Deceived

London, June 1816This newspaper is pleased to record the return to these shores of a certain notorious princess, whose arrival will be greeted with great glee by the gentlemen of theTon.Rumor has it that the Princess IDC has not a feather to fly and is looking for a gentleman to ease her financial worries. Though whether the infamous lady will take him as lover or husband remains to be seen....--The Gentlemen's Athenian Mercury,June 12, 1816 IT WAS A HELL OF A PLACE to look for a husband.Most discerning females, given a choice of marriage mart, would prefer the genteel familiarity of Almack's any day to the rather more dubious qualifications of the Fleet Prison.Princess Isabella Di Cassilis did not have that luxury. Princess Isabella was desperate.She had explained to the jailer that her requirements were very specific. She needed to marry a man who owed so much money that to take on her twenty-thousand-pound liability would be a mere drop in the ocean of his debt. She needed a pauper -- a strong one, since she did not want him dying on her and leaving her heir to his debts as well as her own -- and she needed him now.It was of no consequence to Isabella that she would be ruined if this escapade ever came to light. She was beyond ruin already. The more fastidious members of the Ton closed their doors to her, so what harm could a little more scandal do? She might even accomplish the remarkable success of being ruined twice over in one lifetime. It would be a considerable achievement for a lady of only nine and twenty.Isabella Standish had not been born to be the princess of a European country, not even an insignificant one such as Cassilis. Her father had been a minor member of the Ton who'd aspired to be important but had never quite achieved his ambitions. Her grandfather had been fishmonger to King George III, ennobled by the monarch in one of his bouts of madness after he had partaken of a particularly tasty piece of rainbow trout. The family title was therefore not only newly created but also the butt of some hilarity, to the great mortification of the second Lord Standish, Isabella's father.It had been Isabella's misfortune that at the age of seventeen she had been walking down Bond Street the day before her wedding and had caught the roving eye of the jaded Prince Ernest Rudolph Christian Ludwig Di Cassilis, who had been charmed by her prettiness and her unspoiled manners. Prince Ernest had immediately made a counteroffer for her hand in marriage. It was an offer that her father was not minded to refuse, as he was about to be bankrupted by his extravagance. Prince Ernest's arrival was most timely, for Lord Standish if not for his daughter. The wedding that took place a few days later was not the one that Isabella had intended.It was also entirely Prince Ernest's fault that a widowed Princess Isabella, some twelve years later, was following a turnkey down the narrow stone corridor into the depths of the Fleet Prison. Ernest had died most inconveniently in the arms of his mistress, leaving his widow nothing but debts and a tarnished name. When she'd returned home to England, Isabella had discovered that her late husband's infidelity had been financial as well as physical. He had run up debts in her name. He had used her to fund his debauches and she had been so happy to be on a different continent from him that she had not even noticed. So now she was driven to desperate measures of her own to extract herself from the disaster Ernest had brought on her.Isabella shrank within her black cloak and pulled the hood more closely about her face. All her senses were under assault. It was almost as dark as night inside the prison. The air was thick with heat and the smoke of tobacco, but the scent did nothing to mask the deeper, more noxious smell of hundreds of fetid bodies pressed close. Raucous voices were raised in endless uproar, mingling with the scrape of iron fetters on stoCornick, Nicola is the author of 'Deceived', published 2006 under ISBN 9780373771646 and ISBN 0373771649.