Page 64 of The Courtship Trap
Thin as a lobster I am grown,
Till scarce I by my friends am known;
I fix upon St. Valentine
To reveal this flame of mine.
The New Ladies’ Valentine Writer (1821)
Richard took a seat, his fingers twitching toward his cravat as he loosened it slightly, an old nervous habit Sebastian recognized well. He cleared his throat, casting a sidelong glance at Sophia before exhaling heavily.
“Some months ago …” he began, but Sophia lifted a hand, her serene features sharpening with quiet command.
“Lady Slight’s mistakes are her own to reveal,” she said, her voice cool but firm. “We will not discuss the specifics of what prompted her to seek you out.”
Richard pressed his lips together, giving his wife a wry look. “Yes, well. Quite right.” He turned back to Sebastian, squaring his shoulders. “What I can tell you is that Lady Slight approached me, asking for my help. She wished to”—he paused, searching for the right words—“become a better person.”
Sebastian arched a brow, arms still crossed over his broad chest, unconvinced.
Richard sighed, running a hand through his hair. “She wanted guidance. To make amends, she said. To change her course.”
The manner in which Richard said it—equal parts disbelief and rueful acknowledgment—had Sebastian narrowing his gaze.
“Go on,” he said.
Richard huffed a short laugh. “At the time, I thought it absurd. Me? Mentoring someone on the path of virtue? You cannot tell me you do not see the irony.” He gestured broadly to himself, a man who had spent his youth as one of the most notorious rakes in London. “I was hardly the model of good behavior.”
Sebastian did not disagree.
Richard pulled a face, as if still baffled by the notion, and waved a hand. “I told her no, of course. Who was I to lead anyone toward redemption when I was still figuring it out for myself?”
“But then he told me,” Sophia interjected smoothly, her voice mild but unwavering. She folded her hands in her lap, her blue eyes steady on Sebastian’s. “And I reminded him that if he had chosen a different path for himself, he was in no position to turn someone away when they wished to follow his example.”
Richard huffed, shaking his head. “Yes, well. She was annoyingly correct, as usual.”
Sophia smiled faintly, but said nothing.
“So,” Richard continued, leveling Sebastian with a look, “I wrote to Lady Slight. And I agreed to help.”
Sebastian’s jaw clenched. His mind whirled with this new revelation, trying to make sense of it against everything he had believed about Harriet. Had she truly wanted to change? Had the woman who had deceived him so thoroughly also spent months seeking salvation?
It did not erase what she had done.
But it complicated everything.
Richard exhaled, rubbing a hand over his jaw before meeting Sebastian’s gaze. “Her situation was … more troublesome than my own,” he admitted. “The things she wished to atone for were not straightforward. In my case, if I wronged a woman and it resulted in worsened circumstances, I simply made arrangements to improve those circumstances. It just took some ingenuity and some blunt.”
Sebastian’s brow furrowed. “And for Harriet?”
Richard spread his hands. “She is a woman,” he said simply. “She cannot merely send a man some money to repair a situation. She cannot use her title, position, or influence in the same way a man might. And, besides that, the men involved in her past did not need anything from her. Each had profitable, successful lives.”
Sebastian flinched at the implication, his mind immediately going to who those seven or eight men had been that Harriet had confessed to. He clenched his jaw, saying nothing.
“So eventually,” Richard went on, “we settled on another approach. If she could not make direct amends, she could at least use what resources she did possess to help others, to ease her conscience. Not necessarily those she had wronged, but perhaps the more vulnerable who had been wronged by others. The forgotten.” His voice dropped slightly. “Perhaps women, considering she learned her glib ways from her father. And women were the ones he had wronged most.”
Harriet inhaled sharply,trying to steady her voice. “I just need some time to myself,” she said, forcing the words out past the lump rising in her throat.
But to her dismay, the tears began to fall again. She pressed a trembling hand to her lips, ashamed of her own weakness. What a fool she was—foolish to have thought she could change her fate, foolish to have hoped for a future that had never been hers to claim.
