An Earl for the desperate bride (Regency Romance) (Regency Tales Book 1) Read Free

having her position as the lady of the household usurped by a country girl barely out of the schoolroom, had coldly informed her that His Lordship preferred to have his sister continue to manage the household.
    “My brother expects to rule over a home that is orderly,” Mrs. Clemens told her after leading her to the room that she would occupy until her wedding, when she would share Lord Sevile’s quarters. “You cannot be expected to assume that responsibility at your age and with your background.”
    Eliza had no wish to insert herself into the running of the household but she was puzzled by Mrs. Clemens’ reference to her background. It wasn’t as if she had come to London under a cloud of scandal; she was an unknown presence in a city that was strange to her after her country upbringing. She decided that Mrs. Clemens was merely the cantankerous sister of an overbearing man and that was all there was to it.
    Lord Savile was away for dinner, sending his regrets in a note which explained that he had numerous business affairs to attend to and would not be able to join her and his sister for the evening meal. However, he would return to Savile House soon and was looking forward, he wrote, to wooing her in the manner befitting an ardent bridegroom.
    Tossing the note aside, Eliza dressed for dinner with a heavy heart. Ardour from a man she already despised was unwelcome. She felt imprisoned in the huge house. Although it was vastly more fashionable than the unpretentious country home where she had grown up, she found herself missing the faded rugs and worn draperies that now represented what was familiar and reassuring. It was obvious that Lord Savile could afford the very latest in European styles. His house was a display of everything that followed the fashions of the Prince Regent.
    Mrs. Clemens had delighted in showing her the ostentatious trappings of wealth with which her brother had decorated his house, her mood alternatively gloating over the opulence and showing a sullen resentment that Eliza would benefit from the splendour. For her part, Eliza thought the styles excessive. The couch in the morning room was supported by lion’s legs bearing the head of the Sphinx. Mythological creatures adorned every chair and table; the furniture itself an admittedly gorgeous array of ebony, mahogany and rosewood. It made her family’s oaken dining table, from which the family had eaten since the days of the Tudors, seem shabby and out of date.
    Mrs. Clemens recited the price of each item as she pointed it out to Eliza, who realized that she must have received the information from her brother. It was a pity to buy for the sake of the price tag as opposed to beauty, Eliza thought that night, the day thankfully over and the evening meal mercifully ended. She supposed the food was very elegant but it was nothing like what Mrs. Kent, who had been the cook since Eliza was young, could do with a partridge.
    It was a pity, Eliza thought crossly as she sat by the window, that with all of Lord Sevile’s vast wealth, he could do nothing to ease the oppressive summer temperatures, which seemed to wrap her bedchamber in layers of stale, stuffy heat. Boldly, even though she was in her nightgown, Eliza opened the window so that if, by chance a stray breeze passed by, it would find its way to her.  The tree outside her window was leafy and many-branched, and surely, she reasoned, the night air would spare her a breeze or two.
    And if the stories about the night air being harbingers of disease and maladies were true, then she would simply die and be spared this horrible marriage, Eliza decided. She’d rather perish from a fatal ague than die in childbirth as Lord Sevile’s previous wives had done. Would she come to envy those women in time, she pondered as her eyelids grew heavy. Had they welcomed death? They could not possibly have loved the man who was their husband. Were there ghosts in this house, the unquiet, unhappy spirits of the