The Adventuress: HFTS5 Read Online Free

dream.
You
always wanted to be a gentleman, and I always wanted to marry well.”
    “Have you thought, Emily, that if just one member of the ton recognizes either the former butler or the former chambermaid, we should be socially damned? That butler, Rainbird, looks familiar.”
    For a moment, Emily appeared very young and vulnerable and lost. In that moment, she wished they were servants again, living on dreams. Then she rallied. “Fustian,” she said bravely. “I shall make my début in society, and you shall meet the Prince of Wales, which is all you ever talked about. Courage, my uncle. We shall survive.”
    “I shall try to be brave,” said Mr. Goodenough. “Wait here and I shall fetch a servant to carry our trunks. The bell-wire is broken.”
    When her “uncle” had left, Emily rose to her feet and studied her face in the greenish old looking-glass over the fireplace. Surely she looked like a lady!
    But when she had been a servant, she had felt like a lady inside. Now she felt like a servant inside. Odd.
    Emily had been brought up by a spinster aunt. Her parents had died when she was very young. Her aunt had been a hard, unfeeling woman but prided herself on “knowing her duty.” Before her death, she had secured Emily the post of chambermaid at Blackstone Hall, home of Sir Harry Jackson, a childless bachelor of some sixty years. The butler, Spinks, now Mr. Goodenough, had taken her under his wing. Like Emily, he was a dreamer, and they would often walk in the grounds at the end of the day, planning fantastic futures for each other. Emily’s was always the same. Some rich lady would befriend her, bring her out as a débutante, and a rich lord would fall in love with her and marry her. The butler’s dreams were wilder and more fanciful. On some evenings as he walked with Emily, he would fantasise about being a pirate king or becoming a missionary or enlisting in the army, although the one dream he would return to over and over again was that of meeting the Prince of Wales, now Prince Regent.
    And while they walked and dreamt, neither guessed that old Sir Harry was shortly to die and leave all his fortune to his butler.
    Now that they were rich, now that they were on the threshold of that long-dreamt-of Season, Emily felt the stronger of the two. Mr. Goodenough was basically a timid man. Emily often suspected he missed his days of butling. When she was married and had a title, he could live with her always, decided Emily. The years would pass and he would become accustomed to being a gentleman and no longer dread exposure.
    “Pity we paid our shot in advance,” said Mr. Goodenough as he came back into the room. “But I did not expect to find anywhere so quickly.”
    “That house has been advertised for the past three months,” said Emily, “and at such a low rent. I wonder why no one else snapped it up.”
    “As to the matter of the rent,” said Mr. Goodenough cautiously, “I feel you should have paid the full eighty pounds. Oh, I know that dreadful Palmer needed a set-down, but it was done in front of the servants, and, if you but remember, we servants have a hearty contempt for anyone who appears miserly.”
    Emily laughed. “I think I am forgetting more quickly than you the thoughts of a servant. Do not worry. The staff at Clarges Street will have no cause to complain of my treatment.”
    But it was a tight-lipped Emily who stood in the front parlour at 67 Clarges Street an hour later. The fire had not been lit, and the holland covers still lay in a pile in the corner where Rainbird had thrown them that morning.
    She rang the bell and waited. And waited.
    After ten minutes, she gave it a savage pull.
    Rainbird sauntered in and stood looking at her, eyes bright with insolence.
    “You r-a-a-a-n-g?” he drawled.
    “Take your hands out of your pockets when you address me,” said Emily, turning pink with anger. “You will find our trunks still standing in the hall. Have them carried up to our