Page 80 of A Lady of Means
The Burn Bookof Lady M
Miss Kate Herring:Said young lady advertises her family’sexploitsadventures in the Congo.Some light digging shows that one Mr.Thaddeus Herring came back a ransom richer.One has only to wonder if the purpose and activities Miss Herring extols, were, in fact, mercenary in nature rather than Godly.How does a man of God afford a manufactory in Manchester and two of the Earl of Westmoreland’s prized racehorses?
* * *
“What are you all….”
Several days later, Moria entered the breakfast room and immediately her words fell away as soon as she saw the pamphlet the occupants of the drawing room were holding.
The Burn Book.
She snatched one from the nearest hand, it was Lawrence’s.He didn’t try to take it from her.
“No…” her stomach dropped.
She’d written some unkind things.She’d mostly written truths.But they were salacious, and they were about people that garnered attention and sold headlines.
Someone had stolen her words.Words written by an angry and heartbroken and guarded girl in her own notebook in her room.Lady Gretchen and Carina had also written in the book, but there was no audience intended.At least she and her friends hadn’t signed their own names to them.Although their names were conspicuously absent.
“Did you write this?”It was Jasper, walking to stand in front of her, pamphlet in hand.
“There’s no proof of that,” she shot back, straightening to her full height as he peered down at her.
“Whoever stole this took some of the worst of the worst and the most damning,” Noelle put in, standing from her seat at the table.
Moria felt like sights and sounds were happening around her, to her, but she wasn’t a part of it.
Who had done this?
As if on cue, Lady Carina and Gretchen entered, Olivia in tow.
Before Moria could ask any questions, her two friends rushed her, pulling her into their arms.
If anyone ever found this, it’d be quite the scandal,Gretchen had said, was it a fortnight ago?Or longer?
You mean people would pay to read some debutante’s diaries?
No.She wouldn’t.But when she looked into Gretchen’s face, she knew she had reached the same conclusion.
Here,Moria had said, putting the book in Kate’s hands, Write something.
Kate had taken the quill.What should I say?
Do your worst.Moria had said.
You let it out, honey.Put it in the book.Gretchen.
And then Kate had inked her quill, she’d written entry after entry.The four of them had passed around a bottle of champagne Carina kept in her carriage.Moria had been so in the throes of grief and drink and the safety of friendship that she hadn’t noticed that Kate didn’t take the bottle.She hadn’t noticed where the book, black and pink and so necessary to her survival, had ended up when she’d returned home hours later.
“It was Kate,” Lady Carina explained to Moria’s family.
Lawrence and Fitz looked at each other.Jasper swore.
“How many people have read this?”Moria heard herself asking as though from someone else’s voice, far underwater or on the other side of a chasm.Perhaps her body was on the other side of a chasm from her heart.It might as well be, it had dropped all the way through the carpeted floor, at least.
Gretchen and Olivia both took a step toward her.The occupants of the breakfast room were rapt as Olivia spoke first.“It was all over the Piccadilly news stand.Lady Carina, Gretchen, and I bought all they had and then went to three more stands and bought those too, but…”
“Then we had to keep an appointment for tea with one of Lady Olivia’s suitors and his mother,” Gretchen continued.
