Amanda Scott Read Free Page A

at her.
    “Unexpected? How could we be unexpected? Surely you must have known we would return as soon as we received word of Michael’s death.”
    Jordan shrugged with a slanted, somewhat accusing glance at his mother, and Margaret found herself thinking he had not improved much in the three years she had been away. Two years her senior, he had been an irritating young fop who, whenever they met in London, had seemed to enjoy attaching himself to her in order to bask in the reflection of her popularity. Although Michael and Abberley had merely teased her about her conquest of the young man, she was certain that Frederick Culross would have soon sent him to the rightabout, once Michael had allowed an announcement of their betrothal to be posted in the Gazette . But it would not do to think of Frederick now. Resolutely, she pushed the memory into the nether reaches of her mind and regarded Mr. Caldecourt straightly, waiting for his response.
    But it was not he who spoke. “You do not ask how I fare,” said Lady Annis plaintively. “Of course, you do not realize that Doctor Fennaday has positively insisted that I be in my bed at nine o’clock. My health is tenuous, you know. But I must not complain of my sufferings. There could be no question, once your courier had brought us news of your intended arrival, of my going to bed without knowing you were safely at home. It is my nature to worry,” she added with a sigh.
    “But why on earth are you here?” demanded Lady Celeste, unbuttoning her gloves. She glanced pointedly at the interested Moffatt, who quickly effaced himself, before she looked back at Lady Annis. “I am sorry you worried, for there was no need. But surely you ought to be tucked up in your own bed in Little Hampstead.”
    Lady Annis drew herself up, her impressive bosom swelling with righteous indignation. “And leave my poor dead husband’s little grandnephew to the mercies of mere common servants? Surely, you cannot think I should be so remiss in my duty as that. Why, as soon as I heard—”
    “Just how did you hear?” Lady Celeste interjected impatiently.
    “The vicar,” replied Jordan, “and once we was here and had got our blacks on, we couldn’t very well put them off again, so there seemed little point in going elsewhere.”
    “I must say,” put in Lady Annis quickly, “that I am utterly shocked to see you both in colors. Though I have little right to speak on that head to you, Celeste, I should think that out of respect for your very own brother, Margaret, you might have seen fit to dress more conventionally.”
    “Foolishness,” said Lady Celeste, moving now to warm her hands at the fire. “We’d no time for shopping before we left, let alone time to have anything proper made up, as anyone but a ninnyhammer might have realized without my having to explain the matter. Margaret can attend to such stuff now that she’s home. Not that she don’t look fine as she is.”
    Mr. Caldecourt, lifting his quizzing glass to his eye, surveyed Margaret from head to toe and agreed. “Slap up to the echo,” he said, nodding. “Dashed if she ain’t, Mama. That sort of rig will be all the crack in London when the Season begins next month. I’m persuaded we shall see any number of fashionable ladies in just such a getup as that.”
    Irritated to realize that he was making her self-conscious, Margaret smoothed the slim, slate-blue wool skirt of her traveling dress, then turned away from him to remove her bonnet and gloves. She was saved the necessity of making any reply to his observation by Lady Annis’s assurance that she, for one, would see nothing of the kind.
    “We shall stay quietly in the country this year, my pet. I am certain that my poor nerves would never survive the excitement of a London Season so soon after the shock of poor Michael’s death. And we are in mourning, you know.”
    “But dash it all, we ain’t dead,” objected her son. “Perhaps I shall have to live a bit more