The Exploits & Adventures of Miss Alethea Darcy Read Free

you are presently a bear with a sore head, and not in the mood for games.”
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    Bootle had known how it would be when he brought his master the news that George Warren was on his way to Paris.
    â€œThe devil take him,” said Titus. “He’s off to get the picture; well, he isn’t going to find it as easy as he thinks. Bootle, get packing.”
    Which Bootle already had, and he was quite pleased to do so. Maybe a journey abroad, for all its inconveniences, would shake some of the fidgets out of his master. He’d never known him to be so out of sorts for so long; Mrs. Thruxton might have a lot to do with it, but there was more to it than that. Mr. Manningtree was the kind of man who needed a purpose in life. His estates were in excellent order, and he wasn’t one of your gentlemen farmers, happy to look after his crops and land. London society bored him, and Bootle knew that his long sessions at Angelo’s with the foils and his habit of walking wherever he went in town were merely a way of working off some of his energy.
    Politics had seemed likely to take up a lot of his time and attention, but that hadn’t worked out; that was the trouble with a man like Mr. Manningtree; he was too clever and had too many ideas for those old dozers in the House of Commons. Yes, a trip abroad, sea air, the discomforts of travel, that would calm him down—if only for a while.
    It might even rid him of this obsession with an old painting; whatever had got into his master to put him in such a passion about a picture? It was as though all his disappointment and rage had focused on the Titian, not to mention on Mr. Warren—such a fuss about an Italian painting, it made no sense.

Chapter Two
    â€œI took this chaise as far as Butley, like you wanted,” Figgins said. “I told him we’re changing there to the mail, going north.”
    â€œLaying a false trail,” Alethea said, wrapping her cloak more closely about her. It was chilly in the chaise.
    â€œWe’ve places on the stage goes past at seven. When do you think they’ll find you’ve gone and set up a hue and cry for you?”
    Alethea yawned. “Not till later than that. He’ll sleep for hours yet, and I slipped some laudanum into the milk my maid brought me last thing—she always finishes up what I don’t drink. She won’t be up and about at her usual early hour.”
    â€œGreedy creature, and more a wardress than a maid; serve her right if she never wakes up.”
    Alethea closed her eyes, seeing images of the household she had left behind. Scenes flashed in and out of her tired mind, tired because she hadn’t slept a wink that night, nor for many nights before, and tired from the aching months of unhappiness.
    How much she wished she could roll back time, undo those same months, and be as she was before her marriage, Miss Alethea Darcy, single and fancy free. Carefree.
    Except that she hadn’t been fancy free, that was the trouble. That was the reason for her precipitous rush into the married state. Marry in haste and repent at leisure, wasn’t that how the saying went? How true, how very true, in her case. Why had she done it? How could she have been so foolhardy? Even in the depths of her anguish, she might have known that Norris Napier was no fitting husband for her.
    But then, she had felt that no man on earth would do, other than the one man she could not wed. And her pride, her cursed pride, had persuaded her that a marriage—any marriage—was the only way to deflect the pity and false sympathy and relish, even, of the polite world.
    She didn’t want to think about those dreadful days after the announcement of Penrose’s engagement to Miss Gray, yet the memories would intrude: the nightmare journey back to her cousins’ house in Aubrey Square, the exquisite relief of reaching the privacy of her bedchamber, of lying wracked and exhausted across her bed,