Regency Rumour: Never Trust a Rake / Reforming the Viscount

How dare she? He was a good marriage prospect. Any other woman would be thrilled, not look as though she’d just inadvertently trodden in something unpleasant.

But instead of turning on his heel, and putting her out of his mind, the thought that was uppermost in Lord Deben’s mind was a burning desire to force her to recant.

‘Me?’ Goodness, but he looked cross. He was probably regretting talking to her so freely now and coming to stand in this rather private little recess. Oh dear, but she hoped he did not now suspect she was trying to entrap him, too. She had better put him straight, at once.

‘No! I mean, I had not thought about it at all. And I wouldn’t.’

She could not believe that women would actually try to entrap a man who’d rather shoot himself in the leg than settle down to marital fidelity. Were they mad? Although perhaps they didn’t know as much about him as she did.

‘Why? Because you consider me an irredeemable rake?’

Well, he was one. She knew that now. The bucks who’d swarmed into her aunt’s house had been incredibly indiscreet, letting slip all sorts of unsavoury facts about him. She hadn’t been able to believe how coarse their conversation had been. It demonstrated not only a lowness of mind, but also an insulting disregard for her sensibilities. They were so keen to discuss the latest exploits of the Devilish Lord Deben, that they’d reminded her of a pack of baying hounds, chasing down a poor unfortunate hare.

It had been years, they’d revealed, since he’d kept a mistress in the conventional sense. Since they’d seen him take one of them driving in the park. They’d been slavering to guess what this queer start of his might mean. Was he changing his tactics once more? For, after he’d severed connections to the last of his high flyers, he’d methodically worked his way through the willing married ladies of the ton. When he’d sampled all the most beautiful, he’d cut a swathe through the wanton widows. Had he now decided to pursue unmarried girls of questionable birth for sport? After all, everyone knew how easily he grew bored, once he’d made a conquest. His affaires, apparently, never lasted very long.

Yes, they concluded, he would have far more sport attempting to seduce respectable virgins. He must be looking for a challenge to pique his jaded appetite. A virgin was bound to attempt to hang on to her virtue for as long as possible.

Only the fat young lord had voiced a protest, so blackened was Lord Deben’s reputation. And then only to point out that if it were the case, surely he would at least start on a pretty girl.

Her cheeks heated, half with chagrin at not being thought pretty enough to warrant seduction, and half with guilt at knowing far too much about the man who stood so close to her. She ought not to know such things about him. Or about any man.

‘I beg your pardon. It is not my business to comment upon your behaviour. I … I think I had better return to my aunt,’ she said, lowering her eyes.

‘Yes, run back to the safety of a crowded room,’ he sneered. ‘You do not want your spotless reputation sullied by loitering too long in my presence.’

She glanced up at him in confusion. For a few moments she had felt as though she could say anything to him and he would understand. It had been an age since she had just been able to talk freely like this. Not since she’d left the all-male household in Much Wakering. Her aunt and Mildred set such store by only discussing acceptable topics that it had felt wonderful to let down her guard and just say whatever came into her head.

But of course he wasn’t one of her brothers. Or a man she had known all her life. He was practically a stranger.

‘You are correct, of course,’ she said woodenly. The one thing she did know about him was that he was a rake. No, make that two things. He was a rake and an earl. And she was a nobody. ‘A woman’s reputation is a fragile thing.’

‘Which you believe I am quite capable of casually destroying.’

‘No!’ Very well, she knew three things about him. The nonsense those bucks had spouted was so very far from the truth it was laughable. He had no intention of seducing her. His reasons for taking her out for a drive were completely honourable.

No, she corrected herself. She could not claim that anything Lord Deben did would be completely honourable, not in the way she meant it. He’d tempted her to take a course that she considered most dishonourable. But he had not suggested it to make sport of her, or ruin her. In his own way, he had extended the hand of friendship to her.

‘Not on purpose, anyway. I am quite sure that I have nothing to fear from you.’ He did not pursue innocent girls. ‘But don’t forget, I have already been subjected to a deluge of unpleasant gossip just because you singled me out for attention the once.’

She looked up at him again and what he saw in her eyes struck him like a blow over the heart.

Not on purpose, she had said, and she had meant it.

She trusted him.

And if she felt it was wiser to keep away from him, she did so with regret. It was all there in those eyes that were as transparent as the sky on a cloudless day.

‘I could put a stop to all the unpleasant gossip,’ he said, ‘by allowing it to be known that I do intend to make you my wife. And then, if I appear to pursue you, they will be falling over themselves to become your friends.’

Even as he uttered the words, it occurred to him that he could do worse than really marry Miss Gibson. At least she would not bore him. He would not wish to limit his intercourse with her to the bedroom. She would be a charming companion. The prospect of marrying her was so very appealing that when she laughed it was all he could do not to flinch.

‘Oh, heavens. You cannot really think that anyone would believe I am the kind of girl who would really tempt a man of your … well …’ She felt herself blushing as she thought of some of the remarks the yahoos had made about his love life. ‘Your … experience, shall we say? If you ever do decide to marry, they will expect you to pick someone … exceptional. She will be beautiful, at the very least. Probably wealthy, too, and with far better connections than mine.’

A wonderful feeling came over him as he saw that he had absolutely no need to make her recant. It was her own powers of attraction she was calling into question, not the entire concept of marrying him.

With any other woman, he would have wondered if she was fishing for compliments. But Miss Gibson was honest. Brutally honest, at times. So he could just take her remark at face value.

God, what a novel experience that was!

Another thing she had said he could take at face value … what was it she’d said, earlier? She had never considered the thought of marrying him. She really had not. There had been no speculative gleam in her eye when he’d taken her out driving. There was no coquettishness about her now. No, Miss Gibson was treating him as though he was her friend.

‘Come, now. In the spirit of our friendship, what say you we have a little fun at the expense of all those yahoos,’ he said, ruthlessly using her own terminology to bring her round to his way of thinking. She was not ready to think of him in terms of marriage. But he could soon change her mind, had he unlimited access to her. There had never yet been a woman he could not bring to eat out of his hand.

‘I have already told you that you are eminently marriageable. And now that my godmother has made your connections known, people will be ready to believe in our courtship. Next to scandal, it is the one thing people love to think they can see brewing.’

She shook her head. ‘I have already told you, I have no interest in playing such games. Though,’ she admitted, ‘I am flattered that you think I could figure as the kind of woman you might lose your heart to.’

‘Are you?’

‘Yes,’ she admitted with a delightful blush. And then ruined it all by adding, ‘Because even an ignorant girl from the country like me can see what a coup it would be, socially, to get an offer from a man of your rank and wealth.’

A coup. Socially. Had ever a man been so neatly put in his place?

And there was he thinking she’d actually started to like him.

His disappointment was out of all proportion to the slap she’d administered, particularly since she’d not done it deliberately.

‘Then you had better,’ he said coldly, ‘return to your aunt, had you not, Miss Gibson?’

He watched her scurry away, like a mouse relieved to have escaped the paws of the kitchen cat. And he pretended the same indifference as would the kitchen cat, balked of its legitimate prey.

But behind his lazily hooded eyes his mind was racing. There had to be some way of making her change her mind about marrying him. He just had to discover what that might be. He would have to observe her closely, surreptitiously if need be. Until, like a hunter stalking its prey, he would find the optimum moment to pounce.

And take her.

Chapter Six

‘Miss Gibson!’

Henrietta faltered to a stop at the malice evident in the speaker’s tone, turned, and saw Miss Waverley emerge from the doorway from where she must have been watching her tête-à-tête with Lord Deben.

‘I might have known you would seize this opportunity to corner Lord Deben and thrust yourself upon his notice yet again.’

‘It was rather the opposite,’ retorted Henrietta, recalling how Lord Deben had accosted her on her way to the refreshment room.

‘You would say that, you brazen hussy,’ hissed Miss Waverley, bearing down upon her. ‘I know what you are about. But it won’t work.’ She raked Henrietta with a contemptuous look. ‘You are making a spectacle of yourself by pursuing him like this. Lady Susan only invited you here so that we could all watch you trotting after him, like some lovesick puppy. So that we could all laugh at you.’

She did laugh then and it was one of the most unpleasant sounds Henrietta had ever heard.

‘He is not really interested in you,’ she said. ‘How could he be? You are just an ugly … nobody. He is very choosy about the females he permits into his bed, you know. They all have to be titled, for a start, and incredibly beautiful. And accomplished, too.’

‘Then,’ said Henrietta quietly, ‘that certainly rules you out, does it not?’

‘You impudent little … vulgar mushroom!’ As Miss Waverley’s face contorted with fury it occurred to Henrietta that she must not have heard about the way Lady Dalrymple had gone to such lengths to prove she was most emphatically not a mushroom of any variety.

Or if she had, she’d chosen not to believe it.

‘I could have you thrown out of this house for daring to speak to me like that.’

Henrietta very much doubted it, but Miss Waverley did not give her an opportunity to speak, so determined was she to give vent to the frustrated spite that had clearly been building up while she waited for just such an opportunity as this.

‘But I shan’t bother. You are not worth bothering with,’ she said, almost as though she was repeating something another person had dinned into her. ‘And Lady Susan may have taken you up, temporarily, the way she often does with odd people who capture her fancy …’

Strangely, although she’d been able to discount everything else Miss Waverley had said so far, recognising it as an outpouring of spite, the remark about Lady Susan struck home, for she’d been suspicious of her motives from the start.

‘There won’t be any dancing,’ Lady Susan had informed her when she’d told her about this evening. ‘Just the opportunity to mingle with interesting people and indulge in stimulating conversation. My father has read your father’s treatise on the potential uses of de-phlogisticated air,’ she’d said, leaning slightly forwards as though about to deliver a confidence. ‘He was most impressed. And for my part, I am just longing to having one female amongst my acquaintance with whom I can hold an intelligent conversation. There are precious few in town this season.’

Henrietta had not missed the way Lady Susan’s eyes had flickered briefly towards Julia, who had been sipping a cup of tea and staring vacantly at nothing in particular. And had decided on the spot she did not like her. Not at all.

And yet it still hurt, somehow, to realise that everyone would now regard her as one of the ‘odd’ people that sometimes caught Lady Susan’s fancy. As odd as some of the other guests present tonight. The wild-haired poetess who’d been pointed out to her in one of the receiving rooms, for instance, or the penniless inventors, grubby artists and belligerent self-made men one would not normally see at a ton event, but who were tonight rubbing shoulders with peers and politicians.

And Lord Danbury, forcing himself to be polite to people he only tolerated in his house because they amused his daughter.

It made her feel a bit like one of those performing monkeys in a travelling circus. Especially when Miss Waverley added, ‘But once the novelty has worn off, she will drop you again and you will sink back into obscurity where you belong.’

Like those performing monkeys, shut back in their cages once the show was over.

With that, Miss Waverley lifted her skirts and swirled away, leaving Henrietta standing stock still in the corridor. She was rather shaken by that display of venom, which was, in her view, completely out of proportion. Miss Waverley, she mused as she pulled herself together and set out for the drawing room where she’d left her aunt and cousin, must be all about in her head. For one thing, had Henrietta not intervened, she would have been at the centre of the most almighty scandal. Though she was not to know that. She had no idea what kind of a man she’d attempted to manipulate. That she’d done the equivalent of poking her hand through the bars of a lion’s cage.

And as for predicting that she would sink back into obscurity—well! If the members of the ton were all like Miss Waverley, and those yahoos who’d invaded her drawing room and flung insults left, right and centre, then the sooner they lost interest in her the better. She had only accepted the invitation here tonight because she’d seen it would mean so much to her aunt and cousin. And they, she observed from the doorway, were now enjoying themselves immensely. Not only had Lord Deben convinced the waiters to serve them, but in the short time she’d been out of the room, Mildred had managed to acquire a brace of admirers. One of them was leaning over the back of the sofa and trying to murmur in her ear, and the other, who had pulled up a spindly chair to her side, was shooting him dagger looks.

Neither of them were in earnest, she didn’t suppose, and anyway, Mildred had learned a salutary lesson the afternoon of the brawl. Men of this class did not take women of her class seriously. They might flirt with her, but behind all the flattery lurked a contempt for her background that would prevent any but the most desperate fortune hunter from offering her anything more than carte blanche. Whereas Mr Crimmer, for all that he was cursed with a stutter and a fatal tendency to blush, had more than proved the strength of his feelings with his fists.

She took her place on the sofa on the far side of her aunt from Mildred, so as not to interrupt her light-hearted flirtation, and flicked open her fan. How soon would they be able to go home? And how soon after that would she be able to return to Much Wakering, and the very obscurity Miss Waverley had taunted her with as though it would be some kind of punishment? She sighed. Although she wrote regularly to her father, it seemed an age since she had seen him.

Perhaps he would come up to town for a meeting, or a lecture. He often took off at a moment’s notice, after having read an advertisement in the paper.

Her hand slowed and stilled, as she imagined him going to one of his meetings, and unexpectedly hearing her name bandied about in the way Miss Waverley had just described, for Miss Waverley was never going to let the matter drop. She was so angry about having her plan to entrap Lord Deben thwarted that she would most likely take every chance she got to blacken Henrietta’s name. And she was so popular with the men that she would never lack an audience.

A cold sensation gnawed at the pit of her stomach. She did not care for herself, but her father would be terribly upset to find he’d pitched her into such an uncomfortable situation.

Not to mention her brothers. When they returned home on leave, what would it do to them to find their sister talked about in that horrid way?

Oh, they would understand without having to be told how it was that their absent-minded father had come to send her to stay with the Ledbetters, which was what had led to the general assumption that she had a background in trade, but it would not make their chagrin on her behalf any the less. And even though Lady Dalrymple had enlightened some people, there were others, like Miss Waverley, who would prefer to believe the worst.

But it wasn’t that, so much, which would worry her whole family. It was the nature of her entanglement with Lord Deben. She had done absolutely nothing wrong, but Miss Waverley was sure to make it sound just as bad as it could be.

It was a kind of poetic justice. Because she had rashly pursued Richard up to London, she was going to be branded as the kind of girl who chased after all men. She felt a bit sick. By pushing her father into hastily arranging what he thought was a Season for her, she might well have dragged her entire family into the mire.

She could still hear the drone of Mildred’s two admirers buzzing in her ears, and see gorgeously apparelled people milling about the room, but she felt strangely detached from them all, guilt roiling through her like a poisonous miasma so thick that it practically blotted them all out.

Until Lord Deben strolled across the part of the room into which she was staring sightlessly.

Giving her a faint ray of hope. People were going to gossip about her, now, whatever she did. And that being the case, she would much rather they did so because she had become, mysteriously, the toast of the ton, than a byword for vulgarity.

She was not giving in to base temptation. She was not doing this because she wanted to put Miss Waverley’s nose out of joint. She was not thinking of how often it would mean she would have to spend time in Lord Deben’s stimulating company. It would just be far better for her male relatives to believe she’d had a successful Season, than pain them by becoming a laughing stock.

Rising to her feet, she walked across the room to Lord Deben’s side and, when he did not at first notice her hovering on the fringes of the crowd that had gathered round him, she reached through the throng and tugged at his sleeve.

A matron put up her lorgnettes and stared at her frostily. One of the men nudged another and they both smirked.

Lord Deben eyed the little hand that had just creased the immaculate sleeve of his coat, and then, slowly, followed the line of her arm to her face.

‘Miss Gibson,’ he said.

For one terrible moment, she thought she might just have committed social suicide. If he chose to snub her now, she really would be finished. Silently, with all her will-power, she begged him to help her. And after what felt like an eternity, but was probably only a second or two, his face broke into a charming smile.

‘My dear, I completely forgot. You are quite right to remind me.’ He took her hand and pulled her into the charmed circle. ‘You will excuse us, gentlemen? Ladies? Only I did give my word that …’ He trailed off, pulling his watch out of his pocket and examining it. ‘And I am already overdue. We were so deep in conversation,’ he said to Henrietta, ‘that I quite forgot the time.’

He tucked her hand firmly into the crook of his arm and gave it a reassuring pat. The others moved aside as he led her out of the door and along a corridor. After only a few paces, he opened another door, peered inside, then pushed her into a deserted room, shutting the door firmly behind them and turning the key in the lock.

‘Thank you.’ She breathed a sigh of relief. A brace of candlesticks stood upon the mantel over the empty grate, so that although the room was not very inviting, at least they were not in complete darkness.

‘Did you doubt me?’ He folded his arms and leaned back against the door. ‘I gave you my word that should you apply to me for aid, I would be there.’

But he’d never really thought she would come to him so quickly. His heart was only just returning to its regular rhythm, after the surge of jubilation that had set it pounding when she’d pleaded with him, mutely, to help her. It went some way to compensating him for having made the first move this evening. He’d still been rather annoyed with himself for doing so when two weeks earlier he’d sworn that the next time they spoke it would be because she had come to him. And yet the moment he’d seen her, feigning indifference, he’d been compelled to confront her, even going to the lengths of barring her way when she would have left the room.

‘Yes, that is why I came straight to you. It was only that I was not sure you would understand.’

‘My dear, you would not approach me, push through a crowd who fancy themselves the most important people in the land, and tug on my coat sleeve unless it was a dire emergency.’

Which was why he had not been able to resist making her wait for his response. For a few moments, he’d had the supreme satisfaction of having her exactly where he wanted her—metaphorically, if not literally, on her knees before him—and it had been so sweet a feeling that he’d prolonged it as long as he could. It had been just punishment for the damage she’d unwittingly caused his pride.

‘The most important people in the land? Oh, dear!’

‘They only think they are,’ he said with contempt. ‘But never mind the conversation you interrupted. I am far more interested in learning what has occurred to induce you to abandon that fierce pride of yours and come to me as a supplicant. Not that I object, you understand.’

‘Sometimes,’ she said, observing the smugness of the smile that curved his lips as he referred to her as a supplicant, ‘I really, really, dislike you.’

He took one step sideways. ‘The key is in the lock. You may turn it and leave, if you so wish.’

‘You aggravating man,’ she seethed. ‘You know very well I’m not going anywhere. Do you have to make it so hard for me?’

‘Make what hard?’ His smile was positively predatory now.

She glowered at him.

‘To tell you that I have changed my mind. That if you would be so kind, I should like to take you up on your offer.’

‘My offer?’ His smile froze.

‘To make me the toast of the ton,’ she snapped. ‘They are all going to gossip about me. I cannot stop it now. And at least if you … I don’t know … do whatever it is you had in mind to make them think I’m … fascinating … then at least my brothers won’t be ashamed to own me.’

A strange look came over his face. ‘You are doing this for your brothers?’

She’d done something very like this before. When Lady Chigwell had been berating her, she’d borne it all with weary indifference. It had only been when the old harridan had cast aspersions on her family that she had flung up her chin and answered back.

Because she loved them.

Love was the key that he’d been searching for. If she believed she was in love with him, he would have it all. Her compliance to his wish she should marry him and, most of all, her loyalty. He didn’t know why he hadn’t seen it before. But now he had, he couldn’t see her marrying anyone unless she fancied herself in love with him.

And once she’d made the commitment, she would remain loyal to the bitter end. No matter what she thought of him once she knew him well enough to realise he was not the kind of person anyone could really love, she would remain loyal. He might have mocked her for that streak of Puritanism she so frequently displayed, but that very morality would spare him many of the distasteful aspects of marriage that had made him avoid it for so long. She would not be the kind of woman to take a lover the moment she’d presented him with an heir. On the contrary, any children she bore would undoubtedly be his.