Autumn Glory and Other Stories Read Free

announce the disasters in store for them. Of all the dire fates, though, in a life filled with injustice and slights, Algernon Thurkle was the worst blight of all. At least Ellie, beautiful Iselle, was to get a handsome peer. And Nessie, sweet Inessa, was to get Frye Hall and those marvelous horses. She, the last child, the unwanted third daughter, was to get Algie Thurkle, with his spots and stammer and stable-centered conversation. Why, his horse had more intelligence! She’d rather wed his horse, for that matter. At least the horse did not have roving hands. Lady Bannister’s youngest girl may have been without a governess for these past years, but she had the lending library and the collection downstairs to teach herself, and if there was one thing she learned, it was that there was more to life than horses and hunting. Well, she was not going to do it. She was not going to marry an unlicked cub without even making her bows at the marriage mart, and she was not going to become Mrs. Algernon Thurkle, not after spending the last eighteen years as Irmagard Snodgrass. Life could not be that cruel.
    The freckles were bad enough, the left-handedness could usually be concealed, and she had long resigned herself to being the ugly duckling in a family of swans, but Irmagard! Not even Maggie, she thought with eighteen years of resentment, because Lady Bannister thought Maggie sounded common. So she was Irma to her closest associates, and more often Irm the Worm to her older sisters, who had too often found the grubby infant underfoot, asking questions, following them about. From the natural superiority of five or six years, they resented the constant shadow of a bumbling baby sister.
    They did not resent her now, falling on Irma to save them from the atrocity of arranged marriages. At least they did so after Iselle roundly berated her for waking them before noon, and Inessa raised her blue eyes to heaven and clucked her tongue at the sight of the dirt tracks across her carpet.
    “Oh, hush, both of you, do. Ellie, you know you don’t need any beauty sleep; you’re always prettiest after dancing the night away. And if you don’t hurry and listen, you’ll find yourself never dancing again. And, Nessie, you’ll have to do more than pray over a little untidiness, unless you wish to have Mr. Frye tracking stable muck through your parlor.”
    “Mr. Frye? Whatever are you speaking of? He would never come calling on Mama in all his dirt.”
    “And what do you mean, I’ll never dance again? Why, there will be balls every night as soon as Papa’s wretched hunt is over and we leave for London.”
    “We are not going to London, none of us, that’s the point. We have a veritable crisis.” And so she explained about their mother’s plans to see each of them engaged by the night of the hunt ball, less than a week away.
    Predictably, Iselle dissolved in a flutter of weepy lace onto the chaise longue, without looking one jot puffy or red-eyed or rumpled, Irma thought disgustedly as she bathed her eldest sister’s forehead with lavender water.
    “I made sure Mama would give up after all these years,” Ellie groaned. “I’ll go into a decline, I swear, and waste away from a broken heart. Viscount Wingate will marry a faded wraith, and then I’ll come back to haunt him for taking an unwilling bride.”
    The only books Iselle ever read, nay, listened to while Inessa or Irma read aloud, were gothic romances from the Minerva Press. It showed. The handkerchief wafted through the air. “I shall die for true love.”
    “Don’t be a cabbage head, Ellie,” Irma chided. “No one dies from an arranged marriage. Just look at Mama.”
    Ellie moaned again. Then she sat up suddenly, tipping the basin of scented water onto Irma. “Wingate!” she shrieked, as if she’d truly seen a ghost. “Why did she have to pick that stuffed shirt Wingate?”
    Irma ignored the spreading wetness in her lap.
    “Oh, do you know him? Did you ever meet him