Lord Portman's Troublesome Wife by Mary Nichols Page B

she is to come here tomorrow.’
    ‘I cannot think why you mentioned her to his lordship. She has not been trained as a lady’s maid.’
    ‘After Mama died, she always maided me when I needed it and I shall be glad to have someone familiar by me when I move to Bishop’s Court. Lord Portman has relations and friends he would like invited to the wedding. He is going to call with their directions. And he is going to take me to the theatre.’
    ‘Oh, Rosamund, what a gentleman he is! You have certainly fallen on your feet and will be the envy of the whole ton. ’
    In the four weeks before the wedding, she was frequently seen out and about in Lord Portman’s company. Although they could not go to balls and routs on account of her mourning, they could, and did, attend musical concerts, went for walks and rides in his lordship’s phaeton, visited Vauxhall Gardens, called on Viscount Leinster and his charming wife, Louise, saw the play at the Theatre Royal, where she met Lady Sophie Charron, the famous actress and mother-in-law to Lord Drymore. In public Harry was always the sumptuously dressed macaroni, with the affected high-pitched voice and mincing gait, but in private he dropped the pretension and became a very different man: strong, kind and careful of her. She was tempted to ask why he did it, but decided she did not know him well enough.
    Not a word of adverse gossip reached her ears andshe put it down to the story he insisted on telling that their fathers knew about the match and heartily approved. She realised as the days passed that it would be all too easy to fall in love with the real man, the one beneath the pose, and that was something she must guard against at all costs.
    Every time she began to think what her future life would be like as Lady Portman, she felt a deep knot of guilt inside her, which would not go away, knowing she was using his lordship to escape from Lady Bonhaven or having to live with her brother and his wife. Her search through her father’s papers had revealed nothing and she was no nearer discovering why he had been hoarding a bag of counterfeit gold coins, nor anything about the Barnstaple Mining Company. She was rapidly coming to the conclusion it did not exist, had never existed and was therefore untraceable. Max had told her to mind her own business and to leave it all to him, but he did not seem to be doing anything about it. The last person she could speak to about it was her husband-to-be.

Chapter Five
    R osamund woke early on the morning of her wedding day and lay in bed listening to the birds twittering outside her window and the barking of a stray dog in the street and asked herself what had possessed her to agree to this travesty of a marriage. She had sold her independence, her identity, even the kind of person she was, for what? To be done with debt. To escape from penury. To find and bring to justice the men who had cheated her father—already that quest had proved abortive and she did not know where to look next. Was it worth it? According to Lord Portman, they would lead their own lives after the ceremony, but he would expect her to adhere to certain rules, rules she might find irksome. She had a feeling that she was going to be lonely. Thank heaven for Janet!
    As if thinking about her maid had conjured her up, the door opened and Janet came in, bearing a cup of hot chocolate. ‘Good morning, Miss Rosamund,’ she said cheerfully, setting the chocolate down on the little tableby the bed. ‘It is a lovely day for it. Not a cloud in the sky.’ As if to prove her point she drew the curtains, flooding the room with sunshine.
    Rosamund sat up and sipped her chocolate, watching Janet flit about fetching out her underclothes, her petticoats, hose and shoes, laying them out ready for her to don, then going to the door to admit a maid with jugs of hot water to fill the hip bath, which already stood in the middle of the floor. It was all going on around her, this hustling and