Page 9 of Sacrificing the Untamed Lady Henrietta
How was he to make sense of the blow just delivered?
“You would engage a lady to be my in-bed doctor then?” he managed to gasp through his fury. “Perhaps it is not me who has taken leave of his senses—but you!”
He rose from the table abruptly and shook his head vehemently.
“I will not do it,” he snapped, spinning to leave. “Undo the engagement.”
“We cannot do that, Ewan, and you know as much.”
“I did not consent to this!” Ewan howled, pivoting back to look at them in disbelief. “How could you make such a decision without me?”
“We knew precisely how you would react.” Phineas sighed. “Like this.”
“And how was I meant to react, Father? Meekly? Jovially? Please, do tell me what I was meant to say or do, so I might do it. I would not wish for you to think me behaving inappropriately and find some other means to correct me.”
“That is unfair, Ewan!” Phineas snapped. “We arranged this for your own good.”
“And the good of the duchy...you worry about the Clark bloodline.”
“As any man does,” Phineas retorted.
“Ewan, you must not think that this was done in haste,” Prudence insisted, but the Marquess could not bear to look at her. She was every bit as complicit in the matter as her husband.
“I will not see this through!” Ewan insisted.
“If you do not, you will be besmirching the honor of this house,” Phineas told him flatly. “As you well know.”
“It is you who besmirched our honor!”
“If you choose to see it as such, so be it, but all the same, we will be regarded very poorly among our peers. I will not be about forever, Ewan, and one day, you will become the honorable duke. I presume you will do what is right not only for the duchy but for yourself.”
Phineas rose and nodded to his wife. Prudence paused, looking from her husband to her son imploringly.
“Do consider this, Ewan,” his mother murmured; he scoffed with disgust.
“There is nothing to consider,” Ewan snapped. He stormed from the dining hall before the Duke or Duchess could call out.
Chapter 4
Oddly, the days following the General’s ominous words were uneasily calm in the Oliver household. When she dared, Henrietta glimpsed at her father, but he deliberately avoided speaking with her. A fact which both unnerved and pleased her.
She reasoned that in just a few more days, she would receive the word she had been expecting. Her scheme was to steal away in the night and board a coach to London before anyone knew she was gone. If Henrietta had not been so distracted, she might have noticed that her mother was also anxious.
“Mama, have the mails come through?” Henrietta flittered into the front room, her skirts fluttering behind her. She stopped abruptly when she saw her father also inside the salon; Seth hovering nearby as always.
“Yes,” the General answered for Tabitha. “In fact, the mails have come, Henrietta.”
He tossed a stack of papers upon the floor with the flick of his wrist, his face twisted in fury.
“What harebrained thing have you done?” he demanded. “What is the meaning of this?”
Henrietta’s face paled—her father had found the letters intended for her eyes. As they stared at one another, she saw her dream slipping away.
“Speak, girl! What have you done!”
“I…I…I wrote the medical universities,” she sputtered. “And asked them to grant me admission.”
To her horror, Seth began to guffaw, and Henrietta’s face flushed with humiliation. She wished he was not there, but she also knew the butler was the very least of her concerns.
