Page 3 of The Fortune Hunter’s Gamble

“I hope you will come. I know you will wish her very happy,” Aunt said.

“I wish them both to the devil,” Rowden said, throwing the card he held to the floor.

By August, he was at Oxford, drowning himself in cheap sack and expensive women, because a man with no future had no need to live in temperance. And Sophronia Elizabeth Feltham Edmons Hinton might indeed go to the devil, for all he knew, because he would never speak to her again.

CHAPTER ONE

HUNGERFORD, BERKSHIRE, MAY 1798

For the first seventeen years of her life, Sophronia Edmons had more or less done exactly as she pleased, the consequences of having an indulgent father, an absent mother, and an aunt who was too soft-tempered to attempt to subdue an unruly child.

For the last twelve years of her life, Sophronia Hinton had lived to please others. Her family, first, by allowing herself to be courted, then bound in marriage to a man who could support her and them. She had spent the ten years of her marriage attempting to please her husband, whose caprices varied by the day. She had spent the last year behaving as a proper widow in mourning, so that the executor of her husband’s estate could not find any reason to accuse her and withhold the inheritance which she was due.

Now her mourning was over, the estate was settled, and Sophronia held possession of this enormous house. She stood under the avenue of lime trees, contemplating the graceful manor. The nine bays of windows winked back at her, their expression a bit smug at her quandary.

Once again, she could live to please herself, and the funds that Henry had set up for her meant she had the resources to support nearly every whim or undertaking.

And what, precisely, would please her? It had been so long since she was able to follow her heart that Sophronia feared she might have fallen permanently out of touch with that instrument. The bold, laughing girl she’d been had receded out of reach of recovery. Older Sophronia groped behind a thick curtain of memory, trying to lay her hands on dusty forms she might not even recognize when she found them.

What had she wished for her own life, so long ago? And what would she do with herself now, with decades of her life, God willing, still ahead of her?

“We might turn it into a girls’ boarding school,” she said to her companion. Hinton House held a kind of austere, magisterial beauty that gave it the gravitas befitting a worthwhile institution. The windows of the ground and upper floors marched in perfect symmetry around all sides of the rectangle, and the central portion opened to a Doric-columned porch as if the house were an entrance to a temple. The small wing with the conservatory jutted off to one side, an afterthought that added a touch of ease and charm. “I fancy I would make a good headmistress.”

“I could be your assistant,” Lily said at once. “Better me than Miss Barnes at the dame school.”

Lily Westall, a handful of years younger than Sophronia, was the daughter of a colonel who Sophronia knew harbored greater ambitions for his only child than for her to become a schoolmistress.

“Your father hinted to me that he hopes you might marry well,” Sophronia said, but in a mild tone, for who was she to scotch a young woman’s dreams? Sophronia had married well, and look where it had gotten her.

Complete independence, at the ripe old age of nine-and-twenty. No husband. No children. No other dependents.

Just her, living alone in this magnificent pile.

Lily’s mouth turned down at the corners, and she touched the small purse dangling from her wrist. “He’s said as much to you,” Sophronia guessed.

“Worse.”

Lily was a charming little wren of a girl, small and quick, with inquisitive dark brown eyes and short brown curls framing the sweet face beneath her leghorn bonnet. She couldn’t be a greater contrast to Sophronia, who was referred to as statuesque and quite handsome by the people who wanted her approval, and described as frowsy, bold, and too robust by those who did not approve her style.

“He’s decided.” Lily withdrew a folded note and slipped it into Sophronia’s hand.

The strangest sensations overtook Sophronia as she read the colonel’s impatient scrawl. “Giles?” The name slipped out before she could catch her tongue. Sophronia had become adept at catching words off her tongue—marriage to a quick-tempered man had a way of ingraining that habit. But the perception of being pulled in opposite directions, with one’s middle falling away, did tend to let unguarded words slip out.

Lily clutched her reticule in her fingers, immediately anxious. “You don’t approve.”

“On the contrary. Giles Rowden is…” Sophronia groped for praise. “Son and heir to the Baron Denford, of course.”

Lily dropped her gaze to the gravel drive. The shade of the lime trees cast a cool touch on the back of Sophronia’s neck.

She might think it a warning of Fate, if she were the superstitious sort, which she wasn’t.

“Yes,” Lily whispered. “He is.”

Which is why her papa, the Colonel, would want Giles for Lily. The title of Lady Denford would excuse a multitude of inconveniences, such as that of marrying a man who gave every indication of possessing a weak character, and not much stronger of a mind.

Unlike his cousin Rowden, who could be accused of possessing too much character, and certainly a strong will, if not the greatest intellect.

Thinking of Rowden pulled her like taffy once more, further, tighter. So Sophronia did what she always did when memories of Rowden taunted her: she pushed him out of her mind and slammed the door on his provoking face.