The Marriage Wager Read Free

have the opportunity to go to grand parties such as this. However, Constance could find little joy in chaperoning her foolish cousins through countless balls, soirees and routs. There was, she found, a great deal of difference between actually having a Season, such as Georgiana and Margaret were, and watching someone else have a Season.
    Her own chance at a Season had come and gone long ago. When she was eighteen and it was time for her coming-out, her father had fallen ill, and she had spent the next five years taking care of him as his health steadily declined. He had died when she was twenty-three, and as his estate had been entailed and he had had no male heirs, the house and lands went to his brother, Roger. Constance, unmarried and with no means of support other than the small amount of money that her father had left her, all of it conservatively invested in the Funds, had been allowed to remain in her home as Sir Roger and his wife moved in, accompanied by their two daughters.
    She would always have a home with them, Aunt Blanche had told her somewhat piously, although she did think it would be better if Constance moved out of the bedchamber in which she had always slept into a smaller one in the rear of the house. The larger room, with its lovely prospect of the drive and park, was more suitable, after all, for the two daughters of the household. The move had been a bitter pill for Constance to swallow, but she had consoled herself with the thought that at least she had a room all to herself, rather than having to share with one of her cousins, and she could retreat there for a bit of much-needed peace and quiet.
    Constance had spent the last several years living with her aunt and uncle and their children. She had helped her aunt with the children and with the household, wanting to be of use out of gratitude for their having taken her in, but also because it was plain that such help was expected in return for her room and board. Patiently Constance saved and reinvested the small income she received from her inheritance, hoping to one day accumulate enough that she would be able to live off it entirely and therefore be able to live on her own.
    Two years ago, when the eldest daughter, Georgiana, had turned eighteen, her aunt and uncle had decided that, given the expenses of a debut, it would be best to wait until the younger girl turned eighteen also and then bring their two daughters out together.
    Constance, her aunt told her graciously, could come along to help chaperone. There had been no mention of Constance participating in the annual social rite in any other capacity. Although the London Season was used as a sort of marriage market for mothers of marriageable girls, neither Constance nor her aunt considered Constance eligible to look for a husband. She was not an unattractive woman—her gray eyes were large and expressive, and her hair was a rich, dark brown strewn with reddish highlights—but at twenty-eight, she was decidedly a spinster, long past the normal age to be brought out into Society. She could hardly hope to wear pastels or pin her hair up in fetching curls. Indeed, Aunt Blanche preferred that Constance wear a spinster’s cap, but although Constance usually gave in and wore a cap during the day, for parties she refused to don that final symbol of blighted hopes.
    Constance did her best to comply with her aunt’s expectations, for she knew that her aunt and uncle had not been obliged to take her in after her father’s death. The fact that they had done so primarily out of equal parts fear of social disapproval and eagerness to have an unpaid helper for their own children did not absolve her, Constance thought, from a proper gratitude toward them. However, she found it difficult to endure the chatter of her cousins, who were both silly and inexplicably vain about their looks. And though it was also vain of her, she supposed, she despised wearing plain dresses in grays, browns and dark blues, the