The Paper Princess

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“It won't happen to me. Never to me!” said Miss Felicity Channing fiercely.

“Why not?” demanded her governess, Miss Chubb. “It's happened to your three elder sisters. Why not you?”

“I am made of sterner stuff,” said Felicity. Miss Chubb looked at her delicate charge's sensitive face and wide, vulnerable eyes and gave a cynical snort.

Both ladies were seated beside the fire in the nursery at the top of Tregarthan Castle in Cornwall. It had been an exhausting day, a day in which Felicity had watched her sister, Maria, sob her way to the altar to wed a man she barely knew.

Felicity had three elder sisters, and Maria was the last of the three to be forced by the girls’ stepfather, Mr. Palfrey, into an arranged marriage. Not content with being married to one of the richest women in England, Mr. Palfrey was always on the look-out for more money to support his lavish tastes. He had married Lucy Channing, the girls’ mother, when she was a pretty, young widow and the Channing girls were all still in the nursery. Felicity's mother, now Mrs. Palfrey, had been a permanent invalid for some years, allowing her husband full rein.

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