The Temporary Wife/A Promise of Spring Read Free Page A

expected, with a straight spine that did not touch the back of her chair. She folded her gloved hands in her lap and directed her gaze modestly at her knees.
    She was the picture of prim gentility. She was quite perfect! He decided there and then that she would do, that his search was at an end. He was looking at his future wife.
    C HARITY D UNCAN SAT close to the window in order to make the best of the last of the daylight. It would not do to light the candle one moment before it became absolutely necessary to do so. Candles were expensive. She was mending an underarm seam of one of her brother’s shirts and noting with an inward sigh that the cotton fabric had worn thin. The seam would hold for a while, but there would be a hole more difficult to mend sooner than that.
    Her task was taking longer than it ought. Her eyes—and her mind—kept straying to the newspaper that was open on the table. Buying a paper each day was her one extravagance, though it could not exactly be called that. She knew that Philip liked to read it by candlelight after he got home from work, but in the main the purchase was for her own sake. She must find employment verysoon. For almost a month she had been looking and applying and—all too rarely—attending interviews. She had even applied for a few situations more menial than a governess’s or a companion’s position.
    No one wanted her. She was either too young or too old, too plain or too pretty, too high-born or too well-educated, or … Or prospective employers became too pointed in their questions.
    But she would not give in and abandon the search. Her family—one sister three years younger than herself at home and three children considerably younger than that—was poor. Worse than poor. They were deeply in debt and had not even known it until the death of their father a little over a year ago. And so instead of being able to live a gentleman’s life, Philip was compelled to work just to support his family. And she had insisted on working too, though there was precious little money a woman could earn that was sufficient to share with others or to pay off debts.
    If only there were some way of making a huge fortune quickly. She had even considered some spectacular robbery—though not seriously, of course. She ought not to complain, she thought, her task at the shirt finished at last. At least they were not quite destitute. Not quite, but close enough. And there seemed to be no real light at the end of the proverbial tunnel.
    But Philip was home, and she rose to smile her greeting, to kiss his cheek, to serve his supper, to ask about his day—and to draw his attention to the one advertisement in today’s paper that looked like a possibility.
    “It does not say how many children there are or what ages or genders they are,” she said with a frown when they had progressed to that topic. “It does not say whether they live here in London or in the Outer Hebrides or at the tip of Cornwall. But it does say that there is a position available.”
    “You do not have to take employment at all, Charity,” Philip Duncan said. It was his constant theme. Philip believed in taking full responsibility for his womenfolk.
    “Oh, yes, I do,” she said firmly. “It is the only suitable position offered in today’s paper, Phil. And there was nothing at all at the agency yesterday or this morning. I must try for it at least.”
    “You can go back home,” Philip said, “and allow me to support you as I should. You can go back home where you are wanted and needed.”
    “You know I will not do that,” she said, smiling at him. “You cannot possibly support us all, Phil, and you ought not. You ought to be able to live your own life. Agnes—”
    “Agnes will wait,” he said firmly. “Or she will tire of waiting and marry someone else. But it is unseemly for my sister to have to take employment.”
    “I need to feel that I am doing something too,” she said. “It is not fair that I