Page 3 of The Duke's Stolen Heart
Margaret made apfftsound through pursed lips. “Welcome to England, where all that matters in a marriage is how great the bride’s dowry and how respected the groom’s title.”
Antonia chuckled. “You’re funny when you’re sarcastic.” She brushed a tangle of pale hair away from Margaret’s forehead. “You’re also as hot as a chimney. Back to bed with you.”
Her friend followed Antonia’s suggestion, as obedient as a spaniel. Part of her pitied Margaret. Just eighteen, and in her first season, her brother had made no bones about wanting her well married and out of his home as quickly as possible. Antonia needed to keep Evendaw happy to keep her free lodgings as Margaret’s companion. In retrospect, she should have styled herself Mrs. Lowry, not Miss. But that decision had been made during a shipboard passage to secure the sympathies of her prior hosts, the Kilpatrick women. By the time they landed, it had been too late to change her story.
But in a few more months, with some luck, Antonia would have enough money to stop running. Some mornings, Antonia awoke with an iron band of panic around her ribs, heart pounding at the thought of being caught before she could disappear. Renting a small room on the fringes of Cheapside, a neighborhood with access to the tradesmen she relied upon to fence her stolen bits of wire and gemstones, had brought Antonia a small measure of peace. She could bolt at any time. Reinvent herself. Choose another name, another past, become anyone she wished—and the person Antonia wished to become next was wealthy. Being poor was, at best, an inconvenient way to live.
Havencrest had made clear that she didn’t have months, however.
“Will you read to me?” asked Margaret plaintively when they had settled her into bed. She rubbed her red nose with a square of linen. Antonia deployed the bell pull to summon a maid for a fresh pot of tea. Reading a few pages to a sick woman was a cheap way to earn her keep.
Yet Antonia dreaded the way her off-kilter pronunciations spoke the truth about her lack of formal education. At least here in England she could pretend they were odd Americanisms. It was one reason she had elected to move here, instead of out West, when the time had come to get out of New York. At the time, she had believed England offered greater proximity to wealth and the physical comforts that came with it.
London wasn’t the first city where she had pilfered the contents of its finest citizens’ pockets, but Antonia had vowed it would be the last.
Then again, Antonia’s decisions were rarely well-considered. If she were an animal she’d be a cat, forever landing on her feet after making a wild leap. Her promises were so much hot air.
“Where were we?” she asked, finding the page where they had left off the night before. “Ah, yes. The Frog Prince.”
Poor Margaret, finding solace in a collection of fairy tales like a child, not a grown woman. She hadn’t yet learned that princes always turned into frogs once you kissed them—never the other way around. Her lesson was coming, though. Antonia might go so far as to deliver it herself, just to repay Margaret’s kindness.
