Belle of the ball Read Free

that tide. It was something Lady Swinley had long talked of and hoped for as the best possible match for her daughter. But by the time Arabella had decided she must make a push to attach him. True had the upper hand, and Arabella had found it beyond her ability to bring the rather imposing Major-General to heel. If that was not quite how things had come about, it was how her mother viewed it, laying the blame equally on her daughter and their cousin. Ultimately it came down to the same thing: they had lost a fortune.
    And simply put, the Swinleys were destitute. Lady Swinley swore that when her husband died four years before, she had no idea that they would be so poor. The tide had lapsed due to there being no male heir in sight, but what should have been a stroke of good fortune for his wife and daughter did not aid their finances a bit; the manor house was mortgaged up to the very top of the crenelated roof. A brilliant marriage on Arabella's part was supposed to rescue them from penury, but somehow one Season followed another—Arabella had not yet known that her marriage was supposed to pull them out of the soup—and the right man, wealthy, tided, and handsome, had never come along. Why should they worry though, both mother and daughter thought? There was always Lord Drake. Isabella Swinley and Jessica Prescott, Countess Leathorne, were bosom bows from their school days and had planned, loosely, the match very early. Once Drake was back from the war and had resigned his commission, the visit was planned with the match in mind.
    But somehow, Arabella and Drake had not hit it off as they should have. And then with the nightmares and Drake's apparent preference for petite, mousy True-love, Arabella had decided that Lord Nathan Conroy— Drake's best friend, staying at the Leathornes' home on an extended visit—was a more likely conquest. Not as rich, but much more susceptible to Arabella's flirtatious ways. And so while Drake suffered through a bout of fever and delirium brought on by his despondency at Truelove's supposed impending nuptials to another man, Arabella and her mother had taken Lord Conroy's invitation to depart with him to his family home as a sign that he, not as rich as Drake, but still wealthy, could be had.
    'T will not tax you with losing Lord Drake if you will not raise the issue of Lord Conroy," Lady Swinley bargained, picking up the book that had fallen from her fingers at Arabella's announcement of the Snowdale snubbing.
    "Agreed, Mother," Arabella said. For she could not look back on that visit to Lord Conroy's family home with any degree of comfort, even though she still held herself blameless in the disaster that had made them flee from the mansion in late January.
    Lord Conroy's mother, the indomitable Lady Farmington, made Lady Swinley appear as gentle as a ewe lamb. And she was fiercely protective of her son, so Arabella, only staying at the family estate on sufferance and made to feel it every day, could not openly pursue the alliance with Conroy. And he, being a mama's boy and rather afraid of his dragonish mother, and alarmed that he had displeased her by inviting the Swinleys in the first place, had backed away from the preference he had clearly demonstrated for Arabella when they all were at Lea Park-That was when Lady Swinley had made her disastrous and desperate plan, unbeknownst to Arabella. But it did not bear thinking about; it was all water under the bridge. She was still furious with her mother, but it would do no good to berate each other. Their situation was desperate and she needed to find a wealthy husband this Season, or they would be in deep trouble.
    And so she told her mother the tale of the morning, and the snub by Lord and Lady Snowdale, and the gentleman stepping in.
    "But you put him in his place, I hope?" Lady Swinley said.
    "Yes, of course! I said it had just been a misunderstanding, and that the Snowdales were there before me. They spoke to me very kindly after that,