Read Sheri Cobb South for Free Online

you must! A girl turned up on me doorstep this evening, claiming to be me sister. I know she’s lying, but ‘elen will ‘ave it the girl is on the up and up.”
    “How can you be so sure she isn’t?” asked Sir Aubrey. “Nothing against your mother, Ethan, but if she had one child out of wedlock, why couldn’t she have had another?”
    “Because me mum was cold in ‘er grave long before this chit ever walked God’s earth!” retorted Mr. Brundy, annoyed at being presented with the same argument his wife had put forward. “Added to that, we don’t look anything alike. The girl’s got blue eyes, and ‘er ‘air’s a sort of reddish yellow.”
    Sir Aubrey’s amusement turned to genuine interest. “Indeed? It sounds as if you have a beauty on your hands.”
    “A beauty?” Mr. Brundy considered the matter as if such a possibility had never occurred to him. “I suppose she’s pretty enough. What further proof would you need that she’s no kin of mine?” he concluded with a rueful smile.
    “That settles it! If you, who can see no woman beyond your own wife, find this girl pretty enough, she must be a diamond of the first water! I suddenly find myself possessed of a burning desire to see this supposed sister of yours.”
    “I’d give ‘er to you with me blessing, but ‘elen won’t ‘ear of it. She’s convinced the girl is me sister, and must stay with us.”
    “Ethan, for a married man, you know amazingly little about women!” declared Sir Aubrey, shaking his head in pitying disbelief.
    “And you, I suppose, are an expert on the subject,” Mr. Brundy remarked cynically.
    “Can you doubt it? I have, after all, successfully evaded the creatures for thirty years.”
    “Your day will come, Aubrey, mark me words,” Mr. Brundy predicted confidently.
    “You are beginning to sound like Sir Linus,” Sir Aubrey informed him. “Nevertheless, I should like to know why, if marriage is the blissful state you would have me believe, you are sulking about here while Lady Helen is no doubt crying into her pillow.”
    This was a possibility Mr. Brundy had not considered. “Do you really think so?” he asked, torn between distress at having caused his wife pain and hope that, if she were half as miserable as he was, a reconciliation might yet be effected.
    “Trust me, Ethan, they always cry,” drawled Sir Aubrey.
    “I’ve no wish to ‘urt me wife,” said Mr. Brundy.
    “Of course you do not! The trick is to bring the thing off in such a way that you come out looking like a hero to Lady Helen.”
    “And ‘ow, pray, am I to do that?”
    “Ethan, do you remember when you first came to London?”
    Mr. Brundy remembered his inauspicious introduction to Society very well, since it had only taken place only a few months previously. He had quickly discovered that England’s elite class was extremely reluctant to clasp a weaver to its bosom—and none more reluctant than Lady Helen Radney, the woman with whom he had fallen in love at first sight. Fortunately, by the time he realized how impossible such a match would be, he had already married her.
    “Aye, I remember it well,” he said at last, a little smile playing about his mouth.
    “The less pleasant parts, I mean,” said Sir Aubrey, correctly interpreting his friend’s beatific expression. “To be blunt, Ethan, no one knows better than you how brutal Society can be to outsiders. Your membership at Brooks’s taxed all David’s powers of diplomacy, and in spite of Lady Helen’s ducal connections, there are still families who won’t receive you.”
    “Thank you for pointing that out to me,” said Mr. Brundy, his voice heavy with irony. “Now that you’ve put me in me place, would you mind telling me what that’s got to do with this girl?”
    Sir Aubrey’s smile turned demonic. “If she wants to cut a dash in Society under your aegis, let her. She’ll turn tail and run the first time I scowl at her through my quizzing glass.”
    “You’d do