plump fingers. “Never fear, Verena, one way or another, one of those girls will be Lady Harris before the month is out, and you and I’ll not have to fret any longer.”
Georgie came barreling out of the dining room and nearly tripped over her thirteen-year-old sister, Kathleen, who was kneeling at the closed door.
“Kit!” she whispered, not wanting her aunt and uncle to discover her sister eavesdropping. It would only add to their always growing list of the sisters’ unpardonable sins.
She caught her young sibling by the arm and pulled her away from the dining room and toward the stairs. “How many times have I told you listening at doors is going to get you into trouble!”
Ignoring her sister’s admonishment, Kit shook herself free and launched right into the situation at hand. “What are you going to do, Georgie? You can’t marry that awful man!”
“I don’t know,” she confessed. Then she glanced away from Kit’s worried expression, and hurried up the stairs to their attic refuge in the long-unused Brockett nursery.
“Uncle can’t do this to you. It isn’t fair,” Kit complained, following hot on her heels.
“There doesn’t seem to be much choice in it,” she told her as they entered the room. At least not right this minute. Georgie closed the door behind them and let out a long, desperate sigh.
Pacing across the threadbare carpet, she tried to think of some way out of this despicable betrothal. But what could she do in so short a time? And what would she do in the morning when Lord Harris’s personal physician arrived?
Georgie’s stomach lurched anew, so she settled down onto the shabby window seat, hugging her trembling legs to her chest. Lady Finch’s letter, still clutched in her hand, fluttered to the floor.
Kit followed and flounced down on the carpet near Georgie, taking up the dropped correspondence and smoothing out the wrinkled pages. “What reason did Uncle Phineas give? I couldn’t hear everything.” She smiled sheepishly at her admission, but offered no apologies for her behavior. “Surely he can’t mean to force you into this—even if he is our guardian, he is still family. And family wouldn’t do that to one another, would they?”
At this Georgie laughed, a weak and bitter noise. She turned and gazed into Kit’s earnest and fearful gaze. “Family may not, but our relations have never considered us such. As it is, the problem lies in the fact that Uncle Phineas isn’t our real guardian. Aunt Verena let slip that Father left the legal responsibilities of our care to a Lord Danvers. Apparently this marriage is his idea.”
“Lord Danvers? Who is he?”
Georgie shook her head. “I haven’t the least notion. Tonight was the first time I’ve ever heard of him.”
“Do you think Mrs. Taft knew of this?”
“No,” Georgie said. “Of that I’m certain.” Mrs. Taft might have been deficient in many ways as a foster parent, but if she had known that someone other than Uncle Phineas had held the purse strings, she would have moved heaven and earth to see that “her girls” had been allowed the privileges and tutelage that other young ladies of their rank were afforded. Money had always been scarce in the Taft household, as the captain was often away on long voyages, and any extra money he did bring home was usually invested back into his ship.
No, there was no way that Mrs. Taft had been aware of this Lord Danvers.
But now that Georgie was, and once she’d undone her engagement, she’d find this scurrilous man and see to it that he never presumed to order her life in such a high-handed manner again.
Or Kit’s either.
“You can’t let this happen,” her sister said, looking up from Lady Finch’s letter. “You just can’t. We could go to this Lord Danvers and appeal to his sense of honor.”
“I doubt he knows what the word means,” Georgie told her. “Apparently, he was court-martialed today by the Admiralty. Obviously, dishonorable conduct