Page 3 of The Phantom Duke
I suppose he was a little too delicately featured at that. A touch of the rogue would not have done any harm.
The tea was brought in. A cup of Earl Grey, black and hot, was poured for Maria. She sipped it appreciatively.
“Who else but a woman knows how a man should be shaped?” Anna said. “Who else has the sense to know?”
“And who but we know the pitfalls to avoid?” Evelina said.
“We are not the only women to have been unlucky in love,” Maria protested.
“Far from it, and I dispute the notion of unlucky. We have chosen poorly,” Anna said, “but we probably should not blame the rogues we have saddled ourselves with for being rogues. Rather ourselves for believing they could be anything else.”
“My thoughts exactly. I have no desire to be wed after hearing your accounts of it,” Theodora said.
The meeting of the Corset Chronicles Club meandered on through the evening, eventually reaching its inevitable finish as the clock struck ten. As the women bade each other farewell, Maria found a sense of dread growing within her.
“Father will doubtless have some opinions to share when I return home. In vino veritas, as they say. I shall have to defend my actions all over again and mollify him,” she said.
“You know that you can come here at any time of the day or night if you need sanctuary,” Evelina said, hugging her.
Maria left Thornwall House in one of Evelina’s traps to take her across London from its northern boundary to its western side to Sunspire Manor, just beyond Belgravia. That was the house of the Earl of Sunspire, where she and her father lived. As the conveyance rattled its way through the darkened streets, she thought of freedom and if there truly was any hope of finding a handsome, kind, and noble husband or if all men were inherently flawed.
For some reason—perhaps the absorbing shadows all around her—she found herself thinking of Winterleigh and the Phantom that legend said haunted that place. Maria became lost in thought about the mysterious man, drifting on the edge of sleep on the tides of dreams about a sinister figure, face hooded and shadowed, following her.
Wakefulness arrived suddenly and violently. The carriage came to a halt, and Maria began to stir. She heard raised voices inside, followed by the screech of broken glass.
The shards showered outward from the house, glittering in the moonlight like falling stars, and something large and heavy landed on the trap’s roof, cracking the wood with the force of its impact. Maria jolted, her heart thundering in her chest.
Father was already drunk.
CHAPTER 2
“So, you’ve come back from the home of that degenerate dissident, have you?”
Frazer Shelidan, Maria’s father and the Earl of Sunspire, was tall and thin with gray hair, bushy eyebrows, and a hooked nose. When he tilted his head, he looked like a raven, staring down at her from the length of a sharp, stabbing beak.
“I have come home after visiting with the Dowager Countess of Thornwall,” Maria corrected, standing in the doorway of his study.
“That harpy?” he scoffed.
Steeling herself, Maria walked confidently into the room, stopping to pick up two empty wine bottles. At least, the two that he had consumed in here. Though judging by his speech, that may have been the limit of his drinking so far. A cool breeze stirred the curtains where the window had been broken.
Maria’s eyes searched the room for anything amiss, noting quickly the absence of a bronze bust of Shakespeare. That must have been the item her father had hurled through the window. The same bust that cracked the roof of Evelina’s trap.
“A woman who poisoned her husband,” her father said, upending another bottle over his open mouth.
When the last of the red liquid had pattered onto his tongue, he hurled it against a bookcase, showering the leather spines with glittering glass.
“She did no such thing,” Maria said calmly. “Please step away from there before you cut yourself on broken glass.”
“Do you think I care about being cut on glass, girl?” he roared. “You have fatally wounded my honor and my name with your reckless behavior!”
Maria had taken hold of her father’s elbow to steer him towards the door, but this criticism was a needle. Anger and injustice of the remark brewed within her, threatening to boil and spill over. She bit back the sharp retort that was just on the tip of her tongue.
“I could not turn a blind eye to his adultery,” she said, forcing her voice steady. “What damage would that do to our honor? Or to my reputation? I took the only action a woman with any pride could take, Father. The only action I thought you would want me to take.”
“You should have obeyed your father. Before you are wed to a husband, your father is your lord and master. Decreed by God. You defied me! You are wicked!”
“I am hardly wicked, Father.” Maria placated, turning away from him and picking up a book that had been thrown to the floor during a drunken temper tantrum.
