Give Him a Chance (The Chances #13)

Chapter One

If the man in the ridiculous wig does not take my side soon, Lady Lucy Chance thought furiously, I am going to do the unthinkable and lose my temper.

“I think you will find it is a very reasonable argument that I am making,” she said aloud, doing her best to keep her voice level, despite the intense provocation. “And all I ask—”

“‘All I ask’?” The man seated before her—in a seat much higher than her—glared down with an incredulous voice. “All you ask?”

Lucy tried not to permit her cheeks to flush at this, but it was rather difficult. After all, she had an audience.

The courtroom was absolutely packed. The gallery was rammed with people, some clearly curious, one or two quietly weeping, but the vast majority of them were calling out, laughing, whooping whenever a prisoner was brought out in chains.

As though this were an entertainment, Lucy thought sinisterly, righteous anger boiling in her blood. As though the prisoners were animals in some sort of zoo.

Behind her sat a gaggle of solicitors, all wearing those ridiculous wigs they insisted on wearing, muttering about a wild woman.

Which, now that Lucy considered it, had to be her.

But really, what did they expect? It was almost impossible to march into the Houses of Parliament, and goodness knew she had tried.

Even with her father’s assistance, she had been refused entry, so there were really very few options ahead of her when it came to changing the law and demanding better for the very least in Society.

And the least this judge could do was speak to her as though she were a sane woman.

“You are in contempt,” the man was saying, each syllable enunciated slowly and dramatically as though she had lost her wits. Or worse, was French. “My good woman—”

Lucy had momentarily taken a seat, but she launched up to a standing position in outrage at such a statement. “I am not your good woman!”

There was more laughter from the gallery now, something she should have expected, but it was nonetheless absolutely outrageous.

Well, really! Where was British democracy when you needed it? Where was the elegant and instructive cut and thrust of debate? Where was the man’s reason?

Though perhaps I should not have expected such a person to be reasonable, Lucy thought darkly, when they happily accept the ridiculous requirement of wearing such large, powdery wigs.

Maybe his brain was overheating under it.

The judge glared down his large beaky nose. “My dear woman—”

“My name is Lady Lucy Chance, and I am the daughter of—”

“My lady?”

Lucy turned. The voice had been gentle and genteel, which was more than most voices one could find in a courtroom, even she had to admit.

The person speaking was a solicitor of some sort, a barrister, from what she could make out by the ridiculous garb he was wearing. Honestly, it was 1841, for goodness’s sake! Did they not wish to make any improvements to the legal dress?

“Yes?” she snapped, temper rising as it was becoming clearer and clearer that once again, she would be unsuccessful in her goal.

The solicitor smiled obsequiously. “Do not give your full name, m’lady. Not in a place like this.”

Lucy raised an imperious eyebrow. Being so imperious was not her natural state, and so she had practiced hard in a looking glass that very morning for just such an occasion.

It was a shame that whenever one of her eyebrows rose in derision, the other one somehow joined it, making her look momentarily surprised instead of devastatingly cutting.

She lowered both eyebrows. “And why not?”

The solicitor glanced at the gallery, at the calls and jeers from the courtroom’s audience, then back to her. “Because you are a different class, m’lady. You do not wish to be tarred by the likes of their brush.”

Lucy swelled with outrage.

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 the first person 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 had seen what 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. You might 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 of A 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 even supposed to 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.

Lucy held her head high. “Your Honor, I think you’ll find if you just consider some of my proposals—”

“I have considered your nonsense for far too long, my lady,” Judge Bonner said, lifting his gavel.

Her stomach twisted. No—no, she had come so far. She had worked so hard! She could not lose her opportunity now! “Please, just a few more minutes of your time!”