others, assuming they haven’t married off or found appropriate vocations for themselves!”
“If you do not get an appropriate governess for them and if you do not send the boys to school they will never have the means to obtain appropriate vocations!” Percy all but shouted.
Daphne drew back as if mortally offended. “How dare you speak to me so! How dare you imply that I am not the very best of mothers!”
“You don’t even know their names!”
“They all have so many of them,” Daphne snapped. “It’s impossible to keep them straight!”
The carriage had halted entirely, but they were not able to descend from it just yet. They would have to wait for a footman to come and help them and that could take ages. So they were trapped together in that small enclosed space. Huffing out a breath, Percy looked anywhere but at her sister.
“You know,” Daphne said, “I warned you about your Mr. Dunne. I told you what his true aim is… but there is more, Percy. Much more. You mustn’t trust him. He’ll only cause you pain and humiliation, if you do. Besides, it’s so much better to not be married! No husband telling you what to do and what you can and cannot spend!”
“And no money to spend anyway because you’re a woman and even if you could find employment, you’d never be paid more than a pittance, while you live a lonely, miserable life devoid of passion and even companionship,” Percy snapped. “Just stop it, Daphne. Stop trying to ruin everything that I have just like you ruined my dolls as a child!”
That statement rang out in the coach and it offered Percy a kind of clarity about the situation that she’d never had before. Daphne was always miserable because she was always jealous, not only of her but of anyone she perceived to have something she did not. Percy had developed an infatuation for James as a young girl so Daphne set her cap for him. Now Percy was unfettered by the bonds of marriage and Daphne wished she were as well. Percy was childless and so Daphne would simply deposit her children on anyone else so that she might forget their existence. And Algernon Dunne, the neighbor Daphne had been trying to impress for years, had never deigned to notice her but he’d wanted to court Percy and Daphne had done naught since it began but tell her what a fool she was for believing he could ever want her.
“You don’t have it in you to be happy for anyone else. You begrudge every person you meet every shred of happiness and satisfaction they have in their lives,” Percy noted. “Because you’re incapable of feeling either happy or satisfied. You have a greed for things and for attention, but no love for anything. I am sad for you, Daphne. What a pity and a waste it is that you’ve been given so much and have no ability to appreciate any of it.”
Daphne’s lips twisted into an ugly snarl. “Save your pity for someone who needs it! I do not. And by the end of this night you will know exactly how little value you have to a man like Algernon Dunne!”
Nothing more was said as the carriage doors opened and a footman offered his assistance to Daphne. Percy watched her go with a shake of her head. Sisters weren’t supposed to despise one another. She’d never been especially close to Daphne as they’d always been so very different in their interests and their personalities. But it had never occurred to her that she was hated, not until that very moment.
Pushing those terrible and very sad thoughts aside, she alighted from the carriage with the aid of a servant and followed her sister up the sweeping stone steps to the brilliantly illuminated entrance to the home of the esteemed Viscount and Viscountess Holland.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Algernon had made his way back to the ballroom. He’d had a brandy, or two, in the card room and was feeling, if not good, at least less inclined to assume the worst. Across the room, he saw Aurora. Lady Sheffield, he corrected mentally. Under the circumstances, maintaining his distance from her was the most appropriate course of action. But seeing that she was in the company of the Duke of Westerhaven, it was easy enough to see that she was quite content in her current situation.
And then he heard it. The announcement he’d been waiting for since his arrival. The butler stepped