Page 43 of Unbound Duchess

“You know, it was not as if your brother forced me to stand with the servants,” Ellen said, feeling a twinge of guilt for agreeing that he was an ogre. “I did not wish to get in the way of your reunion with your family.”

“Oh, are you not the dearest thing?” Madalene sighed as she looped her arm with Ellen’s. “But you are family now, as well, and I know my brother. It is you I must learn about. Come, let us take tea in the women’s parlor and talk.”

Ellen panicked as Madalene turned to Mrs. Bradley to give her the order. Madalene seemed warm and bubbly and outgoing, but so had Judith when they had first met. Judith had helped Benedict to ensure her plan to run away would fail. Could she trust another woman who called herself a friend?

“Gosh, the feel of you,” Madalene noted as she pulled Ellen along to the women’s parlor. “You are as stiff as a board! What has got you so tense? Is it me?”

“Um…” Ellen muttered, fidgeting with her fingers.

Madalene groaned and rolled her eyes as she let go of Ellen’s arm to fall back into the nearby pink velvet chaise, sprawling in an overdramatic fashion at which Ellen could not help but smile.

“What am I saying? Of course it is,” Madalene went on. “I am told often that I am far too ‘much’, you know. Too cheerful, too giddy, too, too, too—I am simply too!”

“No,” Ellen laughed. She could not help it. Even through her hesitance, she could not help but comfort Madalene.

“You seem so very lovely,” Ellen assured her as she wrung her hands tighter. “It is just…I have only had one friend before and she…did not treat me very well in the end.” She paused, then added, “Or perhaps ever, at all.”

Madalene raised a curious brow as she propped herself up on her elbows.

“Intriguing,” she all but sang.

Ellen grimaced.

“More like pathetic on my part,” Ellen answered.

“Mmmm, no,” Madalene said, shaking her head. “I do not yet know this story, but I am certain that is not the correct word.”

She bounced up onto her feet as the maid came in with the tray of tea, which Madalene quickly waved off.

“No, no, I changed my mind. Bring us some red wine instead, please,” she ordered with a cheeky smile.

The maid bowed her head before turning back around and returned a moment later with a bottle and two wine glasses.

“Much better,” Madalene praised.

Ellen watched in amusement as Madalene dismissed the maid with cheeky warmth, then poured each of them a glass of wine so full that it nearly reached the brim.

“That is a lot of wine,” Ellen pointed out as she accepted the glass.

“I wager there is a lot to this story,” Madalene countered, then carefully clinked their full glasses together.

“Now,” Madalene said, taking on a suddenly commanding tone. “Drink. And talk. I simply must know everything.”

Needing the wine to loosen her tongue, Ellen took a longer pull from the full glass than she normally would, and as she began to feel the delightfully dizzying effects of the spirit ease the tension from her mind, she began to talk.

At first she was tentative, telling Madalene how kind Judith had been when they’d first met. As her full glass reached its bottom, though, Ellen found herself pacing the room as she aired out every slight Judith had tossed at her.

“And I did not even want to go to that masquerade!” she exclaimed a half hour later as Madalene refilled her glass.

“She put me in this awful dress that certainly was not my color! And it was velvet! I despise the feel of velvet! Yet I let her do it. I let her push and bully me around because I thought that was what friendship among ladies was!”

“Hogwash,” Madalene retorted, then took a sip of her own wine. “She sounds like an evil witch through and through!”

“Ugh! And that was not the worst of it,” Ellen went, feeling the full effects of her inebriation settle in, “When I told her I did not want to marry my cousin… When I expressed my concerns about him being dangerous… What did she do? She went behind my back and told him!”

“I will slap her, I swear to God,” Madalene swore as she shook her head. “What an awful woman!”

Her inhibitions lowered by the wine, Ellen threw her head back and laughed loudly as she pictured Madalene doing just that.