A Matter of Class Read Free Page B

the worst sort of criminal.
    Two days of incarceration had felt like two weeks or two months. Each hour had seemed a day long. Perhaps, Annabelle thought all too frequently, she had made the biggest mistake of her life when she fled with Thomas.
    And sometimes she thought there was no perhaps about it.
    The window of her bedchamber overlooked a small kitchen garden and a maze of stables and coach houses behind it. There was very little to look out upon and no way at all of knowing who—if anyone—rode into the square at the front of the house and maybe even stopped outside their door.
    Perhaps no one did.
    Perhaps no one ever would.

    The bottom threatened to fall out of her stomach. Oh, how she hated this helplessness. She had never been helpless. Quite the contrary.
    And then she heard the distant sound of the door knocker banging against the front door.
    It might be anyone, of course.
    Indeed, it almost undoubtedly was someone . Annabelle shocked herself by giggling aloud at the sad joke. She clapped one hand over her mouth.
    It was best not to hope. But how could one not hope? What else was there to live for?
    More than half an hour went by before the key scraped in the lock of her door and the door swung inward to reveal her father on the threshold, frowning sternly as usual, and her mother behind his right shoulder, smiling encouragement at her, tears in her eyes, her face pale and wan.
    Annabelle stood and clasped her hands at her waist.
    She felt slightly sick to the stomach. Guilt was a horrible feeling, and she was staring it in the face when she glanced at her mother. Apprehension was just as bad. What now? Was the carriage ready at the door to bear her off into outer darkness?

    â€œWell, miss,” her father said, stepping inside the room and seeming to half fill it with his tall, imposing figure. When he frowned, his great hooked nose made him look even more like a bird of prey than usual. “You are to have better than you deserve.”
    Her mother nodded and dabbed at a spilled-over tear with one index finger.
    Annabelle said nothing.
    â€œI have been persuaded to lower my standards in order to restore at least a modicum of respectability to my family,” he said, “though it will be a long time before I will forgive you for forcing it upon me, Annabelle. My only consolation is that you will suffer more than your mother and I, and that you will deserve exactly what you get.”
    His lips stretched into a grimace that might have been intended as a smile. Not a smile of pleasure or amusement or affection, however.
    Gracious heaven, Annabelle thought, darting a glance at her mother, who was swiping at another tear, whatever did he mean ? The Marquess of Illingsworth had not offered for her after all, had he? Had Papa never been close enough to him to smell his breath ? Or to see
his teeth ? Had her bold bid for freedom really failed so utterly and so miserably?
    But Papa had lowered his standards ?
    â€œI have just had a visit from Mason,” he said, clasping his hands at his back.
    Annabelle’s eyes widened. There was a sudden coldness in her head that threatened a fainting fit. It took a conscious physical effort to draw a breath into her lungs.
    â€œMr. Mason ?” she asked foolishly as though her father had spoken too quietly to be heard clearly.
    Mr. Mason was their neighbor at Oakridge. He was enormously wealthy and enormously . . . well, large. He was also, if her father was to be believed, enormously vulgar, uncouth, and any number of other unsavory, low things. In other words, he was not one of them . He was not a gentleman. He had made his fortune in coal and still had coal dust encrusted beneath his fingernails—according to Papa. And he had had the unmitigated gall to purchase the estate adjoining Papa’s when it was for sale many years ago. He had pulled down the old house and built an expensively vulgar mansion in its place and had set out to be