Page 58 of Lady Daring
“Ticket!” he snapped. “Ev’run has to have a ticket, e’en the doxies!” His scowl lifted into surprise. “Aye, is it you, Miss Wardley-Hines? Go on in, then.” He blinked as he regarded her outfit. “Di’n recognize you in that rig, I grant you! Apologies! Go on in, now, they’re waitin’ for ye, miss.” He shook his head, and Henrietta heard him mutter as she passed. “Looks like a Frenchie, to wit. Aye, now! Ticket from you, if you please.”
“You needn’t stay,” she told her footmen. “In fact you might quite prefer going next door for a pint.”
“We’re stayin’, Miss Hetty,” John said. “You’ll need a cool head about ye, from the looks o’ this crowd.”
“A pint sounds—” Peter began, and then started as if he’d been elbowed or kicked. He glared at his superior. “Aye, we’ll be ’ere. And pints later, then.”
The Tavern staff had arranged the Pillar Room to resemble the House of Commons, with benches lining the sides of the room beneath the Corinthian columns that gave the room its name. In the center stood a small raised platform with a lectern in the middle for the speaker, and on each side sat a table lined with chairs. A spectator’s gallery occupied both ends of the room, the benches placed closely together, and these werealready spilling over with people. Henrietta felt faint as she looked at the crush.
This was the largest meeting the Minerva Society had ever hosted. She saw several faces she recognized from the Bicclesfield ball crowding the spectator’s gallery. So Aunt Althea was right, and a good number of people had come for a peek at the bluestocking abolitionist who had routed Lord Daring. The eccentric reformer with the mouthful of a name, the girl with the wealth of her father’s northern mills behind her. Drawing people to her debate had merely increased the number of gawkers ready to laugh at her freaks.
“Good heavens, Hetty, you look like Marie Antoinette! I adore the look on you. This is quite a change.” Lady Bessington took her hands as Henrietta reached the dais and examined her from head to toe. “Marvelous,” she said with a delighted laugh. “You look very innocent, sweet and uncomplicated. How clever.”
Henrietta hoped that Pinochle’s taunt about bringing down Lady Bess was no more than bluster. Lady Bessington was as immune to scandal as any woman could be. Her husband held one of the oldest earldoms in Scotland and a seat in the British House of Lords. Her family tree branched from royal stock. All four of her sons held positions of influence, and her daughters had married into high families across Europe. If her debate were a disaster, Henrietta would need Lady Bess for any last chance to join the Daughters of Minerva and honor her mother’s memory.
She turned to the lectern and tripped when she saw the men seated at the small table on the pro side of the room. One of them had his striking visage plastered regularly across the London newspapers, not to mention the several editions of his book.
“Bess.” She gasped. “Did you know Mr. Oulidah Equiano is here?”
“I invited him, dear,” Lady Bess answered, amused. “You do recall he signed our petition. Shall I introduce you?”
“Not now,” Henrietta said. “I might have the vapors. Introduce me after, when I have my wits about me. Where did all these people come from?”
Lady Bess’s eyes lit with the joy of battle. “The Corresponding Society sent a phalanx after they saw our advert in the paper. I suspect many other debate clubs came as well. They’ve been lying low, with Prime Minister Pitt so nervous after the burning breeches, but I shouldn’t wonder if they’re rousing for a fight. It’s going to be quite an event, my dear, and you stirred the pot!”
“I don’t wish to provoke a fight,” Henrietta said. “I intend for us to have a polite, civil discussion about Miss Wollstonecraft’s ideas.”
“Well, you didn’t mention Miss Wollstonecraft in the advert, which would have scared away a good number of those present,” Bess said. “You said we would debate the responsibilities that men in power have toward their dependents, and that, my dear, smacks of French revolutionary sentiment.”
Bess beamed as she surveyed their table of supporters. “You recognize who is seated next to Mr. Equiano, I hope? That’s Charles James Fox, the firebrand, and next to him is Thomas Hardy, the shoemaker, the one who started the Corresponding Society. If we let either of them speak, there’s bound to be a riot.”
Her expression said she relished the prospect. “And just think what the papers will have to say about it tomorrow! We will have exposure for the Society and our aims, that much is for certain, and with all the attention, I can’t but think you will be made a votary. Now go, dear, prepare yourself. Our fate is in your hands!”
Dragging her silk slippers, Henrietta approached the lectern and spread out her notes. Mr. Equiano winked as she glanced at his table, and she bit her lip in a smile. He was recently married, and she wondered about the type of woman who had the confidence to win and keep a man so known and muchdiscussed, a man who could never go unnoticed, a man whom so many adored.
That brought her thoughts to Darien, and she would not think of Darien tonight. She would think of something calming—the garden at Hines House, the neat walk boxed with flowering herbs and colorful borders, the vegetables tangling around their stakes. Darien had kissed her in that garden, his mouth firm and masterful, cool and deliberate.
The kiss in his study had not been quite so calculated; she had felt something warm and urgent in him, something confusing and yet rousing as well. Oh, why was she thinking of Darien Bales when she must compose her thoughts and her speech?
She put herself back at Miss Gregoire’s, in the small gazebo near a landscaped stream where she had spent hours curled up with her friends and a favorite book, dangling her feet in the water from the small ornamental bridge and feeding last week’s bread to the swans. The patter of her heart slowed and eased. That gazebo at Miss Gregoire’s was the one place on Earth where nothing was expected of her, nothing held in judgment, and nothing denied.
Though it was also the place where, as the end of every term drew near, she waited for a letter from her father admitting the house was bare and empty, that he needed her to come home and set all in order. That summons never came.
When Henrietta had at last been brought home, it was to be aid and support to Lady Mama. She’d been useful, finally; Lady Mama was ridiculously easy to please, everything Henrietta did charmed and delighted her. But she wasn’t really needed. When she left to set up a household of her own, Lady Mama would express dismay at her loss but would not keep her from going.
She watched the crowd assemble with a growing sense of apprehension. Surely they could see through the fashionablegown to that lonely, grieving girl still inside her somewhere, the girl who had arrived at Miss Gregoire’s orphaned, timid, and anxious to please. The men arraying themselves on the anti side, plump and self-important, with their equally plump and self-important daughters and wives behind them, had at the ready their biblical bromides and centuries-old convention to brandish as a club, beating her back into her place.
But she was not that hurt, unwanted girl any longer. She owned an estate and would soon own a mill of her own, where she would be needed, where she could set about proving that profits and industry did not have to cost human lives. She was a benefactor for five different institutions in Lancashire, Derbyshire, and London. She was not her mother, scorned for giving herself to a self-made man. She was not her stepmother, bargained away to repair the Warrefield fortunes.
She could be useful as part of the Minerva Society, upholding the truths that women like Miss Wollstonecraft were brave enough to make known. She could speak for every girl at Miss Gregoire’s who had a keen mind and a sense of purpose, who knew she would have to fight to use her talents in this man-made world.
She drew a deep breath and glanced at Mr. Equiano. He had suffered far worse—physical affliction, hardship, and ill treatment from people who believed his race was not fully human. The same people who believed women could not be as strong or as intelligent or worth as much as men. It would always be a struggle to wring justice from the hands of those who had bent the world to suit themselves. But that did not mean they must not try.
“The ladies of the Minerva Society would like to thank you all for your presence this evening.” Lady Bessington called the meeting to order with her clear, carrying voice. She stood like the figurehead of a ship on the dais, every line of her largerthan life. “We are honored to have with us tonight so many distinguished guests.” She gestured to the table of men on Henrietta’s left, drawing all eyes. There were murmurs and some hisses. The fourth man was William Wilberforce, the MP from Hull who had put forward the bill in the House of Commons calling for abolition, and the fifth was William Godwin, a radical philosopher and ardent admirer of Miss Wollstonecraft.
Henrietta felt dizzy. The debates of the women’s societies rarely drew attention. She had expected a sparse group of subscribers, their husbands and sons, and a few interested parties drawn by the advert she had dared to place despite the King’s current feeling about debate societies. This burly, boisterous crowd from all walks of life was so far beyond her expectation that it almost seemed a dream.
Lady Bessington went on to briefly describe the Minerva Society, its history, its goals and aims, outlining some of its causes. Then she turned to Henrietta.
