Taming of Annabelle Read Online Free PDF Page A

your pretty blue muslin.’
    But Annabelle immediately pouted. ‘Lend me one of yours, please ,’ she wheedled.
    Visions of Lord Sylvester waiting below at the luncheon table crowded into her mind. She could almost hear his mocking voice, see his beautifully sculptured mouth.
    ‘No,’ said Minerva firmly. ‘There will not be . . .’
    ‘I don’t want to wear that old blue thing,’ said Annabelle, her voice rising. ‘It’s just like you to want to keep all the finest things for
yourself.’
    ‘That is unkind,’ said Minerva. ‘What has come over you, Annabelle?’
    ‘I’m sorry,’ said Annabelle, bursting into tears. ‘But I do so want to look fashionable.’
    She is still such a child , thought Minerva indulgently.
    ‘There now,’ she said. ‘Dry your eyes. You may choose any gown you want.’
    ‘Really? Anything?’
    ‘Anything at all.’
    ‘Oh, thank you! ’ cried Annabelle, her tears miraculously disappearing.
    ‘Then come with me.’
    An hour later, Annabelle was ready to descend the stairs. She had chosen a morning dress, with an apron front and stomacher let in and laced across like a peasant’s bodice with coloured
ribbons. It was made of jaconet muslin, white with a small design in cherry red, and with cherry-red silk ribbons.
    Her blonde hair had been put up in a loose knot on the top of her head, allowing a cascade of ringlets to fall to her shoulders. Minerva thought Annabelle had never looked more beautiful –
and Annabelle thought so too.
    It was with great bitterness that Annabelle found she was to waste all this sweetness on the desert air.
    Luncheon was to be served in the Yellow Saloon on the ground floor, a pretty room affording an excellent view of the park.
    But it was the sight of the company that depressed Annabelle so. There were no gentlemen present, and, worst of all, certainly no Lord Sylvester.
    The company for luncheon consisted only of the Duchess of Allsbury and Lady Godolphin.
    The Duchess was a small, plump lady with beautifully dressed white hair and large green eyes which had faded with age to a sort of pale gooseberry colour. She had an easy outer manner covering a
rather frosty interior. In truth, her grace privately disapproved of her youngest son’s forthcoming marriage to Minerva Armitage, thinking he was throwing himself away by affiancing himself
to some little nobody from a country vicarage. But Minerva, in her way, could be almost as intimidating as Lord Sylvester, and so she had kept her thoughts to herself. It would certainly be
understandable if she had disapproved of Lady Godolphin, but Lady Godolphin came from a very old family, and so the Duchess found nothing up with that reprehensible old quiz.
    Annabelle had not really been warned about Lady Godolphin since she had not quite taken in her mother’s remarks, and Minerva would have considered it disloyal to criticize the lady who had
been her chaperone.
    Lady Godolphin was a squat lady in her late fifties with a bulldog face and pale-blue eyes. She wore a great deal of pearl powder over a covering of white lead paint. Two round circles of rouge
glared from her withered cheeks and a scarlet wig perched at an improbable angle on her head.
    She was wearing a very low-cut gown of acid-green velvet and the ageing flesh of her breasts quivered under their coating of white lead every time she moved like the winter water shivering under
a coating of thin ice on the lake outside.
    Lady Godolphin sprang to her feet at their entrance, and, without waiting to be introduced, enfolded Annabelle in a warm and smelly embrace. Annabelle extricated herself as soon as she decently
could, noticing as she did so that some of her ladyship’s white paint had smeared the cherry-red ribbons of her bodice.
    ‘Ain’t you the pretty one,’ crowed Lady Godolphin. ‘You’ll have all the fellows shaking in their shoes like blankmanjies. I don’t know how Charles Armitage
produced such beauties. He’s so obesed