Family Scandals Read Online Free PDF Page A

have given anything for a plain pudding.
    Eight years ago now seemed like a lifetime. At fourteen, Amy Houghton had been little more than a waif. Big gray eyes and mousy brown hair, she had been thin as a rail and all arms and legs. He and Douglas had concocted the scheme while in their cups. But it had been a sound one, nevertheless.
    Douglas Camden was the only son of Baron and Lady Camden. When his father had put a pistol to his head after gambling away the family holdings, his mother returned to her parents’ home with her young son. A year later, she met and married Baron Nathaniel Houghton, a widower with five children. Unfortunately, under the influence of their uncle, Viscount Dryden, and his wife, the five children had done their best to make Douglas and his mother’s lives miserable. When Amy had been born a year later, they had not welcomed her any more than they had her mother.
    Douglas had taken it upon himself to watch over and protect his baby sister at all costs. When his stepfather purchased him a commission shortly after leaving Oxford, he had requested he stay in England in order to stay close to his family. It had lasted for a number of years until his superiors decided he needed to be posted somewhere else. When Marcus arrived with his news of receiving his own commission, they had been pleasantly surprised to find they were both being posted to India. That was when Douglas’s perfect plan had been hatched.
    It would be easy, Douglas said, to provide both he and Amy with a little peace of mind. Marcus, well acquainted with Douglas’s stepsiblings, agreed.
    The evening before they left, they had taken Amy and bribed a vicar to perform a marriage ceremony. It was only a fallback. Without a license, he was certain the marriage wasn’t legal, but it was all semantics. He and Douglas were only counting on it to give him some clout if Amy needed protection, and he knew he could rely on his brother to provide the rest. The plan—to ensure that Amy need not ever be under her stepbrother’s thumb—was so simple, it was foolproof.
    Or, would have been if she hadn’t died with her parents on an outing celebrating her seventeenth birthday. He still had the letter from her brother, Gregory, informing Douglas of his mother’s death, and Amy’s, along with Gregory’s father’s. If Douglas hadn’t already been dead, the letter would have killed him. His mother and sister had been everything to him. Marcus hadn’t bothered to write back. The letter he had sent to Douglas’s mother and stepfather would have passed the one he received. Gregory would have figured it out.
    All in all it probably suited the new Baron Houghton just fine to be rid of both of his unwanted stepsiblings so neatly. But Marcus still found it hard to believe his gallantry had all been for naught. It seemed like such a waste. Amy had only been seventeen. She still had her whole life ahead of her.
     
     
    London hadn’t changed much. It was still a sprawling metropolis, parts of which no man of means should venture into. The area around the docks after sundown was one such place, which was why Marcus found himself spending his first night in London still on board the ship he had arrived on.
    Barnes was disappointed. Having been violently ill for the first part of the journey from Calcutta to Bombay, then recovering while enroute from Bombay to England, he was anxious to be on dry land again.
    Marcus’s first morning in London was unremarkable by a Londoner’s standards, but Marcus discovered he had indeed missed the overcast, drizzly days London was famous for. It was as the hackney driver was grumbling about the weather that he realized this was summer and the weather was a bit unusual. Even so, he was enjoying the unexpected cool spell. After the heat of India, it was a welcome relief.
    Arriving at Waring House, he was not surprised to learn the duke and duchess had left for the country. Upon inquiring of the housekeeper as to their