Lucinda was about to leave when her eye fell on the fireplace. She stiffened. It was full of blackened, burnt paper. Ismene would not… could not…
    She knelt on the hearth. One half-page was all that remained. She pulled out the blackened mess and studied it, and then sat back on her heels, her face white. Ismene had taken her book and had burnt it, the book that had carried a loving inscription from her father on the title page. Such spite was frightening.
    “I can’t go on,” whispered Lucinda. “I can’t.”
    She rose shakily to her feet and went out and downstairs to the library to find