The Mark of the Midnight Manzanilla A Pink Carnation Novel Read Online Free Page A

Ponsonby had been seen without her gloves at Lady Beaufeatheringstone’s latest ball? It was hardly a matter of international policy.
    She was just in a mood, she told herself. Tired, cranky, weary. Too many nights of too many entertainments that weren’t all that entertaining. It would get better. It had to get better. She didn’t like feeling like this, so purposeless. So restless.
    She had hoped that having her friends Lizzy and Agnes join her this year would help, that introducing them to society would provide some of the vim that she had felt last year, when it was all fresh and new. But Agnes didn’t care much for such things, and Lizzy had rapidly, without much help from Sally, acquired her own circle.
    Lizzy had, in fact, become something of a minor sensation in her own right. Part of it was due to her stepmother, Mrs. Reid. Mrs. Reid’s novel, The Convent of Orsino , was the topic of conversation at all select soirees, her presence a coup for any hostess. People fought to send cards to her stepdaughter, in the hope that Mrs. Reid might attend, and—even better!—lose her temper and pink someone with her infamous sword parasol. A wound from Mrs. Reid was a sure sign of social success. But while Mrs. Reid’s notoriety might have garnered Lizzy the invitations, the rest she had achieved on her own. At any party, one could find Lizzy surrounded by a fascinated group of men and women, telling hair-raising tales of her youth in India. Given that Lizzy had left India at the age of six, and spent the rest of her formative years first with a retired vicar’s wife and then in the decidedly unexotic confines of Miss Climpson’s Select Seminary, Sally strongly suspected that the larger part of those stories were apocryphal, taken right out of the novels they had smuggled under the covers at Miss Climpson’s. Not that that made any difference to her audience.
    It didn’t hurt that the rumor had made its way around the ton that Lizzy’s mother had been an Indian princess, complete with elephant and priceless jewels.
    It was Sally who had started the rumor about Lizzy’s mother being an Indian princess. Not the elephants. The elephants had come later, along with other embellishments that made the originator of the tale raise her brows and wrinkle her nose. People did come up with the most ridiculous things. . . .
    But, still, it was all better than the truth, which was that Lizzy’s mother had been a bazaar girl. A touch of royal blood rendered Lizzy interesting and exotic; without it, she would be stigmatized as nothing but the bastard brat of an insignificant East India Company Colonel of little fortune and no birth. That was what Sally had reckoned when she started the rumor.
    Of course, she hadn’t reckoned on it running away from her like that.
    She hadn’t reckoned on being left behind.
    That was silly. It wasn’t as though Lizzy had left her. They still spent a great deal of time together. It was just . . . When Sally had left Miss Climpson’s for London, it had never occurred to her that Agnes and Lizzy would carry on without her, turning their trio into a duo. They had even had an adventure of their own—not that it was terribly much of an adventure, given that Lizzy and Agnes had run off the moment there was a hint of a French spy on the scene, disappearing for weeks and causing everyone a lot of bother finding them again. If Sally had been there, they would have routed the spy on their own, and saved everyone a great deal of trouble.
    But she hadn’t been there. As they had reminded her countless times. Not always intentionally, but in little ways—in jokes she didn’t understand and in memories she didn’t share. Sally was used to being the leader of their little trio. It felt very odd to be rendered de trop.
    “—inconvenient diet,” Agnes was saying. “Blood does stain so.”
    Belatedly, Sally pulled her attention back to Agnes. Unlike Sally, Agnes did not seem to be enjoying the cool