The Pretenders Read Free

coloring, I thought, but nothing else about us was alike. I had my father’s height, and 1 supposed I also had his nasty temperament. Unlike Mama, I didn’t forgive.
    I forced myself to smile at my gentle mother. “Do you think it would be wrong of me to pray that Highflyer wins the Derby?” I asked lightly.
    She laughed. She was so pretty, my mother, so soft and so delicate. She was forty-four and I was twenty-one and I had been taking care of her for years.
    I grinned. “What do you bet that we get some hams delivered here tomorrow?”
    “Darling Reeve,” Mama said. ”He is so considerate. I rather believe that I will pray for Highflyer, too.”
    The next few weeks went by in the usual fashion. I rode Reeve’s magnificent hunters every day to keep them in condition. One thing I had to say for Lord Bradford, he didn’t stint Reeve on the normal things that a gentleman was expected to own. It was the gambling that made him put his foot down.
    Unfortunately, Reeve liked to gamble.
    Ambersley, Reeve’s house, was also maintained in beautiful condition. There was an army of servants to keep the house, and an army of gardeners to see to the grounds. In every way possible, Reeve looked like the incredibly wealthy young nobleman that he was.
    Except that all the bills were paid by Lord Bradford, and that drove Reeve wild.
    During the weeks before the running of the Derby, I went on several expeditions with local friends whom I had known forever. They were the same expeditions that we took every spring, and they were growing rather tedious, but I couldn’t spend every waking hour in the stable, and so I went. The expeditions also had the virtue of getting Mama away from the house and her garden, which I thought was good for her.
    One afternoon a group of us went boating on the River Cam, just above the university from which Reeve had been so spectacularly ejected five years before. I found myself in the same boat as Cedric Liskey, the new vicar at our local parish church.
    It was a beautiful day, and I watched the brownish water eddy around the boat as Mr. Liskey pulled the oars through it. There was scarcely the whisper of a breeze. The bulrushes on the shore were as still as their reflections. The willows trailed their branches in the water, and the irises on the shore were budding. The peace, the sunlight, and the warmth were very pleasant, and I smiled at Mr. Liskey as I trailed my fingers in the water.
    “Everyone has been so kind to me since I arrived here,” Mr. Liskey said. ”Why, I don’t believe that I have dined at home more than once or twice.”
    Of course he hadn’t dined at home, I thought cynically. He was twenty-seven, single, and in possession of a very decent living. Every unmarried girl in the parish was after him. In fact, I had been rather surprised to find myself sharing his boat. I rather thought that Maria Bates would have made certain of that place for herself.
    “Are you connected to the Cambridge family?” I asked him now. I assumed that he was, of course. The Ambersley living was a good one, and Lord Bradford would not have given it outside the family.
    He smiled at me. He was a nice-looking young man with good teeth and warm brown eyes. “Yes. I am a second cousin of Reeve’s, actually. We haven’t seen much of each other, but our lives did cross briefly at university.”
    “Oh,” I said.
    He stopped paddling and leaned on his oars. “My career was longer than his, but far less… sensational.”
    I sighed. It often seemed to me that the prank in which the home of the Head of Reeve’s college had been painted daffodil yellow overnight was known throughout England. The joke had resulted in Reeve’s being sent down, which was exactly what he had hoped for, of course. He had hated Cambridge.
    “I don’t like rules,” he had said to me defiantly when his father had banished him to Ambersley in disgrace after Cambridge had washed its hands of him. “I want to be in charge of my