Belle of the ball Read Online Free PDF Page A

say—do not tell me you are entering the matrimonial stakes for old Lord Pelimore?"
    "I am afraid so, Eve. I very much fear it is true."

    Three
    "What on earth could induce you to do such a mad thing, my dear girl?" Eveleen's voice, faintly inflected with an Irish lilt, was filled with incredulous wonder. "You are not thinking that at three-and-twenty you are past anything better? If so, I assure you that you are not quite at such desperate ends yet."
    "Some of us are not independently wealthy and must marry," Arabella said, stung into a precipitate reply by her friend's mocking tone. She glanced around hastily at the crowd, hoping no one had heard their indelicate conversation. One did not speak of money, even if one was desperately in need of it. It just was not done.
    "Oho! It is money, is it?" Eveleen regarded her silently for a moment. She had always been blunt, and no subject was off limits. "Are you and your mother under the hatches, then?"
    It went against the grain to confess all, but if not to Eve, her dearest and closest friend, then to whom? "We are." Arabella lifted her chin, desperately trying not to feel the shame attendant on poverty. "And it is up to me to repair our fortunes, and we only have this Season to do it" It did not even need to be said, she knew, that all must be kept in confidence. Eveleen might like to listen to gossip, but she was not without sensitivity, and she was fiercely loyal to her friends.
    "How comes it that even with no other heirs to snatch Swinley Manor from under the widow and child's bottom, that you and your mother should be so undone?"
    Eveleen referred to the fact that the barony had lapsed after Lord Swinley's death. There was no male heir known, and so the manor house and land, including farm, timber, orchards, and other enterprises, had stayed with Lady Swinley. It was a gray area in law, and there was some dissenting view that the Swinley tide and lands should revert to the throne, but there had not been much interest from any quarter, and there was really nothing to take that was not encumbered with mortgages. Arabella did not honestly know what had happened and said so to her friend, her words smothered among the hubbub of lords and ladies arriving and chattering to friends they had not seen through the long winter.
    "Mama claims that Papa left the estate in a bad way," Arabella continued, moving out of the way for Lord Stibblethorpe, a clumsy and usually drunken marquess, well known for his corpulence and smell. Luckily he was already married, or her mother would have included him on the list. She drifted back toward Eveleen and they both turned to watch the marquess make his way through the crowd like a fishing scow among elegant sailboats. "But it just seems so unlikely," she continued. "I mean, I did not spend overmuch time at Swinley Manor as a child, you know. Mama didn't have much use for a little girl under her feet, and so I spent most of my holidays at my cousins' home in Cornwall. Their father is a vicar, and I stayed at the vicarage for some months every year. But I just wonder how it can be that Papa left things so involved when it is the only thing he did—managing the estates, I mean. I do not remember any sign of gambling; he spent little time in London, and then only at Mother's behest. So what can have happened to all the money?"

    Eveleen shrugged. "I cannot imagine, my dear, but I am sorry to hear about your troubles."
    Lady Swinley was at that very moment giving her significant looks that urged her to go greet Lord Pelimore, still enveloped by a crowd of frothy pale gowns and bare white arms, all belonging to girls being introduced by their hopeful chaperones. But Arabella did not think that was the way to gain the old man's attention. All of those girls would blend into one another after a few seconds; he would not be making any choice this very evening anyway. There were better ways to gain a gentleman's attention, as a veteran of the London Season