The Ruin of Lady Georgiana

Chapter Originals

Lady Georgiana Ashcombe is twenty-five, which in the year 1817 and in the county of Wiltshire is a settled fact about a woman rather than an age. She has refused four offers, she runs her brother's household because nobody else will, and she has spent eleven years watching the estate her father ruined be held together with string. Adam Callow came to Ashcombe at nineteen to break a horse nobody else would touch and has been there ever since, and there are four hundred and eleven acres of that estate and one thing on all of them that makes money, and it is the stud he built out of nothing while three generations of Ashcombes were not looking. In the spring the Duke comes back from London with a debt of forty-one thousand pounds and a solution: a man from Bristol with new money, a bad reputation, and a wish to be connected to a title. Georgiana has eleven months. And every morning at six o'clock she goes down to the long field, in a habit she has mended twice, to watch a man who is not permitted to look at her do the only honest work anybody at Ashcombe has done in a hundred years.