Page 54 of Lady Daring
This proved a prediction true beyond even Lady Clarinda’s fondest hopes. Gossip shot through the ballroom with the speed of flame. The infamous Lord Daring had assayed the virtue of Miss Henrietta Wardley-Hines, and the knight’s daughter routed him, boot and bayonet, sending the villain to heel with a long list of his faults in hand.
Matrons with tender daughters thronged her for advice. Young tulips who competed for the fashionable debutantes saw a girl not easily won and wanted her at once. Everyone who had interested themselves in gossip over the scandalous Lord Daring wanted an introduction to the girl who had vanquished him.
Miss Henrietta Wardley-Hines, knight’s daughter, was the undeniable toast of the Bicclesfield ball.
She danced every dance, laughed at every compliment and flirtation, and drank every glass of champagne that interested suitors brought her. But the champagne was as bitter as used tea leaves, and the sweets turned to dust in her mouth. She saw no further sign of Forsythia Pennyroyal, though she wanted to talk to the girl.
Lord Pinochle, however, watched her closely, and when partners changed during a country dance, she could not avoidtouching her hand to his clammy one without risking notice. She was glad for her kid gloves.
“I see you are becoming much talked about, Miss Wardley-Hines,” Pinochle said with an unctuous smile. “But I thought your cause was to tear unwitting girls from their safe homes, rather than reform known rakehells.”
“Safe homes?” Henrietta nearly spat on the highly polished floor. “Do you not rather mean a home where her goodwill was taken advantage of, her virtue destroyed, her character shamed in being forced to submit to attentions she did not welcome? I call it fortunate if a girl might escape those circumstances.”
His answer was a savage sneer. “You had best watch your step, girl. You will not be sheltered for always beneath the wing of your Lady Bess. You’re treading on dangerous ground with your meddling, and taking up with Daring too.”
A chill slithered down Henrietta’s spine. She looked to the end of the line of dancers where, mercifully, their promenade would end so she could return to her partner, Mr. Lionel Havering, who had promised to sign the Minerva Society’s petition calling for the full abolition of slavery.
“I am leading a debate for the Minerva Society in a few days, milord, on a topic that might interest you. What is owed to dependents when their protectors prove unworthy.” She gave him the barest curtsy, as the dance dictated, and was astonished at her own audacity. This gown was making her bold. “Perhaps you might attend.”
“I rather think I shall.” Pinochle glared as he rose from his bow. “But I do not think I will support your theme.”
That taunt troubled Henrietta as she jostled home with Clarinda and Althea gushing about her success and about the invitations she was sure to receive. But once Duprix had peeled the silk robe off her and she fell into bed, sore from head to foot,the deeper hurt she had tried to push away surfaced into the quiet dark.
She had not repulsed the rake. She had craved his look of approval, reveled in it. She had clung to his arm with all the shallow pride Miss Wollstonecraft condemned, knowing the entire ballroom saw that Lord Darien Bales chose to dance with her, Henrietta Wardley-Hines, tradesman’s daughter.
When he lifted her against his body, she had reveled in the shameless desire that flooded her, in understanding, at last, what drove young women to lose their heads over a man. It was powerful. Intoxicating. Even now, the memory of that contact thrilled along every nerve, rousing her body with a nearly painful awareness.
She was not immune. Not to his potent allure, and not to the look of bewildered shock and horror on his face when she spoke of the wars in Mysore. The hollow grief that had entered his eyes made her heart crack open.
It served her right to have her vanity thwarted, to know she, in her new gown, held no appeal for a seasoned seducer. A Henrietta Wardley-Hines did not have what it took to fascinate a man the likes of Lord Darien Bales.
But to lose the slim thread that had begun to develop between them, among their confidences, their adventures, their racketing about town together—that loss she regretted deeply. It went far deeper than the blow to her feminine pride. He was a man she wanted to know more of, and she had cut off any possibility for trust, for friendship, for any deeper connection, with one fell and terrible confession.
If Henrietta’s pillow and the ostrich feather beneath it grew damp with tears in the smallest hours of the night, no one save Henrietta, the pillow, and the feather knew.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
In the thin gray light before dawn, the chambermaid stole into Henrietta’s room with a summons.
“James said to fetch ye, miss. The babe’s arrived,” she whispered.
“Lady Mama?” Henrietta tossed the covers aside.
“Nay, miss, it’s a good two months to ’er time yet, an ’er ladyship’s in ’er bed. Whose babe does ’e mean, then?”
“My German habit, Hazel, and a fresh chemise. I must go, quickly.”
“That duke’s mort and ’er by-blow,” James reported when Henrietta arrived in the kitchen. He crouched near the door to the scullery, glaring at the cook, who glared back, her wooden spoon raised in warning. “I ’ad a lad keepin’ his peepers on the place. The midwife left in the wee hours, a babe with her.”
Henrietta’s sleepiness fell away in a rush. “Where did she go?”
“Owm I to know?” James demanded.
Henrietta’s heart rose in her throat as she steered her phaeton through the waking streets, around carts, wagons, carters hauling refuse, and housemaids throwing night soil intothe street. Celeste had birthed her baby and sent it away. But where?
At Highcastle House, James slipped into the mews, winning the argument that the daughter of Sir Jasper Wardley-Hines could not be seen at the servant’s door. Henrietta muttered to herself as she trotted her chestnuts around Portman Square. As the daughter of a tradesman, she had free range of the Rossendale Fells along with the family villa at Salford, and she and the girls of Miss Gregoire’s ran tame through Bath.
But as the daughter of a knight, she exchanged status for freedom. Any gossip about her would go straight to the ears of Aunt Althea and the Daughters of Minerva. Only the highest-born could behave with utter disregard for propriety, and sooner or later, even they achieved censure—the Duchess of Devonshire and Lady Celeste herself were proof of that.
