The Adventuress: HFTS5 Read Online Free PDF Page B

death of his wife, although she died eight years ago.”
    “And how did she die?” Emily felt she was being very vulgar gossiping with a servant, but her curiosity about the handsome earl was becoming stronger by the minute.
    “She was beaten to death in a wood near his country home, miss.”
    “Gracious! Who was responsible?”
    “Nobody ever found out, miss,” said Alice, who, like Jenny, had no time for Luke’s gossip and did not believe a word of the next-door footman’s story of Lord Fleetwood’s having committed the murder himself.
    Emily felt she should now dismiss Alice, but she had not conversed with any member of her own sex for such a long time. “You are very pretty, Alice,” said Emily. “Did that not cause you some trouble with the previous gentleman tenants of this house?” Emily suddenly remembered some of her own experiences as a chambermaid while Sir Harry Jackson had still been well enough to entertain.
    “No, miss. Mr. Rainbird would never allow such a thing. One gentleman,” said Alice, remembering the arrival of last year’s handsome tenant, “got a bit frisky at first, but after Mr. Rainbird spoke to him I didn’t have no trouble.”
    “Thank you, Alice,” said Emily, who felt she had been indulging in gossip for long enough. “You may go.”
    Alice went out quietly and closed the door.
    Emily snuggled down under the blankets. So the servants had not seen under her mask after all! No one would, she reassured herself fiercely. Sir Harry’s estates had been in Cumberland, in the far north of England. Such guests as he had entertained had usually come from the local county, and only one or two travellers had stopped over on their road to London.
    A shadow fell across Emily’s face. It was one of those travellers who had tried to force his attentions on her, a horrible man—Mr. Percival Pardon. Her screams had brought Mr. Goodenough, then the butler, Spinks, running to her aid. The row that had ensued had caused the poor butler to have an apoplexy from which he had recovered but which had left his face peculiarly twisted up. Shortly after that unfortunate visit, Sir Harry had fallen ill and entertained no more.
    Surely no one in. London would recognise the chambermaid Emily Jenkins in the now rich and fashionable Emily Goodenough, or the butler Spinks in the changed face of the now Benjamin Goodenough, Esquire.
    They had laid their plans well. They had not dashed off to London, but had gone about things slowly and carefully. The house and estates had been sold, and then they had travelled south to Bath, so that Emily might study the manners of the ladies, and have a fashionable wardrobe made. They had spent a whole year in Bath becoming accustomed to their new identities, although they took no part in the society of the spa.
    Somewhere in London, thought Emily, as her eyes began to close, must be a gentleman of manners and title who would want her for a wife. Lord Fleetwood would not do at all, even if it turned out she had not given him a dislike of her, thought Emily, banishing the earl’s handsome face from her mind. Any man who despised servants as much as he must be cold and unfeeling.
    “Why do you persist in staying in this disgusting hotel?” demanded the Earl of Fleetwood’s sister, Mrs. Mary Otterley. “You have a perfectly good town house in Grosvenor Square.”
    “Which you are living in at the moment,” pointed out the earl. “I did not expect you to take it for this Season as well.”
    “I do not see what the trouble is,” said Mrs. Otterley crossly. “You were quite content to stay with us last year.”
    “If I may remind you of last year,” said the earl gently, “I came to the Season to find myself a wife. No sooner had I found a likely candidate than you saw fit to call on the girl and her parents, and after that I found I was not welcome.”
    “Nothing to do with me,” said Mrs. Otterley. She was a fat, square, pugnacious, red-faced woman, some ten