Chapter 4
“Shredding one’s reputation along with one’s gown might be spurred by failure to find a spouse,”
Lady Vetry snarled the moment they sat down in their carriage. She fixed Clara with an eagle’s eye. “But only in pursuit of a husband!”
Clara didn’t bother to reply. She was huddled opposite her mother, trying not to think about the fact that she could still feel the imprint of Prince George’s fingers.
“If you must expose your bosom,”
the lady ranted, “why before a married prince? Why not a mere duke? Or even a rich grocer? If you’d lured an unmarried man into fondling you in public, you’d be betrothed this moment!”
“That’s not fair,”
Clara protested, praying that the carriage would miraculously circumvent streets clogged with traffic and arrive at their house in the next minute or so. “His Majesty ripped my bodice while groping my breast. I had nothing to do with it.”
“Your response was impetuous and thoughtless, as always!”
her mother retorted, her voice rising. “How many times have I begged you to think before you act? Remember that wretched dog, the one you found in a drain, who gave fleas to the boot boy and the cook?”
“Patsy,”
Clara said. “That wasn’t the same.”
She didn’t know why she bothered defending herself, since her mother had never hidden her exasperation with the fact that Clara was ungainly, impulsive, and deficient in most ladylike arts. Lady Vetry couldn’t reconcile herself to her only daughter’s inadequacies, since she prided herself on her beauty and grace.
“You’ve been on the market for years!”
her mother cried now. “It’s a national disgrace, given the size of your dowry. That absurd reticule made things worse.” She pointed to Clara’s latest creation, as if the bag was responsible for its inability to cover a pair of large breasts.
Clara swallowed hard. She adored the reticules she painstakingly shaped into charming animal faces with wire whiskers, but obviously she wouldn’t be able to carry her favorite mouse ever again.
“Your figure is acceptable, you don’t squint, and you have that bosom, so that’s not the problem. The truth is that beauty is only skin-deep.”
“No one ever fell in love with an attractive pair of kidneys,”
Clara retorted, trying not to sound too resentful. When her mother was in a temper, she brooked no disagreement.
“Kidneys?”
Her mother narrowed her eyes. “Precisely what I mean! You can’t stop yourself from saying peculiar things. It’s unfortunate that Prince George became so obsessed, but that’s not the reason why you’re unmarried.”
Clara made a tactical decision not to comment, because to her mind, he was the reason she was unmarried. Without his attentions, someone would have come up to scratch, if only to get hold of her dowry.
Market rules dictated that a gentleman without money was in need of a wife.
“The truth of the matter is that you’re an eccentric. I can’t imagine why.”
Her mother was as outraged as the prince had been when Clara’s reticule bounced off his round stomach. “I myself am perfectly normal. My mother had a haughty temper, but she never had a fanciful thought in her life! Your father, God rest his soul, was remarkable only for his luxurious sideburns. He read the Bible, and that rarely.”
“Are you criticizing my reticules or my reading habits?”
Clara inquired.
“Both, but particularly the reticules!”
her mother replied, her voice rising again. “They’re an oddity, don’t you understand? One day you’re carrying a rat, the next a rabbit. No one wants to end up with an eccentric in the family, let alone a woman who reads all the time. A woman like that.”
“Like what?”
Clara managed, feeling as if she were choking.
“Like Lady Berne, who dyed the feathers of the estate pigeons bright pink. Or that man who invited his giraffe to tea.”
Clara ran her fingers under her eyes.
“Are you sniveling?”
her mother demanded.
“Yes,”
Clara said baldly. “You compared me to a pigeon-tinting spinster. I’m sorry that I wasn’t able to bring any of my suitors up to scratch, but I don’t think it was the fault of my reticules.” Her breath caught on a sob. “Are we stopping for traffic again? I have to wash. My breasts are covered with excrement.”
“I blame the fashion for teaching young girls to read. Hermione Willis bored me silly, raving about a peanut plant she’s growing in the drawing room.”
“She plans to cultivate peanuts and feed the poor,”
Clara said dispiritedly.
“I suppose her charitable zeal is attractive, but she’s ignoring English rain,”
her mother scoffed. “Not only are peanuts disgustingly greasy, but they won’t grow here.”
Since all Clara cared to do was lie on a couch and read about ghost-ridden castles, it was no wonder gentlemen flocked around Hermione.
“Whereas you’ve got yourself a reputation for frivolity and oddness,”
Lady Vetry continued. “Young men are cowards, you know. They don’t want to be laughed at.”
Clara felt another stab of humiliation. “A man would be mocked for courting me?”
“Put all that’s you together with Prince George’s attentions . . . Yes. Although it’s irrelevant now. That’s all over.”
Her voice trembled with emotion as she patted her chest, for all the world like Sarah Siddons playing Cleopatra stinging herself to death with an asp. “I must face my own failure. At the advanced age of twenty-five, my daughter will never marry into the best circles. I shall make immediate arrangements to sign over your dowry.”
“I needn’t go back?”
Clara asked, her voice cracking from pure relief.
“You foolish chit, you can’t go back,”
her mother snapped. “The prince is furious; Lady Jersey is outraged. It might have blown over if you hadn’t struck him, but you struck the future King of England.”
“That future king tried to auction me off, then pawed me after a bird excreted on my breast,”
Clara said. Still feeling as if she couldn’t breathe, she sat bolt upright on the opposite seat from her mother, her hands shakily straightening the whiskers of her mouse reticule.
“His Majesty assisted you out of pure benevolence,”
her mother said. “You should have taken it as an honor and kissed his hand. Look.” She withdrew a stained handkerchief from her reticule. “I saved this for you, a memento of the time when a future king came to your aid.”
Clara snatched the handkerchief, wrenched down the carriage window, and threw it out.
Lady Vetry cried out as if she’d been poked by a wire whisker. “Valenciennes lace, embroidered with the royal crown! Yet another example of your foolish impulsivity. You could have shown that to your children one day!”
Her brow crumpled into a scowl. “Yet I ask myself: What children? Who will carry on our august line? Who will marry my daughter?”
Clara had asked herself a version of that question a thousand times since she debuted and had yet to find an answer.
“I can console myself with the thought that I have done everything in my power to find you a spouse,”
her mother proclaimed, her voice throbbing. Now she was Lady Macbeth before the queen lost her mind and started washing her hands. “I ordered you an entirely new wardrobe every Season. A month ago I paid a fortune for your new maid, Hortense.”
Clara felt somewhat cheered by the idea of saying farewell to her maid, who brought with her a reputation for buffing pebbles into pearls. She was nice enough, but she had a fake French accent and a conviction that low bodices were vital for catching a spouse.
“She forced me to prepay for the entire Season, arguing that you might elope,”
her mother grouched. “Elope! That was never in the cards, and the woman still has five months left on her contract.”
“Hortense would have been a far better prospect on the marriage market than I.”
“The best maids are like that,”
her mother said airily. “Perfect manners, perfect waistlines, all the rest of it. In Hortense’s case, she actually has the bloodline, albeit tarnished by scandal and Gallic associations. At any rate, she can chaperone you, since I can’t leave London.”
“I’m leaving London?”
“Of course. As a pillar of society, I shall remain for the Season to mend the family reputation as best I can.”
Clara glanced down and discovered that she’d wrenched out one of the mouse’s whiskers.
“You can use your dowry to buy a spouse next year, if you wish. All the second and third sons already had a look at you, so it’ll have to be someone disgraced. A gambler or a drunk. Depending on the man you acquire, I’ll publicly acknowledge the connection—or not.”
Lady Vetry’s lip curled.
Clara had been cursed with an infinite wish to please her mother—together with a complete inability to do it. She tried not to dwell on it, but in truth, her heart had been stamped on so many times that it was as cracked as her dreams of romance.
“What would you think of an actor?”
For the last few years, she had nurtured a hopeless infatuation with a spectacularly good-looking actor named Mylchreest.
Her mother jerked in her seat. “Absolutely not! I’ve noticed you attending the same play over and over in order to watch that man perform, Clara. Whomever you . . . acquire must have a decent heritage. We cannot allow you to pollute a noble lineage that dates back to King Henry VII with the blood of a hempen homespun from Wales.”
Clara had once investigated her mother’s fondest claim about their ancestry and discovered that it didn’t hold water. Her supposedly noble blood traced back to a wealthy merchant who bought the title of baronet from King James for ￡1,095. Being a shrewd man, he had kept the receipt but scrawled an insult in the margin. Apparently he felt he’d overpaid, since he labeled the king a pilfering swindler.
She hadn’t had any real hope when it came to Mylchreest: he was so handsome that if she ever had the opportunity to speak to him, she would be dazzled into silence. Or blurt out an offer that included the precise amount of money he would receive in return for wedding her. That would be even more embarrassing than being openly marketed for her breasts.
“I could travel to Bath,”
she said. Bath was crammed with lending libraries and bookstores.
“You must be joking! I heard last night that Prince George has bought more land around the Royal Pavilion. Apparently he means to plant an onion garden.”
Lady Vetry shuddered. “As if he didn’t already reek of the vegetable.”
Onions would be a relief. Clara doubted she’d ever be able to stomach the sickly sweet smell of cherry brandy.
“If you were seen in Bath, everyone would assume that you had succumbed to his advances. Polite society needs time to forget this regrettable incident.”
Lady Vetry scowled. “It would be best if you married before the next Season begins and attend at most one or two balls next year, in company with your husband. Someone ferocious.”
Disgraced and ferocious. Marvelous. “Why?”
“Your bridegroom must be good with a rapier. A few duels and everyone will forget about you attacking the prince. Instead, they’ll be worrying about him attacking any man who insults you, including the Prince of Wales, should His Majesty’s inadvisable infatuation continue. Though you might have nipped that in the bud today,”
she added on a slightly more positive note.
Why would a peppery man be more interested in her than all the soft-spoken men who regularly forgot her name? Clara turned her head and stared out the window, letting tears roll silently down her cheeks. Long experience told her that her mother responded with irritation to obvious signs of distress.
She didn’t want a bad-tempered husband, a man as available for sale as she was. In fact, she didn’t want to marry at all, nor did she ever want to attend a society event again. But what could she do instead? She wasn’t good at anything other than making reticules.
Back when she and her best friend Torie had first debuted, she hadn’t cared much about being labeled silly and frivolous, since Torie—who couldn’t read—was tarred with the same brush. But now Torie was a viscountess, and her husband had proudly informed everyone in polite society that she was a brilliant painter. The king himself owned one of Torie’s paintings of rabbits.
Clara didn’t have a secret talent that would make a husband proud. All she was good at was reading, and even then she only liked to read frivolous novels, not the enlightening, somber ones. Novels in which a heroine was kidnapped from her convent, fled across France wearing boy’s clothing, and somehow found her way to a duke with flashing eyes who took her in his arms and—
“Wait!”
her mother said suddenly. “I have an idea.”
Clara wiped her face and managed a shaky smile. “Yes?”
“Scotland,”
Lady Vetry said triumphantly. “Most of them loathe British royalty. They’ll probably throw you a parade because you rebuked a corpulent, lascivious royal!”
“So you do understand why I struck him!”
Clara cried, heartened by this show of loyalty.
“Absolutely not,”
her mother retorted. “It showed a sad lack of forethought and poor etiquette. It was practically . . . republican.” Her face lit up. “America! Those rebels will love the fact you attacked the future king.”
“No,”
Clara protested. “Lord Durden told me that Boston has more kangaroos than books.”
Her mother scoffed. “What does that fool know? He’s never been farther than Brighton. He certainly hasn’t crossed the sea. What’s more, I’ve never heard of kangaroos, and you know I regularly correspond with a childhood friend living there.”
“Kangaroos are like giant rabbits with whiskers,”
Clara explained.
“I don’t want to hear about whiskers ever again,”
her mother said flatly. “There are no reticules in your future.” She glowered at Clara. “No reticules and no novels.”
It didn’t seem to have occurred to Lady Vetry that if Clara married someone on the other side of the ocean, she might never see her daughter again. Clara was fairly certain that her mother would consider that a benefit.
At the beginning of every Season, even knowing that she had only a slim chance, Clara had always prayed that a man at the rank of viscount or above would fall desperately in love with her. Anyone at a higher rank than her mother, because the only thing that quelled Lady Vetry’s critical comments was blood bluer than her own.
In more imaginative moments, Clara envisioned her husband reprimanding her mother for unkindnesses. “I fell in love with my wife at first sight,”
the viscount would snarl. “I would have married her were she selling flowers at the opera!”
A viscount had fallen in love with her dearest friend . . . and like all the other available bachelors, he had never taken a second glance at Clara.
“I prefer Scotland,”
she stated, taking a deep breath. She refused to imagine a life without novels. She had subscriptions with every press, and they could post new books to Edinburgh, but it would take months for packages to reach Boston.
“I suppose that’s far enough, if you prefer it. We’ll have to dispatch you tomorrow, before gossip filters up the country, though as I say, Scotsmen might embrace the story.”
Her mother leaned forward and caught Clara’s eye. “You’ll take any gentleman. Cast your net wide.”
“I’m not sure what you mean by that.”
She yanked another whisker from her reticule.
“No man should be rejected on the basis of his age,”
Lady Vetry said, settling back in her seat. “Or his figure, schooling, accent, or estate. A vagabond will do, as long as his bloodline is respectable.”
Clara bit her lip. “Where will I stay in Scotland? How am I to meet these aged vagabonds?”
“Don’t be sarcastic,”
Lady Vetry snapped. “It’s a most unattractive trait in a lady. Do you remember your old nanny, Mrs. Wisk?”
“She used to read to me.”
Her mother winced. “That started you down the path to eccentricity. At any rate, Mrs. Wisk is a Scotswoman. When it was time for you to have a governess, your sainted father sent her to Scotland to be a companion to one of his relatives, Lady Esther Ferguson, who had been recently widowed. I suppose she’s your great-aunt . . . or perhaps great-great-aunt?”
“Have you ever met her?”
“Certainly not. I have never seen reason to venture farther than Britain’s exquisite countryside. Your former nanny will be happy to see you, though now I think on it, I believe Mrs. Wisk has gone blind.”
“Oh, dear,”
Clara said. “She loved reading.”
“If worse comes to worst, I suppose you can read to her,”
Lady Vetry said with a sigh. “I have come to terms with your indolence, Clara, but you must think of your future. Mrs. Wisk won’t last forever, and then what will you do? You have to marry.”
Was she supposed to welcome the prospect of marrying a vagabond with a temper?
“There might be a fuss when you first arrive,”
her mother remarked. “It will quickly pass.”
Clara shuddered at the idea of showing up unannounced. “How will I explain why I’m visiting? What if Lady Esther thinks I’m an impostor?”
Her mother scoffed. “You will have my letter, be dressed in an exquisite gown, and be accompanied by a French maid. You don’t suppose that Hortense would allow anyone to offer disrespect, do you? She’ll brazen it out, and you follow her lead.”
Lady Vetry sighed. “Were Hortense my daughter, this would all be playing out very differently.”
Clara burst into sobs.
“Now don’t you wish that you still had His Majesty’s handkerchief?”
her mother demanded.