Page 2 of Give Him a Chance

Clearly, the man had thought he was doing her a favor, but he had greatly underestimated her.

“I may be a lady,” she hissed, vehemence pouring from every syllable, “but that is no reason for my name and reputation to be protected under some sort of misguided belief that it makes me better than anyone else!”

The solicitor’s own eyebrows had both risen, and Lucy was willing to bet it was in shock. “But—But—your father—”

“My father does not come into this!” Lucy attempted to say magnificently, hoping to goodness her father did not find out she had come here today.

There were only so many times she could see pained disappointment in his eyes.

But Beachem, her lady’s maid ever since the maid she’d shared with her sister, Laurent, had gone off to work for Evelyn after her wedding last year, would at least report to her parents that Lucy had given her the slip a few hours back. As she did almost every day the woman was supposed to chaperone her.

In for a penny, in for a pound. She’d get in trouble regardless.

“And you!” Lucy whirled around to glare at Judge Bonner, who was shuffling papers from his high seat above the court. “You should be thefirstperson to be interested in the sorts of prison reform I am advocating for. It would radically improve so much. Including how often you see the same downtrodden types of citizenry pleading before your court year after year!”

“Lady Lucy,” intoned the judge, glaring in return, though arguably far more impressively with eyebrows that bushy. “You have been bothering judges all over the country. It is well known that your ridiculous ideas about prison reform—”

“‘Ridiculous’? ‘Ridiculous’?” Lucy thrust a hand toward the dock, where mere minutes ago, a sobbing man had been sentenced to ten years in prison for the mere theft of a spade. “This system is what’s ridiculous! When the working classes—”

“The criminal classes,” muttered Judge Bonner ominously.

Oh, it was enough to make her stamp her foot, though Lucy just about managed to prevent herself. “If you consider them guilty before they even step foot into your courtroom, what is the point of a trial?!”

It had infuriated her for months. Years, now that Lucy came to think of it.

The legal system in this country, she thought bitterly as the courtroom erupted at her remarks.It doesn’t work. It isn’t fit for purpose!

It was barbaric, punishing people for the most ridiculous things when the judges surely knew that half the people who appeared in their docks were starving and had only committed these supposed crimes to feed themselves or their families.

Most of the rest… Well, there was poverty everywhere, and Lucy knew what poverty did to a person.

Well. She hadseenwhat poverty did to a person.

After all, she was the daughter of an earl. The only meals she had missed were because she’d been attending prison reform rallies.

“I heard about you from my friend in the Bath circuit,” Judge Bonner said, his voice level but his irritation obviously growing. “He said you interrupted his court proceedings, much like you are interrupting mine—”

“But can’t you see, there have to be alternatives to locking a person up for months, for years at a time, merely because they were hungry!” Passion rose within Lucy, as it always did whenever she was talking about prison reform. “There have to be changes made if we as a society are going to grow and develop with equality at our core!”

“But our society is not an equal one,” pointed out the judge, and it could not be more clear from his face that he had absolutely no qualms about such a thing. “And it never will be.”

Lucy clenched her fists at her sides and managed to swallow her rudeness.

You idiotic old man.Youmight not live to see the world I will build, but I will build it.

It was perhaps not the most popular of campaigns. Lucy’s cousin, Thomas, and his wife, Victoria, ran an orphanage that gained donations now from the great and the good thanks to the impressive work they were doing to educate the poor little mites. And that was all to the good.

Another one of Lucy’s cousins, Samuel, and his wife, Rose, had established a retirement home for actors and actresses who had fallen on hard times. It was beautifully done, and Lucy had attended their opening performance ofA Midsummer’s Night’s Dream, in which Titania had appeared about eighty and their Bottom spent the entirety of the play in a bath chair. Their performances had been exquisite.

Her cousin Alexander, too, had married Lady Marjorie Dalton, a lady of fortune, and she was working with her sister, Samuel’s wife, to assist children and widows of little means.

But it was easy for them, and not just because, in the cases of Thomas and Alexander, their wives had come into the marriages with rather large dowries. Thomas had been given his father’s title while his father was still living and had become the Duke of Cothrom, and Samuel’s father had done the same, making him the Marquess of Aylesbury less than six months ago. The Chances, always doing things their own way, had taken to calling the elder generation, as fathers to the current title-holders, the ‘dowager duke’ and ‘dowager marquess’ respectively. Society, scandalized, had gone along with the strange titles, chalking it up to the typical Chance eccentricity.

Lucy’s father, on the other hand, was holding tightly on to his title, and even if he passed it on, it would not come to her.

No, she was a mere lady, albeit one with a courtesy title thanks to her parentage, with little power and almost no money. She wasn’t evensupposedto go anywhere alone since she was unwed. Whereas her brother and male cousins had all the freedom in the world.

But she was doing what she could.