Lady Anne's Deception (The Changing Fortunes Series Book 4) Read Free Page A

painting furniture, and most of it was enameled a glaring white. Annie reflected that it was rather like making one’s debut from a hospital ward.
    The start of the Season was now barely a week away. According to the calendar, it was late spring. According to the fickle English weather, it was still winter.
    Rain beat down on the muddy streets, and a great wind sent the cowls on the chimney stacks spinning. Cab horses shivered under sodden blankets as they waited at the ranks. You awoke to darkness, and by three in the afternoon the gas was already being lit. London seemed doomed to lie forever under a great flying bank of low, black clouds.
    Miss Winter lived in a thin-walled house in Manchester Square. Damp permeated every room, and little beads of condensation slid down the chilly white of the furniture. She did not believe in lighting fires after the first of March, and so all of the fireplaces had on their summer dress of crepe paper and pine cones under mantels draped in white lace.
    One evening the enterprising Marigold had taken an axe to a chair in her bedroom and had invited Annie along to enjoy the blaze in the fireplace.
    Miss Winter had promptly deducted the cost of the chair from Marigold’s pin money and this punishment had drawn the sisters into a temporary friendship, like two warriors resting on their lances before the next battle.
    Annie had been furious with Marigold all the way to London. Her punishment, meted out by the countess, had been a week on bread and water. But now she and Marigold were drawn together against the uncomfortable parsimony of their aunt and their mutual disappointment with London.
    Annie did not know what Marigold had expected, but she had painted a picture of light, airy streets where ladies in beautiful, colored dresses moved gracefully like swans.
    The reality was of scuttling figures dressed in gray and black and brown; damp clothes, damp smells, overflowing drains, and mud, mud, mud.
    Annie had even accepted with equanimity that Marigold was to have the finer gown for the opening ball at Lady Trevelyn’s mansion, Lady Trevelyn being one of the social leaders. Miss Winter had chosen Marigold’s ball gown herself, and then she had turned Annie over to the care of the dressmaker, telling her that she could have whatever she wanted as long as she kept it within the stipulated price.
    The meals,
chez
Winter, were abominable: cheap cuts of meat, soggy vegetables, stodgy puddings. Miss Winter instructed both girls to eat as much as possible during the Season—at other people’s houses, of course.
    On the day of the ball, Annie turned over in bed and buried her head under the bedclothes. She was tired of sitting up and looking out of the oblong window at that weeping gray sky every morning when the maid entered to draw the curtains.
    She heard the maid’s soft step and then the clink of china as her morning cup of tea and a plate with two Osborne biscuits were placed on the table beside her bed. Then the curtains were drawn.
    And Annie became aware of a new sound. Birds were squabbling and chattering outside the window. Somewhere down in the square a barrel organ was grinding out a wheezy waltz.
    She poked her head above the bedclothes and stared disbelievingly at the shaft of sunlight cutting an oblong across the polished boards.
    And then her stomach began to churn with anticipation at the thought of the ball. But she no longer thought of finding a husband just to spite her sister. She had enjoyed their new closeness. It had made the discomforts of the Winter household seem almost worth bearing.
    It was a kaleidoscope of a day. One moment it seemed as if the evening would never come, and then all at once it was rushing in upon her.
    A lady’s maid, Barton, had been hired to take care of Marigold and Annie, Miss Winter not wishing to pay for her services a day earlier than was necessary.
    Both girls were to wear their hair up for the first time. The hairdresser arrived,