Carola Dunn Read Free Page A

be thought of.
    “I have debts in London, sir,” he said tentatively.
    “Gaming debts, no doubt,” his uncle growled. “You need not think I shall pay them. From now on you’ll not be moving in fashionable circles anyway, so what matter if you are cast out of decent society.”
    “Not gaming debts, sir. It was you who taught me to play and pay.”
    “A little genteel betting on the cards for modest stakes, not two hundred guineas for a scandalous jape! You owe your tradesmen, I suppose.”
    “Yes, sir.”
    “Doubtless they are used to whistling for their money. It’s just as well you told your groom to come on here, for you’ll not be daring to show your face in Town. I suppose you’ll have to stay until he arrives. Now get out, and tell Caroline I’ll dine on a tray in here.”
    Matthew stood up and leaned with both hands on the desk. His leg ached fiercely. “I suppose it’s no good promising to reform,” he said.
    “Too late. I’ve been patient with you and this is the last straw. Now get out! Get out!” shouted the viscount.
    The march back down the long room seemed endless. Matthew closed the door softly behind him and slumped against it. Then he realized the butler was lurking nearby. Straightening, he attempted a smile.
    “I’m afraid his lordship’s in a devil of a passion, Bristow.”
    “He’s been cross as a bear with a sore head all week, Mr. Matthew. It’s the collywobbles—dyspepsia the sawbones calls it. Well, you know for yourself, sir, how his lordship likes his food.”
    “Too much jugged hare, eh? Mrs. Bristow’s cooking is enough to tempt any man to overindulge. My uncle asked for a tray in the library this evening.”
    He returned to the drawing room, but Aunt Caroline had gone up to change for dinner so he had to wait until they met, at one end of the long dining table, to pour out his woes.
    “I shan’t starve, of course,” he said gloomily, helping himself to a second serving of vegetable marrow stuffed with minced veal. “The Consols my father left me bring in around four hundred and fifty a year. But I shall have to choose whether to live by my wits on the fringes of Society or to abjure the Polite World altogether.”
    “You might consider taking up a respectable profession,” his aunt proposed.
    Matthew brightened. “I have always been interested in architecture, though I consider it merely a hobby. The trouble is it would take a long time to get started, and I have debts that ought to be paid soon: my tailor, my bootmaker, my landlady, the coal merchant, and at least half a dozen others. You don’t suppose Uncle Horace will relent?”
    “I wish I could give you some hope, but Horace has always refused to listen to persuasion, since he was a small boy, according to your mama. I recall her telling me of an occasion when she was eight—he would have been six—when he insisted on going shoeless in the snow. No matter what anyone said, only the actual experience of frozen toes changed his mind.”
    “I shall have no opportunity of proving myself sober and frugal, since he will doubtless consider that in my straitened circumstances I have no choice.” He sighed. “You know, Aunt Caro, it’s dashed rotten timing.”
    “Very true, alas. If he had not heard from those busybodies at a time when he is suffering from dyspepsia, I daresay he would have thought your antics a very good joke.”
    “Yes, there’s that, but what I meant is that I’d just about had enough of cutting up larks anyway. It’s not as if I meant to spend the rest of my life on the spree.”
    She patted his arm. “I have often thought that your enthusiastic embrace of the amusements of Town was more of an attempt to forget the horrors of war than a defect of character.”
    He lifted her hand to his lips and kissed it. Half his friends dead in the Peninsula and himself laid up for the better part of a year, not knowing if he would ever walk again—yes, the horrors of war was one way to