Read Online Banishment (Daughters of Mannerling 1) by M. C. Beaton - Free Book Online

criticism of her future husband, for, most of the time now, she was back at Mannerling, the pictures of the ancestors hung once more in the Long Gallery, and she and her sisters, calm, rich, and elegant, strolling in the grounds.
    ‘I found him interesting and good company,’ she said.
    His blue eyes, which a moment before had been merry, were now filled with contempt. ‘Oho, I see your plan. You would marry this creature. You would throw away any chance of life and love for a pile of bricks and glass. You weary me suddenly, Miss Isabella.’
    ‘I never said anything about marriage!’ Isabella’s face flamed.
    ‘Any family with any dignity and self-respect would keep away from a shallow gamester who robbed them of lands, home, and inheritance. I hope for your sake that the idiot burns Mannerling to the ground and sets you all free!’
    He spurred his horse and rode away through the trees down the bridle-path. Isabella urged her mount after him. This was all wrong. How could she practise flirting with one man if she had made her preference for another so plain? When she eventually caught up with him he had reined in again at the edge of the woods and was staring out across the countryside.
    ‘My lord,’ said Isabella, ‘you must not think that just because we paid a visit to Mannerling that we have any deep plot in mind. Do realize that my old home meant a great deal to me. Come, let us be friends again.’
    He turned and studied her. Her beautiful face looked pleadingly up into his. A light breeze blew an errant brown curl against her cheek. His face softened. ‘I have seen houses take over people before, Miss Isabella. I have also seen men accept their losses stoically at the tables and then go away and blow their brains out.’
    ‘My father . . .’ she began in alarm.
    Lord Fitzpatrick privately thought that Sir William was too selfish to ever dream of taking his own life.
    ‘I do not think your father will do himself any harm whatsoever,’ he said.
    ‘I just hope he never gambles again.’ Isabella was anxious now to turn the conversation away from Mr Judd and Mannerling.
    The viscount wanted to point out cynically that he had never yet met a reformed gambler. Was Sir William now gambling in his mind on the hope that this eldest daughter would get his home back for him? But Isabella and Judd! It could not be possible. She was too young, too fresh, too beautiful to ever contemplate an alliance with such a man.
    But the viscount, who was thirty, had forgotten the difference between his age and that of such as nineteen-year-old Isabella. He did not know that Isabella had never thought of love, that she was unawakened and innocent and thought, if she thought at all, of marriage as a sort of business partnership and had not the slightest idea of how one conceived children.
    And so he was quickly restored to good humour. He told her a story of how one of his Irish servants had been found shaking all over and the other servants had diagnosed whirligigitis and had pushed him in the pond, water being supposed to be the best cure, and how Mrs Kennedy had practically had to rescue the poor man from drowning for he could not swim, and had offered the correct diagnosis: that he was shaking all over because he had drunk a considerable amount of the viscount’s brandy in the servants’ hall the night before.
    They rode on amicably. ‘What a wonderful summer,’ sighed Isabella.
    He looked at the sky. ‘Not for long, I think,’ he remarked. ‘The wind has changed.’
    ‘Oh, dear,’ she said, thinking that her promised tour of the Mannerling gardens was only two days away.
    ‘But the countryside needs rain,’ he said, wondering at her obvious anxiety.
    She gave a little shrug, suddenly hoping he would not call on her on Tuesday and find she had gone to Mannerling.

FOUR
    So long as all the increased wealth which modern progress brings goes but to build up great fortunes, to increase luxury and make sharper the