The Incredible Honeymoon (Bantam Series No. 46) Read Free Page B

impossible for Harry to approach the Earl when Felicity was only seventeen, and being only three years older himself he had certainly not enough money to keep a wife.
    His circumstances were not much better at the moment. As he was an only child he would inherit on his father’s death, his estate, such as it was, and there was also a bachelor uncle who had always promised to make him his heir.
    Harry had wished to ask the Earl’s permission to marry Felicity before they came to London for the Season, but Antonia had advised them against it.
    “Papa and Mama have been saving up for years so that Felicity can have a proper Season in London and be presented at Court,” she said. “As you know, it should have happened last year just before Felicity was eighteen. But when Mama’s father died we were all plunged into mourning, and so Felicity’s debut had to be postponed.”
    “Supposing she meets someone else?” Harry had asked despondently.
    “I think it unlikely,” Antonia replied, “that she will ever love anyone but you.”
    It was strange, seeing that Antonia was a year younger than her sister, that everyone referred their problems and troubles to her, and that was another role she played in the household. Even her mother was more inclined to ask her advice rather than Felicity’s.
    “What am I to do?” Harry Stanford had enquired helplessly.
    “Wait until the Season is over,” Antonia advised. “Then when we are back in the country you can approach Papa. I am sure he will be more amenable then.”
    What Antonia really meant was that there was a chance for him unless Felicity had had a very advantageous offer of marriage.
    She privately thought it unlikely.
    Although Felicity was extremely pretty and men fluttered around her in the proverbial manner of moths around a flame, they thought twice before proposing marriage to a girl who had no dowry and only the possibility of 500 acres of not particularly productive Hertfordshire land when her father died.
    That of course was if the estate was not sold and divided equally between his two daughters, which Antonia always doubted.
    But while Felicity had received much flattery and never lacked partners at a Ball, up to date there had been no positive approach to her father and no suggestion of anything more permanent than a flirtation in the garden.
    Now out of the blue the Duke of Doncaster had appeared, and Antonia knew that it put to an end any hopes Harry Stanford might have of becoming Felicity’s husband.
    “I want to marry Harry! I love him! I will never love anyone else!” Felicity was saying.
    When she raised her face, looking lovely despite the tears which ran down her cheeks, Antonia felt desperately sorry for her.
    “I think you have to face facts, dearest,” she said. “Papa would never permit you to marry Harry when you could be a Duchess.”
    “I have no wish to be a Duchess,” Felicity said. “I just wish to live quietly with Harry. I have much enjoyed the Season and the Balls, Antonia, but I kept thinking of him and how much more fun it would all have been at home.”
    Antonia knew this was the truth, and she thought apprehensively that there was no doubt that Felicity would be unhappy living a life of pomp and circumstance.
    She also knew a great deal more about the Duke than anyone else in the family did; she could in fact have answered her father’s queries about the Duke’s motives for his proposal very nearly as competently as the old crony he was going to consult at the Club.
    As their estates marched with each other, the Duke owning some 10,000 acres, Antonia had always been extremely curious, not so much about him as about his horses.
    The one love of her life was horse-flesh and while she had ridden since she was a small child she had always been allotted the worst and oldest horses to ride which neither her father nor her sister required.
    Nevertheless it was Antonia who managed by some magic of her own to enthuse the laziest