Read Online The Birth of Blue Satan by Patricia Wynn - Free Book Online Page B

rooms did not stop with their floor. Mrs. Mayfield had decorated Isabella’s boudoir as if she expected gentlemen to attend her daughter’s levee. An elaborately japanned screen separated a pair of seldom-used, French chaises from the part of the chamber devoted to Isabella’s more intimate functions. Mrs. Mayfield knew that fashionable ladies received their callers while they dressed. Hester found the whole arrangement ridiculous. England, after all, was not France.
    There was no point in questioning Isabella until her maid had helped her off with her clothes and into a lawn nightgown, before going gratefully to her own bed. But later, as Hester stood behind her cousin, seated in front of the reflecting glass, brushing her thick, golden curls, she found her moment.
    “Bella,” she said, once her drowsy cousin had fallen silent, “did you truly mean you do not love St. Mars?”
    “I think he is handsome, but he does not dress as well as Sir Harrowby.”
    “Perhaps not, dear, but do you see nothing else in him to admire?”
    “Mama says his fortune will be immense when his father dies. Oh!” she exclaimed. “I forgot. His father is dead now, so he must be quite rich.”
    “I meant rather some quality of his, beyond his wealth. His strength, perhaps? Or his extraordinary gentility?”
    “Gentle? St. Mars? I do not think him gentle at all. He is so . . . so very vigorous! And he is grown so serious, when he used to be vastly more amusing. You have not seen him, Hester, when he looks at me so fiercely.”
    Hester gave a start. “I am sure St. Mars would do nothing to harm you, Belle. He loves you far too much.”
    Isabella giggled as if Hester and she had entered into a secret. “That’s what Mama said,” she confided, “when I told her that St. Mars stares at me in a way I do not like. Not at all like Sir Harrowby, who’s the perfect gentleman. He knows how to make pretty speeches without making me feel anything at all. Mama says that gentlemen like St. Mars are so passionate, they cannot always think before they act. She said that could turn to my advantage if I wanted.”
    Hester felt a cold, sick fury in the pit of her stomach. So St. Mars’s love was to be used, wasted, and despised? In spite of her own attraction, she found herself aching at his failure to attach Isabella. Bella was the girl he wanted, and was, therefore, the wife he should have. The only hope for his lordship that Hester could see was that her cousin might learn to reciprocate his passion in time.
    “Bella, what do you know of the intimacies of marriage? Would you not rather kiss St. Mars than any other of your swains?”
    “No.” Bella seemed firm on this point. “I think I would prefer Sir Harrowby. He makes me laugh.”
    “I am sure he does,” Hester said wryly. She couldn’t understand her cousin at all, but clearly Isabella’s passion had not yet been tapped. Not that Hester’s had been given a chance to flower either, but she had always been blessed with a fertile imagination.
    Sighing with genuine fatigue, she reached for Isabella’s cap. “Go to bed, dear,” she said, tying the ribands under her cousin’s chin. “We’ve talked enough for tonight.”
    Isabella thanked her prettily for brushing her hair and, yawning mightily again, stumbled off to bed as Hester took a tallow candle up to her room. One of Mrs. Mayfield’s economies forbade the use of wax in the bedchambers.
    Upstairs, there was no maid and no dressing table. Her furniture consisted of an old fashioned bed in sturdy English oak and an ancient cupboard that was quite sufficient for her modest wardrobe.
    Hester set the spluttering candle on a small table and prepared for sleep. The startling events at Lord Eppington’s ball, the sight of St. Mars so ill and feverish, the guests’ suspicions, and now Isabella’s complete indifference to St. Mars’s plight distressed her so much she doubted she would sleep. She wondered what the justice of the peace