Marrying His Cinderella Countess

‘We must definitely get the diamonds cleaned for the wedding—you will want the entire set, I imagine,’ he said, and the urge to laugh fled.

‘The wedding? Where do you want it to be?’

She had a sudden mental picture of herself limping down the length of the endless nave of some fashionable London church while the congregation either tittered into their handkerchiefs or shed tears over Hainford’s disastrous choice of bride.

‘I have no family. Friends, of course, but nowhere near the number of people you would want to invite.’

‘There’s the Hainford family chapel,’ Blake suggested. ‘Mind you, that would mean kicking all the house guests out before we could have a honeymoon there.’

Oh, what the…?

Ellie got a grip on her language.

Countess, remember? I limp, I am always going to limp, and they had better get used to it.

‘St George’s Hanover Square?’ she said recklessly. ‘You can invite everyone. Give Jonathan something to do organising it, instead of disapproving of me.’

And I will find a wedding dress that will give them something other than the fact that I am lame to think about.

*

Jonathan—subdued, clearly embarrassed, and with an equally clear bruise on his chin—had been put to work on the wedding plans. Six weeks, Blake had pronounced, for reasons best known to himself.

St George’s Hanover Square was organised for the ceremony and the townhouse readied for the reception, wedding breakfast and the first night before they travelled to Hainford Hall for a prolonged stay.

But first Blake had summoned a distant cousin to act as chaperon and installed her, Ellie and Polly in a small but highly respectable hotel in Albemarle Street. Miss Paston was in her forties, very quiet and retiring, and had been helping ‘Cousin Margaret’—otherwise known as the Viscountess of Crampton—with her children. She seemed pleasant enough, if rather vague, but Ellie suspected that was a barrier she put up between herself and the realities of life as a poor relation.

That might have been me, she thought with a shiver. The eternal companion, always in the shadows, growing older and quieter as the years rolled past. And instead I am to marry an earl.

Ellie had accepted a new bank draft for Carndale Farm and went to call on Mr Rampion. She would have taken Polly and gone in a hack, but Miss Paston had been appalled and had sent a note round to ‘Dear Cousin Blake’, who had provided a carriage and footman. Future countesses did not travel by hackney carriage.

Mr Rampion, invigorated by the prospect of detailed negotiations over settlements, took the draft, gave Ellie an advance against it and details of her new bank account, and saw her out to the carriage with considerable ceremony.

Ellie clutched her reticule with

its fat purse and bank details and sat staring rather blankly at the beautifully buttoned upholstery of the carriage seat opposite her.

‘Where to now, Miss Lytton?’ The footman was still holding the carriage door.

‘Oh. Where…? Brook Street, please.’

She gave the direction and sat back. She was never going to be a beauty, and she was always going to be…different. Well, she would be ‘different’ in the best way she could manage, and Lady Verity Standing, the most eccentric female of her acquaintance, was the very woman to ask how to go about it.

Verity was the sister of the Duke of Severingham, now in her thirties, ridiculously wealthy, stubbornly single, the despair of her family and one of Ellie’s circle of writing friends. It was well known that the love of her life had died of a fever over ten years before. What was not so well known was that her beloved had been a woman.

Ellie, who had long ago come to the conclusion that one took love as it came and was lucky if it did come, saw no reason to be shocked by this—was only saddened for Verity.

Now she sent Patrick the footman to knock at the smart black front door and kept her fingers crossed that her friend would be at home—because if anyone could create a silk purse out of a sow’s ear, then Verity was the woman to do it.

*

‘You are never going to be a beauty…’ Verity walked around her, eying her as a gardener would an overgrown yew bush that might, just might be transformed by some creative topiary into something to grace an earl’s garden.

It was exceedingly refreshing not to have to deal with someone determined to flatter. ‘No,’ Ellie agreed.

‘But you could be an Original,’ Verity pronounced.

Given that she dyed her already red hair an even more flamboyant shade, always wore black and took a small scarlet parrot which clashed nastily with her hair everywhere, she certainly knew what she was talking about.