The Marquess Who Loved Me - By Sara Ramsey Page 0,23
a lamppost if it had possessed the right pedigree and fortune. If the girls’ charm was a bit shallow, it was made up for by how nicely they tittered at her conversational gambits.
And so when they had asked her one night, when they’d all had too much champagne, whether she had found a man to pin her hopes on, Ellie had told the truth. She’d been giddy with the truth, sure of her own heart, confident that once the season was over, her father would let her marry Nick. He’d promised to let them marry, after all; Ellie just had to finish the season without marrying someone else.
So she had shown Annabel and Clarabel her heart. Wasn’t that what friends were supposed to do?
Friends in the ton knew better. Annabel and Clarabel hadn’t intended to hurt her — perhaps they never even knew that a word was enough to change the course of Ellie’s life. But they went off and whispered to their brother that his despised cousin had tricked a duke’s daughter into falling in love with him. And when Charles Claiborne, a marquess rather than a merchant, came asking the duke for Ellie’s hand…
Ellie shook her head. Madeleine and Prudence weren’t Charles’s sisters. She wanted to tell them what Nick had done. She wanted to show them how he’d hurt her, how confused she was, how much she still wanted him.
But when she opened her mouth, the words wouldn’t come out.
“Are you feeling well?” Madeleine asked, suddenly concerned. “Perhaps you should rest rather than going to London today.”
“I shall be fine in London. As for the rest of it…”
Ellie paused again. Prudence finally took pity on her. She stood and linked arms with Madeleine, pulling the duchess out of her chair when Madeleine looked ready to stay and pursue her questioning. “There’s no need to know your feelings today,” Prudence said. “But we are here should you need our help.”
It was a nice gesture. If Ellie were nineteen, perhaps she even would have accepted it — perhaps she would have been grateful for it, rather than immediately dismissing it. But she was thirty now, on a birthday no one other than Nick would acknowledge since she hadn’t told them the date. She knew the limits of her friendships.
And she knew the truth — no one could help her with Nick.
As soon as they left, she let Lucia pin her hat to her hair and took up her swansdown-trimmed grey pelisse before descending to the front hall. A drive to London was hardly relaxing, given the state of the roads and traffic, but at least she would have a few hours to herself. She needed to explore all the options that would buy her freedom, repair her shields before she saw Nick again — and somehow find the courage to leave him a second time.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Nick loved the City. India had held its own unique charms, and he had enjoyed it enough to stay years longer than he had intended. But no matter how long he lived in Madras, he sensed that he would never quite feel at home there. The Indian men whom he dealt most closely with were anxious to prove their loyalties, and so never shared their culture with him. The ones he didn’t deal with viewed him with suspicion bordering on hostility.
He was no stranger to hostility. The upper classes in London hadn’t liked him either. But he couldn’t entirely blame the Indian populace for hating him, or for wishing the British would leave.
But this corner of London, wedged between the City and the East End, felt like home. The mix of shops and warehouses drew laborers from the east and bankers and merchants from the west, and was ideally suited to supply the whole metropolis with the staples and luxuries the people demanded. Still, he knew most peers would rather die than soil their Hessians by setting foot inside a warehouse.
With his father’s breeding and his mother’s money, Nick could afford to spend his days somewhere far more salubrious. But salubrious climes required socializing with the people who could afford those climes. Nick wasn’t in the mood to be social.
Then again, he also wasn’t in the mood to investigate his own potential demise. But if he wanted to make progress, he needed to see if any threats materialized around his London offices.
And he couldn’t sit idle at Folkestone all day without breaking his promise to give Ellie a reprieve.