Woo'd in Haste by Sabrina Darby Read Free Book Online

so.
    “That’s very kind of you, Tommy. To be truthful, I’d simply like to go to London. And Brighton. And Bath. And all the seaside towns. Sooner, rather than later.”
    Her father huffed. “You’ll go soon enough, Bianca. I want no more talk of such bothersome things.”
    Which was exactly why she never wasted time thinking about traveling. There was no point.
    Despite the slight tension, at night, across the dining table, conversation had never been so lively. Simply having another person present changed the dynamic. Of course, when Kate and Henrietta returned home, there was chatter about everything they had done and everyone they had seen, but that was always underlain with everything that went unsaid, and was said.
    After dinner, as Bianca played on the pianoforte while her father and Thomas played a game of chess and Lottie worked on her sewing, Mr. Dore lingered near her under the excuse of turning her pages for her.
    It was all very proper, but he seemed to be paying her an inordinate amount of attention.
    “You should see London,” he said quietly. “It’s unfair that you should be forced to rusticate while your sister gallivants about.”
    “What do you know of it?”
    “Gossip,” he admitted, using the same word she had accused him of during the fishing expedition. “But your father seemed to give truth to those rumors. You are like the Sleeping Beauty here.”
    “From Little Briar Rose ?” She laughed. “How ridiculous.”
    He smiled, too. “You are rather widely read for someone who has never left her village.”
    “Oh, I’ve left. I actually have been to Brighton,” she reminded him. “It’s so close and we do have family there, but only the once. However, books are my escape. It’s how I travel. How I see the world. I suppose that’s why, even though a tutor, you claim to not believe books the source of best knowledge. When one can move freely, experience things for oneself, one need not rely on a book.”
    “Exactly, Miss Mansfield! Have you read any Rousseau?”
    “I have not,” Bianca admitted.
    “In his book, Emile , he says, and I paraphrase, ‘if one would learn, live life.’ If there is one thing I have learned from my travels, it is that education may take place in the oddest of places.”
    “But you were not a boy of eight,” Lottie reminded him loudly. Dear Lord, had she been listening to the entire conversation? Did that mean her father and Thomas had heard? But no, they were across the room, and though they both looked up now, they had been engrossed in their game. Lottie was much closer.
    “Which is why I believe in mixing excursions with more classical learning,” Mr. Dore returned.
    Although not a skilled chess player like her sister, even Bianca knew when a point was won. But it was a point that simply made her resentful of her sister yet again. Of the ease with which Kate went about her life, trampling upon everyone else’s.

 

C HAPTER S IX
----
    N one of it was proper, but Mr. Dore insisted on coming along on all of Bianca’s outings with Thomas, under the excuse that every experience was a learning experience. That one could learn as much from a morning of fishing as one could from a dry text. It was an interesting theory. Bianca wasn’t certain how rigorously it would prepare Thomas for Eton, but her brother responded to Mr. Dore far better than he had to Lottie. Even if it didn’t seem as though the lessons were particularly advanced.
    None of this was proper. Especially as today, as they stopped for a picnic after a morning of fishing, their small party consisted only of Mr. Dore, Bianca, and Thomas. Lottie hated fishing, well, disliked fish in general, but as long as Bianca had known her, she had begged off joining in on fishing expeditions.
    Which was particularly odd considering the warning she had imparted just the day before.
    “Bianca, I think you have been spending too much time with Mr. Dore.”
    “With Mr. Dore and Thomas, you