Lord Haversham Takes Command Read Online Free PDF

allow himself that night, he got to his feet and went to work.

Chapter Three
    Mira felt dinner to have lasted a lifetime already, and there was still the fruit and cheese course to get through. As dinner was served early in the country, there was still the long evening to be tolerated before she could get into bed and close her eyes on, this, the last day before her debutante Season in London. Her trunks were packed, her traveling costume laid out in anticipation, and she and Mama and Papa would depart at first light with her brothers to follow as it suited.
    Of course, much of her clothing would be selected and done up in London, but none could possibly find fault with the new wardrobe she and her mother had ordered at the local drapery shop. As such, they would do until she could have a few more ball gowns, walking dresses, a riding habit, and her court dress bespoken from Wembley House, the townhouse her father had inherited from the old Duchess, his grandmother.
    In the meantime, the most exciting thing likely to happen was if one of the servants suddenly broke out in spots. With a sigh, she gazed about the room for conversational inspiration but found none. Perhaps this was as good a time as any to bring up the question she had been burning to ask since Harry’s visit to Prospero Park a few days prior.
    “Mama,” she asked in as bland a tone of voice as she could muster so as not to alert anyone to her rather inappropriate question. “Why did Harry not come home after Eton? Is it not strange that he should embark on a voyage across the ocean for so many months without first returning home to see his parents?” The words
and me
were thought but not spoken.
    “Nothing strange about that, in my opinion,” Stephen replied. “I daresay you would get as far away as you could, as fast as you could, and for as long as possible if you had that pair waiting for you at the Abbey.”
    Lady Crenshaw bent a look of disapproval on her older son then turned her attention to her daughter. “I do believe it had something to do with his parents, but not what your brother suggests. Harry has always been a devoted son in spite of his father’s demanding nature.”
    “I always found his father to be somewhat tolerable,” Adrian commented, “but his mother … ” he added with a shake of his head as if mere words failed him, an action that prompted a bark of laughter from his father, one that was quickly followed by a fit of feigned coughing into his monogrammed napkin.
    “Anthony, you know it won’t do to encourage the boys in their vilification of Lord and Lady Avery,” Lady Crenshaw reprimanded. “As I have said on numerous occasions,” she outlined for the benefit of the entire family, “they are not precisely our friends as we are quite beneath them socially. However, they are our neighbors, as well as Harry’s parents, so it would not do to treat them other than with the dignity called for by their position.”
    “I believe it to have been Harry we were discussing in the first place,” Mira said, her words sounding lofty in her own ears. Surely it would not do to come across as quite so dramatic once she arrived in London, and she was determined to gain some refinement sooner rather than later. “Mama, at the time you said his departure for Europe straight from school had something to do with Lord and Lady Avery. What might that have been?” she asked, congratulating herself on her staid delivery.
    “I believe it was nothing more than his mama’s fancy that he should be exposed to as much of the French culture as soon as possible,” her mother replied.
    “It doesn’t seem to have done him much good,” Stephen said with a scowl. “I preferred him as he was before he put on his Frenchified airs. Besides which, I had always thought it had most to do with that rowing accident.”
    Mira was aware of a speaking look her mother gave her father who cleared his throat and made his foray into the conversation.