A Lady’s Guide to Scandal by Sophie Irwin EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
- Status: Available for Free Download
- Authors: Sophie Irwin
- Language: English
- Genre: Historical Regency Fiction
- Format: PDF / EPUB
- Size: 2 MB
- Price: Free
HAREFIELD HALL, 1819
Come now, Eliza, surely you can manage one tear?” Mrs. Balfour
whispered to her daughter. “It is expected from the widow!”
Eliza nodded, though her eyes remained as dry as ever. However many
years she had spent playing the part of obedient daughter and dutiful wife,
weeping upon command was still beyond her.
“Recollect that we may have a fight on our hands today,” Mrs. Balfour
hissed, sending
a meaningful glance across the library to where the late Earl of Somerset’s
relations sat. Nine months after the funeral procession, they had all gathered
again at Harefield Hall for the reading of the will, and from the frosty glances
being sent their way, it seemed Mrs. Balfour was not the only one preparing
for battle.
“Eliza’s jointure was agreed in the marriage settlement: five hundred
pounds a year,” Mr. Balfour reassured his wife in a whisper. “Somerset has
no reason to dispute that; it’s the veriest fragment of the estate.”
He spoke with bitterness, for neither he nor Mrs. Balfour had fully
reconciled themselves to Eliza’s severely changed circumstances. A decade
ago, the marriage of timid, seventeen-year-old Miss Eliza Balfour to the
austere Earl of Somerset—five and twenty years her senior—had been the
match of the season, and the Balfours had reaped its rewards quite
comprehensively. Within a year of the wedding, their eldest son had married
an heiress, their second had been secured a Captaincy in the 10th foot, and
Balfour House had been recarpeted entirely in cut-velvet.
But no one had expected the earl, with so strong a constitution, to succumb
so quickly to an inflammation of the lungs last spring. And now, widowed at
seven and twenty years, and without a child to inherit the title, Eliza’s
position was far less desirable. Five hundred pounds a year . . . Persons could
and did live on far less, but on this subject Eliza agreed with her father. Ten
years of marriage to a man who had shown more affection to his horses than
his wife, ten years of near isolation in the cold, forbidding Harefield Hall, ten
years of yearning for the life she might have had, if only circumstances had
been a little different . . . Given exactly what—given exactly who—Eliza had
been forced to give up, five hundred pounds a year felt a pittance.
“Had she only given him a son . . .” Mr. Balfour bemoaned, for perhaps the
fifth time.
“She tried!” Mrs. Balfour snapped.
Eliza bit her tongue, hard. Miss Margaret Balfour—Eliza’s cousin—pressed
her hand under the table, and the clock struck half past twelve. They had now
been waiting half an hour for the new earl, whose presence would allow the
reading to begin. Eliza’s stomach clenched in anticipation. Surely—surely—
he would arrive soon.
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