Almost a Gentleman Read Online Free PDF Page B

David's rugged looks along with Margery's large light eyes. He'd gotten David's height, too, and even a bit more: on his last visit home he'd measured an inch taller than his father.
    David missed Margery terribly, though he knew that they'd never been passionately in love. Two lonely people in need of companionship, they'd bonded together to help each other through life's challenges. Two sexual beings in need of pleasure, they'd always enjoyed each other's bodies. Two well-ordered, highly responsible people, they'd met regularly for twenty years, to hold each other through the night, refreshing themselves for their daily responsibilities: hers to her business, him to his lands and the people of his district.
    It had never really been a marriage, David thought, except in a strictly legal sense. But it had been better than a great many marriages he knew, for it had been based upon mutual respect and admiration—and upon a shared love for a beautiful child. Margery's death had left a huge gap in his life, but David was wise enough to know that you couldn't easily replace such an arrangement,
    For a while, a few years ago, he'd tried buying sex. Not back home, for he couldn't rid himself of a stiff-necked notion that to do such a thing in his beloved Lincolnshire would be to wreak some obscure violence upon Margery's memory. No, he'd come up to London for it, during a winter when the vile weather would have kept him inside anyway.
    It had seemed the sensible thing. London was the world's center for buying and selling: stocks and bonds, securities and futures (what odd, homely names the money men gave to the abstractions they traded in!). Brokers and solicitors prospered and grew fat on other people's greed, aspirations, and desires. You could buy anything if you knew where to find it.
    At first, innocently, he'd tried the streets, where youth and beauty could often be gotten cheaply. But the streets were dangerous. Better to stick to the network of procurers who catered to the needs of the Polite World, cold-eyed men and women who made it safe and easy for you, while pocketing most of the money that passed from hand to hand.
    He'd spent a few uncharacteristically wild months indulging himself in the pleasures these transactions had brought him. A veritable harem of girls had passed through his hands—each very nice in her way, he thought, and some, the more expensive of them, offering quite interesting specialties. All in all, he'd quite enjoyed the interlude. The girls had been good at what they did and of course he'd tried to make things agreeable for them in return. Perhaps he'd been naive, but it seemed to him they'd rather liked him.
    But after a while he'd grown bored with it, coming, on the whole, to prefer the challenge of connecting a likely girl with better, less damaging work. The procurers had come to hate him; many refused his custom after he'd convinced one of the highest-priced girls in London to leave the business and accept a situation at an inn between Lincoln and London. A brilliant cook and hostess, Alison had not only made the inn's fortune, but had wound up marrying its proprietor. David had given the bride away, at about the same time that he'd concluded that he was more reformer than roue and had ceased going to London for sex.
    No, he had to marry. Marry and perhaps even father some more children. Why not? He wasn't too old for it. It would be agreeable to fill the echoing halls and bedrooms of Linseley Manor with noisy, busy new life. Although he sometimes still dreamed of a romantic love—he'd never quite outgrown the misty chivalric fancies of his adolescence—he doubted that such a thing would come to him: somehow it seemed too late for that. But he thought he could offer some likely lady a good enough life. Devotion, decency, fidelity, and a measure of physical pleasure ought to be enough to promise a future countess of Linseley.
    He'd intended to begin searching for the lady this evening. The