The Sins of Lady Dacey

by Marion Chesney Narrated by Mia Chiaromonte

Overview

The local society could only speculate how a pair of turtledoves would cope as the guests of the scandalous Lady Dacey. Surely she would attempt to corrupt them-an act that both Pamela Perryworth and Honoria Goodham would see as welcome entertainment in their rigid, joyless lives.

Though Mrs. Perryworth is married-most unhappily-and the young Honoria has a cloying tendency to read too much scripture, the purity and loveliness of both ladies nonetheless inflames the senses of two notorious lords. Mr. Sean Delaney loses his heart at first sight of the fair Mrs. Perryworth, while the disreputable Duke of Ware is quite disturbed by the innocent Honoria, who unknowingly dares to tempt his jaded heart.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940169604863
Publisher:	Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Publication date:	06/15/2014
Series:	Dukes and Desires , #4
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

Chapter One

HONORIA GOODHAM was in church as usual. At the age of eighteen, she sometimes felt that most of her young life had been spent on her knees in church. Her parents were very religious. She had been with them to matins, and now it was evensong with the dark night shrouding the village outside and the wind whistling mournfully down from the Yorkshire moors and making the tall candles on the altar flicker and dance. Shadows like the demons that had just entered Honoria's life danced up the lime-washed walls of the old building.

The vicar intoned the words of the twelfth psalm, and the words wound in and out of her troubled brain.

"Help me, Lord, for there is not one godly man left: for the faithful are minished from among the children of men.

"They talk of vanity every one with his neighbor: they do but flatter with their lips and dissemble in their double heart."

Her parents surely had double hearts and were possessed of vanity, thought Honoria miserably.

Her mind slid back to that morning after matins. She could see her parents seated comfortably in front of a small fire in the drawing room, placid and sure as ever, her mother with her gray hair piled up under a muslin cap and her twinkling humorous eyes which belied the fact that she had no sense of humor at all, and her father, thin and bent, cracking his knuckles in that irritating way he had and announcing that a marriage had been arranged for her.

Her thoughts had quickly ranged over the eligible young men of the neighborhood. Perhaps it was young Mr. Lance of the merry blue eyes and fair hair.

And then the blow had fallen. "You are to wed Mr.Pomfret."

Mr. Pomfret was a mill owner of forty years, a widower reported to have bullied his wife into her grave, coarse and fat and vulgar.

To Honoria's shocked protests, she was told that Mr. Pomfret was very wealthy and it was her duty to marry the man chosen for her.

It was hard to break the pattern of eighteen years of dutiful obedience. But now, as the psalm finished and she knelt in prayer, Honoria clasped her hands and wondered if God really existed. What had she ever done in all her blameless life that such a marriage should have been arranged for her?

Sheltered by the high wooden walls of the family pew, she was spared the sight of Mr. Pomfret, but she knew he was in the pew behind and she felt she could sense his thick body waiting for her.

"Lighten our darkness, we beseech you, O Lord," the congregation prayed, "and by thy great mercy defend us from all perils and dangers of this night...."

Her lips moving soundlessly, Honoria prayed with all her heart and soul. "I do not want to marry Mr. Pomfret. Save me from him!"

But as she walked from the cold church with her parents, there was Mr. Pomfret standing in the porch with the vicar.

He leered at Honoria and then gave Mr. Goodham a vulgar wink. "I shall be calling on you tomorrow afternoon to arrange that ... er ... business."

"Sound man," commented her father, as they walked to their carriage through the slanting gravestones.

"I wish I were under one of those gravestones right now," said Honoria, clearly and passionately.

"Hush. Fie! For shame. People will hear you!" exclaimed her mother. One parent on either side of her like jailors, they hustled her to the carriage.

"Not a word more," admonished her mother. "We will talk to you when we reach the privacy of our own home."

Tears blinded Honoria's eyes as the carriage rolled home in the darkness.

"Now," said Mrs. Goodham when they had removed their wraps and were seated in the drawing room among the forbidding black Jacobean furniture, "we will make a certain allowance for bride nerves, but do not ever be so unmaidenly, so vulgar, as to subject us to another similar outburst. Have we not given you the best governess, the best of everything? Is this how you repay us?"

Honoria clasped her hands and looked at her parents with appeal in her wide dark blue eyes. She was still like a schoolgirl, for she had not yet been allowed to put her hair up and wore her brown hair in two long pigtails. "Are we so poor?" she asked. "Are we so destitute that I am to be forced into marriage with a man more than twice my age?"

"Pride goeth before a fall," quoted her father severely. "Pomfret may be in trade, but he is a worthy man for all that. We have sometimes been distressed by signs of flightiness in you, Honoria. You need an older man to school you."

"To beat me into an early grave," said Honoria bitterly.

"You are insolent!" Mrs. Goodham stood up. "Go to your room and do not leave it until you have decided to offer us a full apology. Mr. Pomfret is calling tomorrow to make his proposal. You are not too old for a beating to chastise that saucy soul of yours."

So Honoria went to her room and sat by the window, looking out into the dark night. If only she could run away. But she did not have a friend in the world. Her parents were of the gentry and considered none of the young ladies of the village suitable companions for their daughter. And yet they were prepared to force her into marriage with such a piece of vulgarity as Mr. Pomfret.

A tear rolled down Honoria's small nose. She looked out and up at the dark sky where one star twinkled among the racing, ragged clouds.

"Save me," she said simply, "for I cannot bear it."

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