The Viscount and the Virgin Read Free Page B

society a little.
    And yet she had never felt at all happy in the Herriard house hold. It might have had some thing to do with the fact that she still had vague, shadowy memories of the short time she had lived there before, in the after math of the Dreadful Tragedy. Her grand father seemed always to have been angry, her mother always weeping. And nobody would tell her where her big brother Stephen had gone. Her grand papa had roared at her that she was a naughty girl for even mentioning him, and said that if she so much as spoke his name again, he would have her beaten. A feeling of utter isolation had frozen her to the spot on a part of the landing that she could still not pass without a shiver. For Stephen had always been the oneto scoop her up when the grown-ups were fighting and take her away some where she could not hear the raised voices.
    There was nobody to stand between her and this large, angry man, and it had terrified her. Even the nursery had been no refuge for the frightened little girl. Without Stephen, it had just become a bleak and empty prison cell. She had the impression of being left for days on end behind locked doors, although she was sure even her grand father could not have been that cruel. He must have ensured she had at least a nursery maid bring her some thing to eat!
    But no matter how hard she tried to resist them, those unhappy memories came swirling round her every time she crossed the thresh old of the grand house in Mount Street.
    It was not helped by the fact that once her mother had married Hugh Bredon, her life had under gone such a drastic change. Instead of incarceration and isolation, she had spent her first years at the Brambles learning to fish and shoot and ride, so that she could keep up with her magnificent new big brothers. She did not think she had run wild, precisely, over the ensuing nineteen years, though towards the end of her time there, she definitely had far more freedom than her aunt and uncle deemed appropriate for a young lady. She had thought nothing of saddling up her mare or harnessing the gig to go on errands or visit friends, entirely unaccompanied. And then, after her mother had died, she had taken over the running of Hugh’s house hold.
    Her Uncle Herriard, she knew, would never have trusted a sixteen-year-old girl to run his house hold for him. Her step father might never have shown her muchaffection, but he had reposed a great deal of confidence in her abilities. Hugh had only checked the house hold accounts for the first few months she was in charge, and though he never praised her, he never complained about the way she ran things, either. All he wanted was to be left in peace to get on with his studies, and she had taken great pride in ensuring that he could do so.
    But she had to face facts. When it came right down to it, Hugh Bredon had never quite thought of her as his own daughter. It was as though he was unable to forget that she was the result of his wife’s first disastrous marriage to Baron Framlingham.
    Imogen’s shoulders slumped. ‘I am sorry to be such a disappointment to you, Aunt,’ she said dejectedly. ‘It is not that I am not trying to behave as you would wish…’
    â€˜I know,’ her aunt agreed. ‘That is what is so particularly exasperating. It is so hard to discipline you for faults you just cannot help having! They are so deeply in grained, that…’ She sighed. ‘If only you were as pretty as your mother,’ she said, for what seemed to Imogen like the thousandth time.
    The very first time Lady Callandar had seen her, she had blanched and said, ‘Oh, dear! How very unfortunate!’
    With her wildly curling hair and intelligent grey eyes, Imogen was, apparently, the very image of her father, Kit Hebden. ‘ Knowing eyes,’ her uncle had said disparagingly. ‘That was the thing about Framlingham. Always looking at you as though he knew some thing you