Victoria and the Rogue by Meg Cabot Read Free Book Online Page A

Victoria
    could not help thinking that the Indian way of courtship and marriage made more sense than the way the
    English went about it. In India parents decided, often at birth, whom their children would marry. When
    the boy and girl came of age, certain transactions ensued, generally involving goods of some sort. Some
    girls were worth many goods, some only a few. After these transactions, the couple was joined in holy
    matrimony, and everyone went home with their allotted goods, and that was that.
    In England, it was entirely more complicated. No marital arrangements were made on the part of the
    children’s parents at all. Instead, mothers and fathers kept their daughters tucked out of sight until their
    sixteenth or seventeenth birthdays, at which point they were suddenly pushed into society—something
    Victoria had learned was called a girl’s “coming out,” or “first season”—and paraded in front of the
    marriageable bachelors who happened to be in town and not back at their country estates, still shooting
    grouse, as they’d been doing all winter. The single men then decided which of these many girls they liked,
    and then from there, which girl had the largest dowry.
    The English style of courtship seemed perfectly barbaric—and unfair to the girls, Victoria felt. For what
    if a girl were not attractive, or poor? Who would want to marry her then? Perhaps the worst part of the
    English courtship rituals, Victoria learned soon after her arrival on English soil, was something called
    Almack’s. It was nothing more than a series of large rooms in which everyone who was anyone in
    London society gathered every Wednesday night in order to dance and show off their new spring
    wardrobe. Almack’s was, to Victoria, a nightmarish crush of humanity. It made her long for the airy and
    open market squares of Jaipur, which held occasional festivals, when it was not monsoon season, at
    which everyone from neighboring villages showed up. How she missed the sparkling saris, the fire-eaters,
    the highly spiced savories!
    There was nothing comparable at Almack’s. Bland punch, stale biscuits, and even staler conversation.
    There were no fire-eaters, and not even a single elephant.
    The utter lack of other diversion made the presence of Jacob Carstairs surprisingly welcome. He did
    not, according to her cousin Rebecca, come often to Almack’s. But upon Victoria’s first visit to the
    place, there he was, looking very well in evening dress, though his collar points were still distressingly
    low—the lowest in the room, in fact. Victoria had thrown her cousin a significant look upon noticing
    them, as if to say, See? What was I telling you? No respect for fashion whatsoever.
    Still, unfashionable collar points or not, Captain Carstairs greeted both girls very cordially, and asked
    each of them for a dance—to Rebecca’s delight, and Victoria’s disgust. If Jacob Carstairs thought that
    she was going to meekly forget the humiliation he’d put her through the week before, he was in for a rude
    shock.
    “You knew I hadn’t yet told my aunt and uncle about my engagement to Lord Malfrey,” Victoria said as
    Jacob Carstairs took her hand for the dance she’d promised him. “Admit it. You were hoping to cause a
    scene.”
    “Which I did,” Captain Carstairs said, not even attempting to hide his happy smile at the memory of
    Victoria’s aunt falling into a swoon and her daughters’ attempts to revive her. Victoria’s uncle’s reaction
    had not been nearly as satisfying. He had merely called for Perkins to bring him a whiskey.
    “Well, I don’t think it’s anything to be proud of,” Victoria said severely. “You put the entire house into
    an uproar.”
    “I didn’t,” Jacob said. “You’re the one who wanted to marry a man your family doesn’t approve of, not
    me. I just informed them of the fact. It doesn’t do any good to kill the messenger.”
    “My family doesn’t disapprove of Lord Malfrey,”