Chapter 1
“You will want to smile, Lady Clio. Your reputation is already going to reach shore long before you do. You may wish to at least try to salvage things before it all gets away from you.”
Lady Clio Warson, sister to the Duke of Redcliff, was entirely certain that the look on her face could be most accurately described as a grimace as she turned to face Lord Gwanton, but at least it was showing all of her teeth. That had to count for something.
“Ignore him,” Letitia Knightley, Clio’s former governess and current friend and chaperone, advised out of the corner of her mouth. “Look. We are almost in the dock. Soon we will be in London. Focus on that.”
“That might be more compelling to me if I actually wanted to return to London in the first place,” Clio muttered, sounding only somewhat bitter about it.
“You should have trusted that instinct,” Gwanton commented loudly. “You might have become accustomed to the rules of the Continent, my lady, but I fear that you will find London still has some morals and standards, unlike whatever it is that they get up to in France.”
“Belgium,” Clio corrected.
“Ignore him,” Letitia repeated.
But Clio had tried to ignore Gwanton. She’d been trying to ignore him since they’d left France days prior.
She supposed she could only be grateful that he hadn’t been with them all the way from Belgium, as the coach that had taken them to the coast had been considerably smaller than the boat.
Avoiding him aboard had been sufficiently difficult.
He had been irritatingly impervious to her increasingly unsubtle brush-offs.
She’d tried the cut direct, and that still hadn’t worked.
“But I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised,” he went on. He was standing at what was technically a respectable distance away, but he was more than making up for it by speaking at a deeply outlandish volume, “given the rumors.”
“Don’t,” Letitia said resignedly, like she knew that Clio was going to ignore her advice.
And indeed, Clio did.
She whirled on Gwanton, whose face was twisted in a sneer.
He really was a rather unattractive fellow, but not because of any of God’s gifts or lack thereof.
It was his attitude that made him so unpleasant to look upon; he perpetually wore an expression as though he had recently smelled something revolting.
It was interesting, as that was generally how Clio felt, dealing with him, too.
“What,” she asked with all the ice in her voice that came from six centuries of aristocratic heritage, “could you possibly mean by that, my lord?”
The look in his eye was bright and acidic.
“I know that half the ton likes to worship at the feet of the Lightholders like you are some kind of gods,” he sniped.
“But those of us with decency—with good sense—with virtue—we know differently. We see how you run dens of iniquity and bring fallen women into the fold, polluting the noblest houses in England with the blood of whores.”
For all of Gwanton’s accusations, Clio felt that she actually showed a remarkable sense of decorum when she didn’t punch him in the face for the insult to her family—to her cousin Hugh’s gambling hell, or to the (admittedly somewhat scandalous) pasts that her sister by marriage, Phoebe, or her cousin, Helen, had experienced prior to each wedding their respective spouses.
If she had been a gentleman, she would have hit him.
Hell, she was showing more decorum than Gwanton himself, given his hideous insults.
“If we are so disgusting and fallen,” she asked, her fists clenched at her sides, “then why, pray tell, did you wish so vehemently to marry into our polluted ranks?”
Because Gwanton’s desperate grabs for her attention had indeed gone so far that, the night prior, he’d practically cornered her on the way out of the small dining room provided for the ship’s first-class passengers—and asked her to marry him.
Well, calling it asking gave the man far too much credit.
He had more told her that marrying him was the very best offer she was likely to get, and since she was already such an ancient spinster, not to mention one bearing the stink of Continental excess on her, she really should just agree to be his wife before she became the laughingstock of the ton.
She’d held her temper then, too. She had been polite when she’d told him that, no, thank you, she would have to decline that charitable suggestion.
He had returned this courtesy by calling her a slattern and stomping away.
It really was beyond remarkable that he had the nerve to comment on her decorum, given it all.
Gwanton sputtered.
“I was merely making an offer out of charity!” he all but shouted. There had been perhaps a dozen first-class passengers aboard this trip back to London, and they all seemed to be listening now, even the German family who, as far as Clio knew, didn’t speak a word of English.
If Clio occasionally lost her head to temper, Letitia was as cool and unruffled as a person could be. So, it was a telling sign of how intensely outrageous Gwanton really was that Letitia heaved an exasperated sigh.
“Could we please just disembark?” she implored. “Look, they’re lowering the ramp. We can leave and just forget this.”
“I do not need charity from a man so stupid that he thinks himself liable to gain a lady’s regard by insulting her at every turn,” she snapped.
“I would never lower myself to accept aid from someone who thinks he will rise in Society by denigrating some of its most powerful members. And I would never seek assistance from the likes of you—” She waved a hand at him, encompassing the whole of his person.
“—given that you are just so very disagreeable as a human being.”
From the crowd of listeners came a scandalized little laugh, and someone began muttering in German, as though translating.
“Please move along,” Letitia said to the onlookers. “We have docked, and you may now disembark.”
“I have matters very much in hand, Letitia,” Clio whispered.
“The only thing,” Gwanton spat, “that you have in hand is your family’s determination to disgrace your name and ruin your reputations!”
Clio let her smile get a little bit sharper.
“What you call disgrace should be more appropriately termed love. Or happiness. I assume you are unfamiliar with these words, given …” She trailed off meaningfully, waving a hand to encompass all of Gwanton’s person.
“But it is likely the rarest phenomenon in London. In that regard, my family is rich far beyond what monetary wealth or status could confer upon us.”
“And yet you,” Gwanton returned, “are a stuck-up strumpet who thinks herself too good for a man who comes to her with an open heart and honest intentions.”
Clio couldn’t resist scoffing.
“If that man is you?” she asked. “Yes. I am certainly too good for the likes of you.”
A toad would be too good for the likes of you, she thought … though she feared that, if she said it out loud, she’d give poor Letitia an apoplexy.
Gwanton puffed himself up in a way that made Clio regret letting the toad comparison slip by her.
“I should bar you from leaving this ship,” he said, self-importance coming off him in waves. “That way, you will be forced to return to the Continent, where you cannot pollute good English Society like the rest of the fecund little sluts that your kinsmen tupped.”
Clio didn’t really think that her reaction was unwarranted. She’d dealt with an awful lot from Gwanton, after all. The days of unwanted advances. The terrible proposal. And the insults. All the bloody insults.
But she would not hear such slander about the women in her family, who were absolutely lovely, had brought so much joy to the Lightholder family tree, and who had made the family better in every single way.
Thus, she recalled what her cousin Hugh had once taught her, balled up her fist without tucking her thumb, reared back, pivoted from her hip—
And punched Gwanton directly in his bulbous nose.
The response was phenomenal. Gwanton’s nose started bleeding like a geyser while the man himself began shrieking like a schoolgirl. Several of the witnesses, who had ignored Letitia’s attempts to dispel them, gasped; one lady fainted dead away at the sight of the blood.
And people gasped about what a scandal it was in at least three languages that Clio could hear.
Clio shook out her throbbing hand and, as the haze of temper dissipated, worried that this had been going perhaps a bit far.
“Oh, for goodness’ sake!”
Letitia’s familiar hands were on Clio’s shoulders, then, and she bodily marched the younger woman toward the gangplank and down toward the dock. There were several serving men waiting to help escort the ladies down the narrow walkway, and more than one of them gave Clio an impressed look.
“Are you quite pleased with yourself now?” Letitia groused as she scanned the gathered carriages for the Duke of Redcliff’s coat of arms. She made a satisfied noise in the back of her throat when she spotted it, then steered Clio in that direction.
“Why is it that you never listen when I say things like ‘Perhaps we should think about this a moment?’”
A very wide-eyed maid helped Clio and Letitia up into the carriage. The driver looked as though he planned to dine out on this story for years to come.
Merde, Clio thought, the swear words coming to her mind in French first after spending so many years of her life abroad.
“This is not good,” she said, looking at her friend as Letitia settled in across from her. There was blood on her gloves, she realized.
“It’s not,” Letitia confirmed grimly. “You were planning on having a quiet return to England, as you might recall.”
With the red haze of her anger receding, Clio felt panic begin to rise up to take its place.
“We have to alert the driver,” she said, feeling as though the carriage walls were closing around her as her breathing came more quickly and her hands began to shake. “We cannot go home. Not yet. Not without making a plan.”