The Earl's Mistress Read Online Free PDF

you impoverished?”
    Isabella gave a weary shrug. “Father never could grasp accounts,” she murmured. “I suppose he believed Cousin Everett would do the right thing. Or that the girls’ maternal uncle would—but Sir Charlton has always been a coldhearted miser. Moreover, so far as I go, most people would say it was my husband’s duty to provide for me, not my father’s.”
    “Bah, a penniless poet?” said Lady Petershaw. “A younger son cut off by his father, only to drink himself to death in despair? Richard Aldridge, if you’ll pardon my saying, was a romantic fribble who possessed not an ounce of grit.”
    But he had possessed a head full of thick brown curls, Isabella recalled, along with brilliant brown eyes and the face of an angel. At first he’d been utterly glittering; filled with life and joy and an excitement she’d found infectious. He’d also been able to spout pure poetry—his own words, not someone else’s.
    In short, Richard Aldridge had been in love with life. He had only imagined himself in love with Isabella, declaring himself eternally smitten as he’d tripped off sonnets and odes in praise of her beauty. And that beauty had been her undoing.
    After their impetuous wedding, Richard’s father, the hardfisted Earl of Fenster, had not relented, as Richard had glibly insisted he would. Instead, he cut them off without a farthing. His son had been ordered to marry money, and an alliance with a pretty little piece of rural gentry was unacceptable.
    Richard, Lord Fenster declared, had always been a dreamer and a fribble, and the earl had decided that life must teach the fool what the father, apparently, could not.
    Life had taught Richard quickly. He’d fallen to pieces before Isabella’s eyes, slipping into a lethargy so deep he could bestir himself only to drink.
    Isabella had had a little money—a very little, by Richard’s definition—provided by her maternal grandfather to serve as her dowry, and it had been sent out of guilt, she was sure, for her mother had long been estranged from her family. But that small sum had scarcely covered Richard’s existing debts.
    Nearly insolvent, they had returned to Thornhill to beg her father’s charity. And when Richard died there before the year was out, Lord Fenster was driven by grief and guilt to lay the blame at Isabella’s door; to claim to all who would listen that she’d poured the spirits down Richard’s throat. Or worse, married him for his money, then simply poisoned him to escape a life of poverty.
    Lord Tafford’s solicitor had recommended a suit for defamation, and Fenster’s family had finally managed to hush him up. It had been a tremendous relief. The cost of a suit had been beyond Lord Tafford’s means, for he had honorably paid the rest of Richard’s bills—yet another drain on the estate’s modest coffers.
    When the scandal was over, Isabella’s name was badly tarnished. Indeed, it was tarnished still.
    She lifted a bleak gaze to Lady Petershaw’s. “I made a terrible mistake,” she said quietly, “in marrying young. I was barely seventeen, ma’am, and the worst sort of country mouse.”
    The marchioness shrugged. “And what good, in any case, is a man without money or grit—or, truth be told, stamina,” she said, flashing a sly smile. “I fear there is nothing else for it, my dear Mrs. Aldridge. You must find a man with a firm hand and a fat purse, and remarry.”
    Isabella sucked in her breath. “Remarry?” she said. “Good Lord! Whom?”
    “Well, not that vile cousin of yours,” declared the marchioness. “You would not allow desperation to drive you to that, my dear, would you? Pray reassure me.”
    “But you hardly know him,” said Isabella.
    The marchioness fell oddly silent for a moment. “My dear, I can only say that the circles in which I travel give me insight, oftentimes, into the . . . er, moral inclinations of certain men,” she said. “I fear your cousin is rumored to possess