Page 225 of The Ladies Least Likely
“My brother isin love with you.”
Amalie strolled at her side through the Grand Walk of Marylebone Pleasure Gardens. The paths were not crowded, and pleasant music drifted from the orchestra playing on the balcony of the pavilion. The tall, slender trees with their silvery bark and dainty leaves provided shade from the afternoon sun, and delicious aromas drifted from the shaded gallery that housed the dining area. Jock and Beater were here somewhere, having dispersed to their own amusements after Renwick’s servants let them down in the High Street of what had once been sleepy Marylebone village and was fast becoming an outpost of the great thrumming sprawl that was London. The gravel paths and trimmed trees, an island of repose in the bustling city, seemed outlined in gold, now that Harriette was looking upon her favorite retreats for what might be the last time.
Harriette glanced behind them to where Ren was surrounded by a horde of female admirers. He couldn’t walk a step without being detained by some overly friendly matron towing a demure, giggling girl or two in her wake. The ladies blushed and wafted fans before bright eyes and pinkened cheeks, looking up and down Ren’s form as if they knew what he looked like beneath his saffron silk frock coat and waistcoat with its crimson checks. And they did, thanks to Harriette and Mrs. Darly.
“Your brother and I were good friends the summer he lived in Shepton Mallet. He is kind to me based on that past affection, I think. Proven in that he has agreed to pay me an exorbitant commission for a painting I’ve not yet finished.”
“It is more than that,” Amalie insisted. “He is besotted with you. Over the moon.”
“Hmmm,” Harriette said. As she watched, Bess Hervey, who had looked upon Ren with horror in the formal drawing room of Renwick House, tapped him on the arm with her fan and laughed becomingly. She was an uncommonly handsome woman, drat her sparkling eyes. Meanwhile Charlotte Stanhope, coming up at Ren’s rear with her friends in train, ogled his backside with an unmaidenly leer. Her interested gaze roamed down his brown breeches to the riding boots which made him look casually uncaring of fashion and thus all the more fashionable.
Those girls would recoil if they knew the scars and the suffering that lay beneath Ren’s white clocked stockings and his cunningly crafted boots. Harriette felt a hitch in her stomach. He might marry a woman who would close her eyes when he came to the marital bed, lying still and passive while he went about his business of breeding her, shutting out the sight of his beautiful face inflamed with passion, his eyes that vivid and enthralling blue. He might give himself to a woman who would never strip him down and kiss and taste every inch of him, as Harriette would do, given half the chance.
As all those courtesans on his Grand Tour had done, no doubt. Reports had come back of the extraordinary satisfaction the Earl of Renwick left in his lovers. One famous Neapolitan courtesan had refused a French prince after Ren had left her. He was a man with a man’s appetites and the skill to melt a woman into pudding, as she had found. Oh, yes, she envied his eventual wife. She hoped he chose someone worthy of him.
“A man may—admire a woman he has no intention of marrying,” Harriette said finally. “In fact men are capable of—admiring women they feel very little affection for whatsoever.” She knew she ought to guard her speech around Amalie, a clear innocent. She was not among the experienced, forthright women of her aunt’s household.
Amalie’s delicate brow wrinkled. “I do not think my brother is one of those.”
“And neither should any of your suitors be,” Harriette said. “You must insist that any man who pays court to you honor you with intentions of marriage. Don’t give a moment of your time to a man who does not cherish you as you deserve.” She turned away from the sight of the cluster of curious, flirtatious women growing around Ren.
“Me, with suitors. When pigs fly. I don’t see why you won’t give George a chance to court you,” Amalie went on stubbornly.
“He cannot marry one such as I,” Harriette said. The very thought gave her a strange, hollow ache in the center of her chest. For a dizzying moment, she imagined herself married to him. Stepping out to parties and balls as the Countess of Renwick. Holding teas for the wives of his political colleagues and funding causes dear to their hearts. Having the gossip paragraphs pore over her every move and hold her flaws to Ren’s account rather than her aunt’s. Watching her time to paint disappear before household duties, social calls, the demands of eventual children.
As his wife she would have the right to his bed and his attention, possession of that beautiful body she had traced with her crayon onto paper. But she had watched the British nobility from the fringes long enough to know how closely guarded, how treacherous those circles were. She would bring Ren nothing but amusing companionship and passionate bedsport, when a properly trained and well-bred wife could bring him so much more.
“Besides, you forget I am notorious. I don’t wish to meddle or come in the way between him and the girl he chooses to marry. I—I want him to be free to give his full affection to his wife,” Harriette said, and tried her best not to sound miserable aboutit. There was little point adding that Amalie might come to be tainted by her brush as well.
“And then there is Franz Karl.” Harriette sighed. “My intended.”
Her eyes flitted back to Ren and the coterie of females cooing and bustling about him, using their fans, lashes, and bosoms to capture his attention. He looked dazed and a tad alarmed, not delighted by the attention, as a man ought. Harriette tamped down the urge to rescue him. She had wanted this for him—orchestrated it, actually, with those blasted prints.
“He wrote, you know.”
Harriette watched as a plump, curvy blonde sidled close to Ren and gazed rapturously into his face. Her bosom was not as fine as Harriette’s, but she made certain Ren had a full view of it.
“Wrote who?” Harriette muttered.
“You. George wrote you piles of letters. I found them in the desk in his study when I was looking for Elizabeth Griffith’s volume on Shakespeare’s plays, which he bought for me.”
Harriette dwelled a moment on the lovely, wistful image of Ren and his sister sitting cozily in the morning room at Renwick House, reading to each other. “He never wrote me letters.” She turned quizzical eyes on her companion. “My mother would have prevented me from seeing them, but she would have told me letters were being withheld.”
“He neversentthem,” Amalie said. “But he wrote them. Weekly, if not monthly, up until the time he left for his tour of the Continent. And there is a whole journal of entries addressed to you, which I assumed…” Amalie wore a puzzled expression. “He’s never shared this with you?”
The sun was suddenly very hot, falling through the canopy of trees onto the thick embroidered silk of her open robe and tight stomacher. “Ren wrote to me?”
Amalie’s eyes widened, the blue slightly wider than the brown. “Proof that he loves you,” she whispered.
“Proof of—” Harriette caught herself and looked back at Ren. What, indeed, did it mean? She’d written him heaps of letters, too, but knowing that receiving letters from a girl would make him a subject of ridicule among his classmates, she’d hidden most of them away, reused the paper for sketches, or burned the ones in which her thoughts were too frankly confessed.
She’d written him letters because he was her first and for a time her only friend. When she went to school at Miss Gregoire’s and a new world opened up to her, one with girls of her own age and ambitions, she’d wanted to tell Ren all about it. Writing to Ren sorted her thoughts and made her feel close to him, even if he were leagues away, in distant countries she’d never visit.
But the knowledge that he’d written to her as well, letters that had never reached her—she burned to know their contents, and yet she was afraid at the same time. What had he said in them that he decided not to let her see?
A secret cache of letters—whether they were affectionate or not—put the trail of satisfied courtesans in a different light. It meant Harriette wasn’t one of their sighing numbers. It meant she was something else.
“Ahem.LadyHarriette,” came a fawning voice. “What an unrivaled pleasure to find you here. In the pleasure gardens. Indeed, a meeting most apt, if not fated.”
