Page 206 of The Ladies Least Likely
Or whatever her real name was. Maybe it was time to have that conversation with her mother. She’d shied away from pressing her mother about the story of her life, in part because she didn’t want to hear she was the love child of an illicit union that had cost her mother her genteel station and her home. And in part because Harriette had been content at Miss Gregoire’s and now as part of her aunt’s household, where she was allowed to pursue her interests. She didn’t know any other home than England. She didn’t wish for any home beyond these shores.
“Something I can help you find?” Mrs. Darly greeted her customers pleasantly. Their gaily bedecked hats, dainty shawls, and broad skirts marked them as ladies of means and leisure. They were women for whom the first blush of youth had passed, but not their alliance to fashion.
“Itisher,” one of the women remarked in a hushed tone. She wore a lace cap piled high on her head and large silk rosettes pinned to her bodice and sleeves.
Harriette looked up, thinking the women had come to meet Mrs. Darly, a talented woman who had made a success of herself. But her smile of amusement slid off her face as she realized they were staring at her.
“From Lady Renwick’s last night,” the second said. Tiny feathers sprouted from the top of her wig, and a black ribbon around her throat fluttered as she spoke. “Renwick’s—” She whispered a word behind her glove, and her companion’s eyes rounded.
“And we saw her in the very act of furnishing her sketches to the print seller!” The first woman raised gloved fingers to painted red lips. “Oh, what Lady Renwick will say when we tell her!”
Harriette raised her eyebrows at Mrs. Darly. “Do they realize I can hear them?” she asked in a stage whisper. It was beyond hope that the women were discussing her in tones of admiration. They were licking their lips at the prospect of scandal.
Mrs. Darly was a businesswoman who didn’t miss an opportunity. She stepped forward with a smile. “If you’re looking for works by Miss Smythe,” she said, waving a hand in Harriette’s direction, “I am happy to say I will have a new series of prints available for sale in the next day or so. They’re sure to suit a lady’s artistic sensibilities. Would you like to order a set today?”
Harriette gathered up her portfolio and fled the shop as the women edged toward Mrs. Darly, still watching Harriette with wide eyes as though she were a creature on exhibit at the Exchange or the Tower Zoo.
Mortification pursued her. Renwick’s what? What was the gossip running about her now? How bad was it?
Harriette plunged down the narrow alley that led to Cranbourne Street and then turned toward Leicester Square, where she had left the cabriolet and her attendants. The summer afternoon was hazy and not overly warm and the men lounged at their leisure, Jock perched atop Hyperion, the coach horse, while Beater leaned against the side of the vehicle. The twomen exchanged comments with each other as they regarding the passersby strolling the square and its public gardens.
“Too many patches,” pronounced Jock as the men’s eyes followed the shapely figure of a woman in a gaudy gown who minced by holding a dainty parasol over her bone-white face. “Sign o’ the French disease.”
“Cyprian,” Beater grunted.
Ah, the liberty of men to evaluate every passing female. Though women did it too, as she had just seen in Mrs. Darly’s bookshop. “If you are done observing the wildlife, may we go?” Harriette asked acidly.
Beater bolted to attention, crumpling the paper wrapping of a meat pie he’d purchased off some passing vendor. “There’s Princess yet,” he rumbled, and Harriette sighed.
“Still visiting the Holophusikon, I gather?”
It was veil for an assignation of some sort or another, she knew. Princess had no interest in natural history, far less the collection of curiosities that Sir Ashton Lever had put on display after purchasing Leicester House, the great edifice that lined the north side of the square. But Princess was a consummate actor, and if a lover wanted to pay the five shillings to gain her entrance to the collection, she wouldn’t decline.
“How long do you suppose we must wait?” Harriette asked. She looked about at the people roaming the square, some of them the fashionable out for a stroll, others of the middling class out to watch the fashionable, and the working class going about their business. This was an opportunity. She withdrew her porte crayon from her pocket and looked about for a convenient place to unfold her stool.
Normally the rhythm of her hand while she sketched brought her mind to calm attention, but today the thoughts ran rampant. The whispers of the ladies in the print shop rattled her. It was one thing to have people who were trying to sell newspapersprint foolish speculations in the gossip paragraphs, but quite another to encounter the ridicule in real life. It appeared the Countess of Renwick wasn’t alone in thinking Harriette unfit for polite company.
Renwick’s—what? Her hand slowed as the obvious occurred to her. It wasn’t Harriette’s artistic choices that had suddenly made herpersona non gratain polite circles. It was the assumption that, to see the Graf in such intimate exposure, she must be his mistress.
Oh, why had she not asked Mrs. Darly to keep her authorship of the sketches of Renwick a secret? That kiss with Ren had addled her head. All she could think about was changing the way people saw him so they perceived what she did, the nobility of his character, his gentle nature and his moral strength, along with the undeniable beauty of his person. She wanted to erase the snickers of contempt from his peers and the looks of horror or pity from the young women who saw him approaching them. She wanted him adored by all, as she adored him.
The new sketches would be as good as declaration that she had lifted her skirts for Ren. They confirmed her as a woman completely lacking in virtue.
Well, shehadn’tany virtue, Harriette thought savagely, smudging an errant line with the side of her hand. She’d made some foolish decisions, tried to be mature and sophisticated before she was ready, and now she had to pay the price. That short-sightedness and being caught up in the moment had made her unfit for the society of those to whom a woman’s virtue meant everything.
It made her unfit to marry someone like Ren.
She flipped the ruined page with enough force to tear it and attacked the fresh sheet with her crayon. What would happen if she pursued an affair with Ren as, foolishly and off her head from the glory of his kisses, she’d more or less promised him?Flushed with a desire she’d never known, filled with nothing but thoughts of when she could touch and taste and hold him again, heady with the triumph of knowing this large, splendid, wonderful man hungered for her, she’d been ready to grant him anything he asked. It wouldn’t hurt him to be known as a man who had sampled Harriette Smythe. But what would it do to her?
The morning sun had given way to a grey fog, but that wasn’t what blocked Harriette’s vision when she looked up. Three strollers stood before her, young men who apparently still subscribed to the Macaroni fashions that had made Mrs. Darly’s reputation, even though the look had fallen out of vogue. Their wigs were at least two feet high, with side curls the size of a man’s arm. Their coats and waistcoats glared with crimson and yellow silk, their loose breeches in a contrasting color, and they sported buttons everywhere a button could fit. The aroma of three different kinds of scented water, overlaying the strong scent of unwashed male bodies, made Harriette’s nose recoil.
“The very likeness of yon demirep,” said the one with the tiny hat atop his wig. He affected a high voice and the drawl that had been adopted by those of the Duchess of Devonshire’s set. The upper of the upper crust, or aspiring to be there, Harriette guessed. “It must be our artist knows well thedemimondaine.”
That set of beautiful, often high-born women known for their sexual accessibility. Harriette’s heart sank. Did all of London now know who she was, or of her reputation, from one appearance last night at Lady Renwick’s soiree?
“Indeed, which is for sale? The portrait or the lady?” drawled a second, taking out one of a number of quizzing glasses attached to his waistcoat. He also carried several fobs and watches, a snuff box, and what appeared to be a spyglass, a waterfall of clinking items decorating his chest. His overlong walking stick stuck out behind him, barely missing hiscompanions’ legs as they clustered before Harriette on her stool. “And which demands the higher price?”
He was suggestingshewas for sale, not the Cyprian in her sketch, the painted lady whom Jock had noted on her rounds about the square. Harriette stiffened, curling her fingers around her crayon. She had a devilish urge to snake out her hand and leave a long dark streak down one of the delicate white stockings cloaking a bloated calf.
