Tens of thousands of hours wasted because apparently those skills held no value in her new life. It hurt to think about, so she focused on the newspaper.
Oh. My. Goodness.
There she was again. Yet unlike her previous appearances inThe Times, the sketch was not one of a perfectly dressed future duchess. Her hair was unkempt, her clothes rags, and she was sprawled on the ground, skirts above her knees with a bandy stick on the ground next to her.
Curse Benedict for convincing her to play that stupid game. Curse whoever had passed along the news to the gossips in London, and curse the dashed cartoonist. She would wring his neck.
“What does it say?” Cassandra asked.
“It’s none of anyone’s business.” She closed the paper. Then folded it, and folded it again, hammering on it with her fist to get it to sit flat.
Benedict raised one eyebrow before turning to his sister. “Cassandra, go take your breakfast in your bedroom.”
“But only married ladies can take breakfast in bed. Amelia said so.”
“Lady Amelia is not the head of this household. Off you go.”
With a hop, Cassandra took her plate to the sideboard and started piling it high. Ridiculously high. Enough food for three breakfasts high.
“You’ll make yourself sick,” Benedict said.
“I’m taking my book. Bed, breakfast, and a book. I’m never going to leave.” She gave a wide grin before she danced out of the room.
Amelia couldn’t wait to see her shiny, happy bubbly-ness leave. This was as awful a morning as could be had, and there was no room in it for hope or innocence.
Benedict glowered. “Whatever disagreementwemay be having, you will not take it out on a child.”
“Oh, loosen your breeches. Remarkably, not everything is about you.”
He rolled his eyes. “I don’t have the energy for this.”
Seriously?
He wasn’t the one who’d had his life turned upside down. He wasn’t the one who’d gone from having everything to nothing, and he wasn’t the one who’d just been disgraced in a newspaper read by all of England.
“This is all your fault. You convinced me to take part in that stupid bandy match with all your talk of ‘being a human being.’ Jackass.”
“Princess, I don’t know what you’re talking about, but I have the small matter of half my friends losing their homes to deal with.”
“This is what I’m talking about.” She threw the paper in his direction. “You’ve made me a laughingstock.”
She couldn’t help the tears that assailed her. She drew in a ragged breath. It was one thing for society to think her trapped in a common life. It was another for them to thinkhercommon.
Benedict unfolded the paper. “This? Really? For heaven’s sake, it’s an idiot cartoon, drawn by an idiot, for other idiots to read.”
“And that’s what you really think of me, isn’t it? Just some cotton-headed aristocrat.”
“No, that’s not what I said.”
“I read that paper. Am I an idiot? With all my flower arranging and watercolors?”
He exhaled loudly. “I don’t always understand your priorities.”
She stood, tossing her napkin onto the table. “I do know that there are worse things happening in the world. There are worse things happening right here. But that doesn’t mean I can’t care about being made a mockery of. These are the people I grew up with. I used to have value. Except apparently now I don’t.”
Her father had always told her that she was only worth the title she could marry. Over the past few weeks, she’d thought maybe he was wrong. He wasn’t. Even her contributions to the firm had been sidelined in a night.
“It was one silly cartoon. It doesn’t define you.”
