Page 231 of The Ladies Least Likely
“Can you conceive what the squire and his ilk would say to that?” Ren replied. His face darkened, his voice taking on a hard edge. “The mill owners will be able to make more cloth and sell more cloth, while paying fewer workers. In the meantime, between the Corn Laws and the Poor Laws and the game laws that keep them from poaching to put meat on the table, the common folk can barely afford to feed and clothe their families. I saw the same system all over Europe, and it’s untenable. Such great wealth for so few, earned from the suffering of so many.”
Harriette laid her spoon beside her plate. “Very few of those enjoying the great wealth are able to see that,” she said carefully. “Or feel much for the sufferers.”
She was aware of her own good fortune in that she had never known real destitution. Much as Mrs. Demant might havebegrudged the effort, there was always food on Harriette’s plate and some castoff clothes to wear. When she began school at Miss Gregoire’s, with her fees and a small allowance paid for by her aunt, Harriette had learned to be thrifty, but had never known real fear that she would not be provided for.
And in London, though she came often in contact with women thrown upon the streets by vagaries of fate or cruelty, her aunt’s house was a refuge where there was always the surety that, if they worked together, there would be enough for all. Still, when she tried to imagine the fear and worry of a family that struggled to stretch their pay to cover lodging, food, clothing, and other necessities, it was not so great an act of imagination.
Ren looked into his cup of wine, swirling the liquid. “Perhaps it’s because I have spent my life feeling undeserving of the position I was born to,” he said. “Of looking as an outsider on something I shall never have. But my sympathies are with the workers.”
Unaccountably, his words squeezed her heart all the harder. Her chest ached.This man.She wanted to ask what he looked on that he longed to have for himself. Security? Admiration? A warm family? Love?
She would give him all those things, if she could.
“What kind of unrest?” she asked instead, to keep her mind from straying into paths that could only prove unfruitful.
“Protests, most like.” The innkeeper’s wife made no pretense that she had not caught their conversation as she entered the small parlor with a covered dish. She set it on the wooden table beside Ren and tucked the cloth she’d been using to carry the dish into her apron, then went to the fireplace and picked a spill from the cup on the mantelpiece. She lit it from the small fire keeping away the evening damps and came back to the table.
“Shepton Mallet’s always been a tinder box,” she went on, lighting the candles in their brushed silver holders, no doubtthe finest The George and Dragon had on offer. “There be riots there regular, back in the day, and don’t forget how quick they a-went for Monmouth. We be prideful, we West Country folk,” she added.
“Will there be violence, do you think?” Harriette asked. She had no qualms about their hostess entering into their conversation. In the Countess of Calenberg’s unusual household, the women took turns contributing to housekeeping tasks—witness how Sorcha had taken over the cookery and marketing—and Abassi, though nominally their butler, was confidant, friend, and, Harriette suspected, her aunt’s lover.
She was more concerned with how unrest in the town might upset her mother’s fragile health. If her mother were ill, Franz Karl could not in conscience hie them back to Prussia directly, which she accounted a small providence.
But if her mother lingered, Harriette would be trapped in Shepton Mallet with a fretful parent and a grudging Mrs. Demant, and Ren could not stay and be her white knight indefinitely. He had other properties and business that needed his attention, not to mention his sister. Harriette hoped her new makeup would stop the progression of Amalie’s lead colic and give the girl reprieve from her symptoms, and in time, return her to health. But how was she to hear reports if she was buried in the country, or carried far out of it?
“I shall protect you, Rhette.” Ren’s gaze filled with a dark, steady heat as he stared across the table at her. Candlelight flickered and threw shadows across his sculpted face. A tightness coiled in her belly, pulling at her insides.
The conversation moved on to other reports of unrest across the land in response to the installation of new machinery that upset the age-old way of doing things and the industries that had been livelihood to so many. Ren was informed and level-headed, and while he understood the motives of the business owners,he was surprisingly sympathetic to the poor and displaced, a sympathy she shared. What a wonderful contribution he would make to the House of Lords, Harriette thought, if only he had the courage to make his voice heard and would not let his difficulties with speech silence him. She wished she could be there as his aide and support and champion.
Now there was a surprising thought. She’d certainly never before imagined herself as a prop and aide to a man, just as she’d never noticed, much less attended to small domestic details like inspecting the linens. She still didn’t see herself as capable of bearing and raising a child; such territory was more foreign and terrifying to her than Prussia.
She also did not see herself as someone who would betray a promise made by her family, by the mother who had raised her and the grandfather who had let his daughter and heir leave the country for their safety.
But the longer she was with Ren, traveling with him, dining with him, falling into the deep inviting abyss of his eyes, the more distant Harriette grew from all the things she had always felt to be true about herself. She was changing, becoming someone she didn’t recognize. She was already a woman who had flouted the most basic moral conventions of her class, taking lovers before she was married, consorting with courtesans, living in a household considered on the barest fringes of respectability. She had already determined to make her way and her name in a trade, which was utterly frowned upon for women of any sort of gentle birth.
And now she was entertaining notions of throwing herself at a man she could not have, a man whom she had promised herself she would hand, whole and unsullied, into marriage with a girl of birth and breeding who would make him a proper countess and an agreeable wife. She had notions of violating the honor of her family and the promise her grandfather had made about hermarriage. She had a mind to forget every rule she was supposed to obey and toss it all into the gathering maelstrom of feeling. For if she could not be near Ren, she was going to lose part of herself.
She wanted to be with him, like this, for as long as possible. She wanted, with a greedy passion that threatened to consume her, to know him utterly, completely, and in the most intimate ways. She wanted to throw herself into this delicious, delirious pull of attraction that dangerously blotted out all the guidelines and compass points by which she had plotted her life.
But she also suspected that if she surrendered to this passion, she would lose herself completely, and what would happen to her then?
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Harriette stared at the door of Ivy Cottage and the black wreath that hung upon it.
There was no mistaking what it meant. Smaller wreaths of black ribbons hung in the tall windows flanking the painted door. Death had visited the Demant household.
She hesitated with her hand raised to knock. Who had passed? Mr. Demant? The missus? Mrs. Demant had been her mother’s chief protector and champion. Would Mr. Demant let Harriette’s mother stay in his household without his wife? Who was attending her mother in her illness? It was fortunate that Harriette was here.
“Rhette,” Ren said softly. He stood beside her on the stoop, leaning on his cane.
“It must be recent,” she whispered to him. “Mrs. Demant made no mention of other illness when she sent the express about my mother. I hope it was not one of the children.” How ironic that her mother, who pretended to be ailing to garner attention and solicitude, should malinger, while the healthy and businesslike Mr. Demant, his brisk and terrifyingly capable wife, or one of their spoiled, headstrong children should be suddenly whisked from their mortal coil.
“Rhette,” he said again, “I think you n-need to c-c-consider…”
He trailed off as he did when emotion choked his tongue, but this time she didn’t wait to let him gather his thought. She raised the knocker and let it fall.
Mrs. Demant answered the door. Her face was gaunt and drawn, her expression defeated. Her black crepe dress and veil indicated deepest mourning. Despite the evidence of woe, her face burned with bitterness as she glared at Harriette.
