A Bride for the Prizefighter: A Victorian Romance

slightly glazed.
“Good evening, Lord Faris,” she said, rising from her chair and giving a graceful curtsey.  It was easy to fall back on deeply ingrained manners when all else failed.
He was looking at her rather hard.  “Dear me, you are not at all what I expected,” he drawled.  “Are you indeed, she?”  He extracted a letter from his pocket.  “Miss Mina Walters?” He read the words as though they were slightly distasteful to him and Mina felt herself bristling.  “You do not look,” he added thoughtfully.  “Like I imagine a Mina.”  He twirled a hand about indicating her appearance.  “You look more like…” He pouted a moment in thought.  “A Prudence.” He pronounced with displeasure.
“My parents always called me Mina,” she answered repressively. “Though my true name is Minerva, after the goddess of wisdom and strategy.”
“Minerva?” he repeated with a faint wince.  “Ah yes.”
At that moment, Mina caught sight of the handwriting on the page he held between his elegant fingers.  Surely that was her father’s writing?  She felt her heart leap.  It must be the infamous letter Hannah had posted.  “I’m afraid you have the advantage of me.  Are we acquainted?” she asked with a calm she did not feel.
He threw himself down onto a chair and then winced.  “This chair,” he pronounced carefully.  “Is damnably uncomfortable.”
“Perhaps you ought not to have hurled yourself down into it, in such a fashion,” Mina could not help suggesting.  “It is hardly designed for such ill-treatment.”
He ignored her, his eye roaming over the room with a fascinated and leisurely sort of contempt.  “Dear me, so this is what a young ladies boarding school looks like.  How very disagreeable.  I can scarcely credit she would have left my father for this.”
Mina looked back at him steadily.  “I’m afraid you will have to be a good deal less cryptic,” she said frankly.  “If you expect me to respond at all meaningfully.”
He frowned.  “Do sit down.  I can’t concentrate when you’re hovering above me like some kind of carrion.”  He eyed her full mourning with disfavor.  “That gown makes you look like a crow.”
“Yes, so I gather.  A crow called Prudence,” she agreed tartly.  “I am in mourning,” she said, taking a seat opposite him and drawing her black fringed shawl tighter about her.
“Oh?  Did he actually die then?”  His gaze flickered back to the letter.  “He said he was dying, but I did not know if that was merely artistic license.”
“My father died three days ago,” she corrected him quietly.
“A man of his word,” he replied with a humorous quirk of his lips.
“Always,” Mina agreed and saw by his quick frown that he would like to always have the last word.  Immediately, she determined she would never let him have it.  She folded her hands in her lap and waited as he crossed his legs encased in cream silk breeches and stared at her in moody abstraction.
“Shall I go and order tea?” she asked when the silence started to stretch.
“Filthy stuff,” he answered swiftly.  “I never touch it.  I will take a glass of brandy.”
“I’m afraid my father kept no liquor in the house.”
“Good God.  Was he some kind of puritan?”
Mina did not trouble to answer this for she saw he was not really interested in her father at all.  “Am I to take it there is some kind of familial connection between us, my lord?” she asked coolly, though she still could not credit what her father had told her in his last few moments.
“Oh yes,” he said, nodding slowly.  “We are brother and sister, my dear, though only half-blood.  Through our sainted mother.” Mina felt her color rise and seeing her expression, he laughed softly.  “She divorced my father and married yours,” he said.  “Did she never speak of it even once?”
Mina clutched the arms of her chair. “Not of divorce, no.”
“Of me?” he asked, looking intrigued. “She spoke of her own darling boy?” His lips twisted.
“Of you, yes,” she admitted, feeling as though the words were dragged out of her.  “She spoke of her first-born child, but I never dreamed…” She had never said he was by a different father.  Mina took a deep breath.  “It was her expressed wish that she was buried with your baby bonnet.”
That caught his attention for his eyes widened.  “And was she?”
“Of course.”
“And with nothing of yours?” he asked with a trace of malice.
“With nothing of mine, no,” she confirmed, feeling like she was soothing a jealous child.  He smiled and she realized with a sinking heart that he did indeed look very like their mother.  Only her image was distorted in him, for he did not have Mama’s gentleness to temper her beauty.
“Then pack up your things, sister dear,” he cried extravagantly.  “For I am come to provide for you.  As your late lamented sire wrote and entreated me.”  He flung a negligent arm across the chair back.  “Far be it from me, to refuse an obligation or matter of honor.”  He spoke the words mockingly and she wondered if he was directly quoting her father’s words.  Taking her by surprise, he leapt suddenly from the chair.  “There are debts, I presume, for me to take care of?”
Mina rose stiffly from her own chair.  “Our debts are paid,” she said, her color rising.  “I discharged the last of them not an hour ago.”
“All of them?” he sounded incredulous.  “From your father’s letter, I imagined you quite sunk in penury.”
Was he suggesting her father penned a begging letter?  Mina took a moment to get her temper under control before she replied very carefully.  “Due to the doctor’s fees and funeral costs I was not able to set aside a sufficient sum to pay our servant Hannah for this past month’s wages in full…”
“Say no more,” Lord Faris said, drawing a pocketbook from