Page 103 of Rakes & Reticules
“No, I don’t, but I am a great collector of art, and I will gift you any painting, of your choosing, within reason. You can sell it or stare at it; I don’t care. I just need those papers and I know I can depend on you.” Prinny stood, with some difficulty, his large abdomen protruding over his breeches.
Fitz stood also, hoping he knew what he was getting into. He didn’t need any more complications in his life. He would retrieve the reticule, return to London in less than a fortnight and avoid Patience Grant by any means necessary.
“You can depend on me.”
CHAPTERTWO
Miss Patience Grant stood at the top of the moderate staircase of her family home in Brighton, straining her neck, her lips pursed as she listened to the voices coming out of the parlor. Pulling her bright-blue bonnet over her massive head of hair, she took one step. Bracing her body, she waited for the loud squeak that was usually associated with that particular stair. There was none, so she took another, her heart beating rapidly in her ears. She needed to escape without being seen by any of her relations.
The next three steps were silent as her booted feet hit the plush carpet like she was a young girl again, and not a woman of eight and twenty. She would’ve felt ridiculous sneaking out to go to her place of employment if it wasn’t for her mother and grandmother.
Patience gripped her reticule tightly, ready to take the last two steps and dart toward her freedom. The heat on her scalp was nearly unbearable due to her copious hair and the bonnet. Panting frantically, Patience fanned herself, trying to quell the up and down movement of her chest. She needed to focus on the one thing she wanted most at that moment.
To escape.
Exhaling a slow quiet breath, she rushed down the stairs, the door a hundred paces or more away. Joy swept through her. She would do it. She would leave the house without another confrontation with her grandmother.
Or so she thought.
“There you are!” her mother’s deep voice called out from the door of the parlor.
Bloody hell.
As a woman way past marrying age, she discovered that she very much liked cursing and did it as often as she could.
Patience plastered on a smile before she turned around to face her mother. Doretha Grant did not look like a woman near fifty. No, her mother still had the skin and shape of her youth and there was not a gray hair on her head. Her dark brown tresses were carefully styled in a chignon, despite her thick unmanageable hair that more favored Patience’s sister’s.
“You weren’t trying to leave without speaking with us, were you?” Her mother crossed her arms over her small breasts, her dark eyes, squinting at Patience.
“Of course not, Mother. Why ever would I do that?” she asked in an innocent voice as she walked past her mother and into the parlor.
There her grandmother and sister waited for her. Her maternal grandmother, Jane Miller, had lived with them for as long as Patience could remember, and she had been stern her entire life. Like her mother, Patience’s grandmother had flawless skin at nearly seventy years old. But she had a head full of white hair with only a small sprinkling of brown remaining.
Her grandmother had thought Patience had squandered her one chance at an advantageous connection. Patience’s own mother had failed by marrying a British soldier, who had risen through the ranks to a sergeant and recently an ensign.
Eyeing her sister, Patience raised an eyebrow in challenge, wondering why the girl did not try to warn her. At three and twenty, Mary-Anne Grant was a true beauty, and would be a diamond of the first water, if it were not for Patience’s reputation and the fact their family was on the verge of ruin.
“Sneaking off to that job again, I see.” Her grandmother spat out the wordjoblike it was a contagious disease. “A better use of your time would be helping your sister find a husband with a title and a fortune. Something you failed at.” This was an admonition that Patience could depend on hearing at least three times a day. “After all, you will surely depend on them and their good graces to provide for you in your spinsterhood.”
Ah, there her grandmother was wrong. Soon Patience would be leaving Brighton and her family. All she had to do was convince Mrs. Maria Fitzherbert, her employer, to recommend her to the Shackleford School for Girls.
Once, ages ago when Patience was a new debutante, she had been her grandmother’s crowning achievement. They were inseparable, even with Jane Miller’s known prickliness.
All of her grandmother’s hopes of an auspicious marriage or a wealthy benefactor, had fallen to Patience.
Until the incident.
The event that ruined Patience forever and irrevocably fractured her relationship with her grandmother.
Her mother walked deeper into the room, her thin arms clasped tight and mouth pursed like she had eaten something unpleasant. “Have you forgotten that we’re all destitute now that your father has gotten himself killed?”
“He’s not dead.” Patience’s body shook with anger. She was tired of the same damned conversations over and over. “He will return.”
Her father was fighting the war against Napoleon with the 49thFoot Unit. Their last correspondence from him had been directly before the battle of Waterloo, and he had not been heard from since. That was nearly four months ago, and Patience was beginning to lose all hope.
“You’re a fool if you think your father is still alive. Just like he was a fool to spend his fortune on that blasted commission. If he had taken his inheritance from his father and used it for good instead of furthering his rank, we wouldn’t be in this position in the first place.” Her grandmother tapped her annoying cane against the carpet. “If I had any inclination of the future, I would’ve never allowed my daughter to marry the bastard son of a plantation owner.”
Patience suppressed her anger, every conversation with her grandmother was the same, and she was tired of it.
