Midnight Marriage: A Georgian Historical Romance (Roxton Series) Read Online Free PDF

comfortable or respectable address for a Cavendish.
    Yet the house and its situation suited Deb. So much the better to be crammed in amongst seasonal lodgers, faceless chapel-goers and industrious merchants, who had more to do with their time and energy than to squander it in idle conversation, as did the Quality. The Quality spent their time at the Pump Room sweating out their ills in the hot water of the King’s Bath; ingested scandal with their morning glasses of mineral water, and later in the day, sipped tea laced with the latest gossip in the Assembly Rooms.
    Not that Deb was out to shun Bath society or its jostle of habitués. She was often to be seen at the offered entertainments; promenading in the Pump Room; dancing at the Assembly Room Balls; and taking breakfast with a party across the river Avon at Sydney Gardens. She had become a well-known favorite of the year-round inhabitants; indeed was sought after to play at cards with the old infirm gentlemen whose membership boasted three retired Colonels, a General and a sprinkling of beknighted self-made men. And there were the widows, titled, genteel and mercantile, all hypochondriacs of one form or another who confided their ills to dear Miss Cavendish.
    Yet, she was politely overlooked by the most intimate of circles, made up exclusively of the sons and daughters and cousins of the first families in the land. These illustrious personages readily rubbed shoulders with all degrees of society at the public entertainments but were highly selective as to who could enter their drawing rooms or put their feet under the dining room table. It was not that Deb’s lineage was to be sneered at, after all she was a Cavendish and cousin to the fifth Duke of Devonshire and a considerable heiress.
    Deb’s social consequence and respectability was severely tarnished by her volatility of character. When she was just sixteen years old she had left the sanctuary of her brother’s house against his wishes and traveled to the Continent to look after her ill brother, a musician who was the black sheep of the family. Her two years on the Continent may have been overlooked, after all her disobedience to her brother Sir Gerald was due to her devotion to her brother Otto who sadly, but thankfully for the family’s good name, died in Paris before he could disgrace the family further.
    Deb had resurfaced in Bath, fresh-faced and looking for all the world as if scandal had never touched her lovely form but with her orphaned nephew in tow. The nephew was the product of Otto’s coupling with a wandering gypsy. That Miss Cavendish chose to give the boy a roof over his swarthy head when her elder brother Sir Gerald had at first refused to acknowledge such base offspring scandalized society to such a degree that speculation was rife about the sort of life Miss Cavendish had led on the Continent and provided the tea table gossips with a plethora of conjecture.
    Deb had heard the whisperings, saw the lascivious glances of disreputable men, and the hostile looks of upright matrons. It would have been too simple to say she did not care in the least what was thought of her, she did. But she also knew there was nothing she could do to change society’s opinion of her. That was carved in stone. As long as society kept its distance and did not interfere in her life, she was quite content to coexist with her peers.
    And so it was with head held high that she stepped out of a sedan chair and paid off the chairmen, green velvet riding skirts over one arm, and entered Bath’s noisy and crowded Pump Room in search of her sister-in-law, Lady Mary Cavendish. She had been about to ride out for a breakfast engagement with her French tutor; an elderly gentleman who had settled in a quaint Queen Anne House on the outskirts of town after a lifetime’s service in the employ of some illustrious but nameless French aristocrat. Lady Mary’s hastily scrawled note arrived as she was dressing and requested her