The Scoundrel and the Debutante (The Cabot Sisters #3)

So had he, but Roan didn’t like to think about that. It reminded him of a time he was in Canada, set upon by some men over a card game. He thought he would die that night, too, as the men had come seemingly from nowhere for him and Beck, brandishing sticks. It was a miracle that he and Beck had emerged from that encounter alive—and able to walk. They’d lost their horses, however, and had it not been for the kindness of a widow and her very lovely daughter, well...

Roan didn’t want to think of that now. He was glad that he hadn’t met his demise tonight. Very glad, indeed.

“You must be thirsty,” Prudence said, and began to pick herself up.

“I’m all right,” he said, and smiled reassuringly. “Americans are a hardy lot. I refuse to allow a few English brutes to beat the spirit out of me.” Even if that was exactly what the Englishmen had done. “Why don’t you sleep?” he suggested to her. “I’ll keep the eye that’s not swollen open.”

Prudence smiled wearily. With the weak light from the embers, she looked even younger than he’d originally thought. How old was she? Twenty years? Younger? He got up, put wood on the fire and stirred the embers beneath it.

She rubbed her temples. Her hair, which in this new light looked even more spun of gold, had come completely out of its pins. When she noticed him looking at her she said, “I hope you can forgive me.”

“Forgive you?”

“For this,” she said. She drew her knees up under her gown and wrapped her arms around them, resting her chin on her knees. “If I had joined Dr. Linford as I was supposed to have done, you would have been on the public coach and never would have encountered those wretched men.”

“What’s done is done,” he said, wincing as he moved his back against the tree once more, settling there. “No point in dwelling on it. We can only go forward from here.”

She idly played with a stick beside her foot. “Admit it. You wish you’d never laid eyes on me.”

“I will admit no such thing because it is not true,” Roan said. “But satisfy my curiosity, will you? Why did you really avoid Linford? Were your sisters’ actions really so awful?”

She groaned. “It’s really too mortifying to confess.”

“It can’t be more mortifying than sleeping on a riverbank, can it?”

She smiled. “That is a very good point.” She pushed locks of golden hair from her face and considered her stick a long moment. “I suppose it all began when my stepfather, the Earl of Beckington, contracted consumption,” she said. “Augustine—he’s my stepbrother—was to inherit all. He’s very generous, but his fiancée did not fancy sharing the family fortune with four stepsisters who were not married and had no current prospects.”

Roan winced again, but this time, it was in sympathy for the man who would have a wife and four unmarried sisters. He could not imagine the amount of money that would be spent on shoes alone.

“My mother was very little help to us, unfortunately. That was the same time she began to first exhibit the signs of madness.”

“She’s mad?” Roan asked, uncertain if Prudence meant it in the literal sense of the word.

“As a cuckoo bird,” Prudence solemnly confirmed. “We tried to hide it, for we all knew that once society discovered it, things would be said. Gentlemen would fear that madness might somehow run in our blood and be introduced into their children through any daughter of hers.”

“Do you believe that?” he asked. He’d never really thought of it before now. But then again, he very rarely thought of marriage.

Prudence shook her head. “My mother’s madness began with a carriage accident. There’s no history of it otherwise, but it hardly matters. No one among the Quality would risk it. Added to that, we were without our stepfather to provide a proper dowry. Suddenly, everything looked quite impossible for us.”

“So that’s the scandal,” Roan said. “Your mother’s madness. That’s why you said your sisters were married unconventionally. Someone not in keeping with your situation, is that it?”

“I wish that’s all there was to it,” Prudence said, sighing. “The scandal began with my older sisters, Honor and Grace. Once it became clear that the earl would die, and Augustine would marry Monica Hargrove, and our mother was mad, they had these perfectly ridiculous ideas for how to gain offers of marriage.” Prudence sounded perturbed by this. “Their idea was to marry before anyone discovered our woes. They reasoned that if they hooked a rich husband, they’d be able to help my mother, as well as Mercy and me when we were cast out of society,” she said with mock darkness.

Roan shrugged. “Sounds oddly reasonable.”

“Perhaps in theory,” Prudence agreed. “But in practice, it was scandalous. Honor proposed marriage quite publicly to a wealthy man of illegitimate birth, and Grace attempted to trap a man into marriage and did so very successfully—only she trapped the wrong man.”