hair. I had hoped you would resemble her more.”
Jeremy Vance, Viscount Faris was starting to grate on her nerves. “She was also a very sweet-tempered person with excellent manners. It seems we neither of us resemble her in temperament, brother.” It was the first time she had addressed him as such, and certainly the first time she had shown him outright the sharpness of her tongue. To his credit, he threw back his head and laughed. She had a suspicion he was more than half-cut at this point. A vulgar expression she had learnt from Hannah, their old maid, but she remembered it now and applied it in her thoughts.
She did not know this man, and she did not believe him to be the protector her father had hoped he would be. A dull sense of panic had been rising in her for the past few days like a nasty wellspring that might eventually bubble up and overwhelm her. Now she had left Bath, any meagre acquaintances she might were over a hundred and fifty miles behind her.
Hannah would have already taken up her new position and she had precious other friends. Lady Ralph no longer responded to her letters and Canon Whitehaven seemed to have disappeared off the face of the earth. Of their ex-pupils, several had written her pretty letters when they had first left Hill school, but those had naturally tailed off with time when they had entered society or married.
It was a bleak thought, that this was the only family left to her. This blonde, laughing, drunkard with eyes full of spite and malice for all he was so pretty.
“Sadly, I already have one viper-tongued shrew in residence at Vance Park,” he said with mock-regret. “My viscountess, the Lady Caroline. I had hoped... but there. Things rarely turn out as we anticipate.” He passed her locket back to her.
He had hoped she would be some simpering miss who would cast herself on his chest and beg for his clemency, she thought with shrewdness. Perhaps he had thought to find a gentle confidante in his half-sister. A sort of saintly shadow of his long-forgotten mother. Willing to flatter and cajole him and hang on his every word. Their mother certainly would have she realized bitterly.
“In short, madam, you are not what I expected.” He drew out a cigarillo case and without asking her permission and lit up a thin dark cheroot. Her nose wrinkled for it smelt vile. He noticed her reaction and smiled again. “I cannot see that we would suit.”
A strange way of putting it, she thought. Almost as if he were jilting her.
“I agree,” she answered shortly. If he thought she was going to beg for his mercy, he was sadly mistaken. “Perhaps you should set me down at the next inn and I can make my own way back to Bath at the next opportunity.” It was a bold statement, full of stiff-necked pride for she knew both how little remained in her purse and how little was left for her back in Bath. In truth, nothing.
His eyes flared and for one horrible moment, she thought he would take her up on it. “No, no, there can be no question of anything of that sort,” he said vaguely, his mind clearly miles away. “You are my own flesh and blood and gently reared. I cannot see you cast out on the streets.”
Her back stiffened, but it was no more than the truth. After paying the costs of Papa’s funeral she was practically destitute. Still, courtesy would have dictated he did not draw this to her own attention.
“No, I must see you provided for...” He trailed off, sunk in sudden thought. He tugged on his lower lip in contemplation.
“Perhaps you have a small cottage on your estate,” she suggested with sudden desperation for she did not like the unholy gleam now shining in his blue eyes. “I could give lessons from there - art or music lessons? Or perhaps your wife will know of some acquaintance who has need of a governess?”
“Teaching? There’s precious little demand for lady’s lessons around Penarth,” he said dismissively. “As for Caroline, any acquaintance of hers would have no respectable use for you. No, I have a much better notion.”
“And that is?” she asked with a sinking sensation in the pit of her stomach.
“Why marriage, of course,” he said slowly. “That is the traditional manner ladies are provided for, is it not? And as your fond brother, am I