Edith Layton Read Online Free PDF Page A

She’s younger than any of my boys. Far too young for me.”
    “She’s also widowed, I remind you, and of age.”
    “Yes, widowed, and good for her, poor child.”
    Leland raised an eyebrow.
    “Her husband, Tanner, was a brute,” the earl said sadly. “A good-natured brute when things were going his way. But a bully when they weren’t. He was a prison guard sent to the Antipodes with the convicts to watch over them in the new penal colony. He did it for the extra pay. He always loved money. Her father—now there was a cad—got her into prison. But he tried to do one good thing for her, at least. Or what he’d thought was good. He urged her to marry Tanner, as asked, so she could be protected from the other guards as well as prisoners on our ship.”
    “I thought they kept the females separate,” Leland said with a frown. “That’s what the reformers are always demanding.”
    “So they do. And so they have, here, or at least at most prisons in England. But once a ship is under way, it has its own law. No one can have a thousand eyes, and the few Bible thumpers who sailed with us were fooled a thousand ways. No question a little beauty like Daisy would have been ill used. So she did her father’s will andchose to be ill used by one brute instead of many, and married Tanner.”
    “A wise choice,” Leland said into his glass, though his lips were curled in distaste. “She didn’t do too badly, though, did she? She’s rich now, or so she says. And she doesn’t look the worse for wear.”
    The earl gave him a strange look. “Lee, you’re a clever fellow for a fool.”
    The viscount sat up, his manner no longer lazy. “I play a fool, my lord, that’s true,” he snapped. “Lamentable, but true. It is an affectation that amuses me. Are you telling me you now believe me?”
    The earl waved a hand. “Relax, please. Forgive me. My experiences in prison are still a sensitive subject. But no man can understand unless he was there. Life’s different for a convict. Actually, he no longer has a life of his own, that’s the point. He has only his dreams. Someone else owns his body. Many don’t survive. Those who do bear scars, some visible, some not, however deep and potentially lethal they may be. Amyas still has nightmares. He’s happy now, but I think he will always have them. We all do, because we lived a nightmare.
    “Still, if it’s possible, it’s harder for a woman than a man. Daisy was just turned sixteen when she had to marry Tanner. He was three-and-thirty. He was a robust young man, not unhandsome,but she didn’t marry him for his looks. They were wed by a parson aboard ship on the way to the penal colony. Her father told her that if she married a guard, she’d be safer. And so it was. The authorities looked the other way and let her live with Tanner until her sentence was done.”
    “So her father did try to look out for her? That’s good.”
    “Did he?” the earl asked. “We’ll never know. Some of us thought that money changed hands, as did promises of special favors, because though other men wanted to marry her aside from Tanner, he was the only one her father urged her to wed. Whatever he meant or got from it, her father never saw any other gain. He died of a fever before we reached land.
    “There’s no question living with Tanner helped Daisy survive her time in Botany Bay,” the earl went on as he stared at the glass in his hand. “But I think only just, in some ways. Hers might have been just as hard a sentence to serve as ours.”
    Leland drained his own glass and waited for the earl to continue.
    “She’s four-and-twenty now,” the earl finally said. “I saw her tonight and marveled. She looks and sounds wonderfully well. I don’t know how even that valiant spirit stayed so bright after six years of marriage to Tanner. He never spoke when he could shout. He never asked when he could order. He never hit her in the face, because even he could see how rarely beautiful she