Undoing of a Lady Read Online Free PDF

That humiliated her beyond bearing.
    There was a small smear of blood on her inner thigh. She scrubbed it away, vigorous now. Her virginity was lost. This was the proof. Some faceless, unimagined future husband would probably cut up rough about her lack of chastity. Men were so often odiously hypocritical about such matters. She found she did not care. Perhaps she should. But she had never been able to imagine herself married. Marriage required compromise and maturity and she was painfully aware that she was not very good at such things. Truth was, she had never wanted to be. Now the possibility of marriage seemed more remote than the moon.
    She put on her nightdress but rather than getting into her bed she sat down on the velvet cushioned window seat. Was Nat out there in the shadows of the darkened garden? She felt an almost irresistible urge to pull the curtain back and look. The thing that stayed her hand was the knowledge that if he were there it would be for all the wrong reasons. He would not have followed her because he loved her. He would have followed her because of a sense of responsibility. He would want to make sure that she was safe home and to put matters to rights.
    He could not.
    Nat cared about her. She knew that. But caring was so mild an emotion compared to the wild love she had for him. Caring was for infants and the old and the sick. Nat did not share her passion. He had shown her lust and she had confused it with love. It was an easy mistake to make, a naïve mistake, she supposed. She felt a boundless love for him. He cared for her. She had poured out her feelings in their lovemaking. He had met her love with his desire. The disparity between their feelings for one another was enormous.
    Her hand had crept up to pull back the curtain, driven by the need she had to see Nat again and the crumb of comfort that his caring would offer her. She deliberately let it fall. For her it was all or nothing. Crumbs were not good enough.
    She went to bed. She tried to sleep and tried to ignore the ache within her body and the greed with which it grasped after the pleasure it had experienced just the once. Her body, it seemed, did not care whether she loved Nat or not. It wanted him and it did not like to be denied now that it had been wakened. She tossed and turned and when she did sleep she dreamed about her mother, the notorious Countess of Scarlet, wilful, reckless runaway wife. She could smell her mother’s perfume and feel the softness of her arms about her. In her dreams Lizzie grasped after the absentminded affection her mother had shown her on the rare occasions that Lady Scarletremembered she had a daughter. It comforted her but when she woke in the morning she remembered that Lady Scarlet was long lost and she was alone.

CHAPTER THREE
    M ISS FLORA MINCHIN stood in the drawing room of her parents’ elegant home in the village of Fortune’s Folly—new, shiny, spacious, everything that money could buy, no converted medieval building for them—and studied the Earl of Waterhouse, who was standing on the Turkish carpet in front of the fireplace in the exact same spot as when he had proposed marriage to her four months before. Four months had been the engagement period prescribed by Mrs. Minchin as the shortest possible time in which to assemble Flora’s perfect trousseau. That self-same trousseau was now packed and ready for the wedding trip—Windermere and the Lake District, so pretty, so fashionable—and for the removal after that to Water House, the Earl’s ramshackle family estate near York, which was to be restored with Flora’s lovely money.
    It was not yet past breakfast and they had in fact been roused from the table by the butler disapprovingly imparting the news of the Earl’s arrival. It was a shockingly early hour at which to call. It was also the morningof the wedding and Mrs. Minchin had therefore been even less disposed to let Flora see her betrothed.
    “Flora, I forbid it,” she had