Read Online Regency Romp - Happy Christmas Mr Jones (Regency Romps) by Linda Sole - Free Book Online

 
     
     
    Chapter One
     
    ‘Only two weeks to the Christmas Ball,’ Lydia Savage said and sighed as she looked at her sister and cousins.  ‘I do love Christmas so and it seems an age in coming this year.’
    Jane Savage, at nineteen, older than Lydia by one year, smiled and nodded as she lay down the scissors she had been using to cut out silhouettes.  Mary and Annabel were also nodding their agreement, because, of course, it had been a distressing year for them all.
    ‘It will not be the same this year,’ Lydia said, her eyes moist.  ‘With Mama’s passing and us coming here to live…’ She blinked hard for though nine months had passed since that terrible day, they had all felt the cloud of unhappiness that hung over the Savage household. ‘Not that I don’t like living here at the Manor with you, Mary and you, Annabel.  It is just that one thinks too much at this time of year…’
    ‘We know that it cannot be the same for you and Jane,’ Annabel said sympathetically.  ‘We miss Aunt Isabel too, you know.  She was almost a mother to us after Mama died.’  Lord Savage’s two daughters had been left motherless four years previously and so were in a position to understand their cousins’ grief.  ‘But Papa has promised that the ball will be an end to our months of mourning.  I do not say it will ease your grief, cousin, but you will at least be able to go into company.’
    ‘We are both grateful to Uncle Simeon,’ Jane said, because Lydia was still sighing over her work.  ‘He was so good to Mama when we lost Papa all those years ago.  Had he not brought us here to the dower house and given us a home, I do not know what would have become of us.’
    Jane and Lydia’s father had been addicted to gambling at Newmarket and other horse racing venues.  He was in any case the younger son and his fortune had not been large, but he had run through it by the time he was seven and thirty, and most of Mama’s portion too.  She had only eight hundred a year, which had been secured to her in her marriage contract, and the girls knew that they would have fared ill had their uncle not been so generous.  With Mama’s passing they now had only one hundred pounds a year each, which was a trust put in place at their birth and nowhere near sufficient to allow them to continue in their normal way of life.  Had their uncle not insisted that they come to the Manor the girls would have had to find employment, which neither of them had been fitted for.
    The girls had been reared as young ladies, with the purpose and intent of finding husbands of their own class, who would keep them in a manner befitting their birth.  The only problem was that neither of them had a large dowry.  Uncle Simeon had promised he would do something, but with two daughters and an expensive son, he could obviously not promise very much.  They were pretty girls, fair-haired with blue eyes, though Lydia’s were more green than blue, and their uncle had assured them that husbands would be found for them in good time.
    Mary and Annabel were also very attractive girls, though of very different colouring; they had their father’s dark hair and brown eyes, though here again one sister had eyes more hazel in hue than brown.
    Sitting together, they made a pretty picture and got on well, despite the odd quarrel from time to time.
                  ‘We must not give way to despondency,’ Mary said.  Of a cheerful disposition, she was always the one to lift their spirits.  ‘I think that we should use the time between now and the ball to find ways of helping others.  If we set our mind to it we could make and deliver gifts to the elderly and poor in the village.  It would give a purpose to our days – and nobody could object to our visiting people who need us.’
                  Lydia looked up, her interest caught.  ‘What a good idea, Mary.  I was just thinking that I needed a project…this is so