Chapter 15 #3
He studied her, and his eyelids lowered into a sleepy, seductive look. Her toes curled in her silk slippers.
“Havering was right,” he said, his voice deepening. “No one will care you are a bluestocking in that gown. You look utterly delectable.”
She floundered a moment in the pleasure she took in that declaration. He was a practiced seducer. That was one of his lines.
“Wonderful. I hope the attention shall gain more signatures for my petition.” Henrietta tugged her hand free of his and made her turn. “Save your skills for worthier targets, Daring. I have no betrothal to break.”
He closed his fingers about her wrist. She felt the warm strength of his hand through her gloves, and an answering warmth stole through her belly. His eyes darkened to violet as, quite deliberately, holding her eyes the whole time, he pulled her up against his body and lifted her in a turn.
Heat radiated from him. At the end of the turn he set her on her feet, sliding her slowly down the front of his body.
Even through the layers of muslin and silk, she felt the hard planes of his stomach and thighs.
A thick gush of heat splashed from her throat to her belly, and when he withdrew to his place in line, she nearly toppled.
He had been attempting, since that first night in the Ellesmere gallery, to provoke a reaction from her.
To arouse her—there was no other word for it.
Her last shred of dignity lay in not letting him know he had succeeded.
Henrietta cleared her face and skipped to her place in line, attempting insouciance.
“You’d best behave yourself with me if you want my uncle’s help,” she said when their palms met again.
He stepped too close, his leg brushing her skirts.
“Though for my part, I should think if you don’t wish the responsibilities of your inheritance, you might simply ask your father to break the entail. ”
“I already—” He bit off the words, bristling with anger. “Interfering female. I broached a private matter with your uncle. How dare he share a confidence?”
“Private?” She laughed. “Nothing you do is private. Every deed of yours shows up in the broadsides. Every person you have a word with. Including me.”
“I thought you planned to take advantage of the attention,” he said in a sharp tone, his eyes dark. “More signatures for your causes, etcetera.”
He understood her even less than she understood him.
“Oh, naturally. And I couldn’t care a whit if the attention is bought at the cost of respect for my family.
How amusing to see us lampooned in the street, to have my brother twitted because he inherited by special remainder, my uncle mocked because he won his title for service, my father ridiculed for supporting the King.
As if one is more worthy for being born to an inheritance rather than earning one’s gains by hard work. ”
“That is the way of the world, Henry. You can’t change it.”
She tore her hand from his and stood glaring at him. “But it’s unfair. My father, whom your class thinks nothing but a vaunting tradesman, helped fund an army so the British might make peace in Mysore. He helped bring the rule of law to an unsettled land.”
Darien halted in his tracks, and the blankness in his eyes cut off her tirade. “Mysore,” he repeated. “Jasper paid for the wars in Mysore?”
Henrietta curled her hands into fists at her sides. The rest of the dancers stumbled to a halt to watch their exchange, but she paid them no heed. “My father made a loan to the King, and the King used the funds as he wished.”
“To bring good men to their deaths.” Darien’s voice rose.
“So that he can have cotton for his infernal mills, and Lady Clarinda might have her tea! How can you be proud of them?” He stepped close, looming over her.
“Does your father have any notion how much blood is on his hands, thanks to those wars?”
Henrietta stood her ground. “I regret the costs of war as much as anyone, but sometimes a price must be paid for peace.”
“Enough.” He flung out a hand as if to push her away.
Every head in the room turned in their direction.
“Look at you, trying to pull children out of the gutter while your family hands over the blunt that sends gallant men to suffer and die in some hellish land, making orphans. How can you bear the hypocrisy?”
Her face burned with humiliation, and not because people were staring.
Her entire body was frozen in shock. She knew people died in war, horribly, senselessly.
The overseer on her estate was a man scarred by war.
But no one had ever accused Jasper of being culpable, blaming his money for the deaths of men and innocent others.
“My father has devoted himself to improving the lives of the less fortunate,” she stammered. “And so have I. We at least make an effort, which is a better use of our time than many alternatives.”
“You may think me reprehensible,” Darien said softly, “but you’re a fool, Henry.” And without a bow or a word of parting, he turned and walked away.
The crowd parted before him like the Red Sea. With his face so set and forbidding, his shoulders broad and taut with anger barely leashed, no one stepped forward to ask him what the matter was. He stalked from the ballroom, the most elegant and fascinating of men, and he was entirely alone.
“Hetty. My dear.”
Marsibel touched her arm, her face troubled. “Are you quite well?”
Henrietta summoned a smile. It felt small and bedraggled, a pitiful effort. “I suppose I’ve made a complete spectacle of myself.” She couldn’t bear to look around the room and meet the avid eyes. “Can I hope the Bicclesfields have a trapdoor that might swallow me, like some theatre device?”
Aunt Althea joined them, her face lit with an astonished smile. “My word, Henrietta. You’ve done it! Everyone saw Lord Daring set on you, try to seduce you, and you sent him off with a flea in his ear!”
“We had a terrible row.” Henrietta put a hand to her ribs. Her stomacher was pinned too tightly. “I said some very unfeeling things, and he…he…”
He made her body flame from scalp to sole, and she pushed him away in a blind panic at what that meant. How it made her weak, all too susceptible.
He was the secret benefactor of the Pennyroyals.
He was, in essence, the benefactor of any number of young women whom he had helped free from unwanted marriages, though to the rest of the town, he looked to be cutting a ruinous swath.
He had put her in dresses that, for the first time in her life, made her feel graceful and lovely. He had helped her bring Mary Ann to the Sisters of Benevolence and arranged Elijah’s funeral.
He had, as a matter of fact, signed every one of her petitions.
And she had accused him of acting irresponsibly when he was trying to set things right with Celeste. She ought to have asked him why he didn’t wish to become his father’s heir, rather than calling him to account for it.
“He saw you are immune to his tricks, as any Wardley must be,” Aunt Althea said. “Despite that gown! Henrietta Eglantine, I am very proud of you. Whatever else happens tonight, you are already a success.”
This proved a prediction true beyond even Lady Clarinda’s fondest hopes.
Gossip shot through the ballroom with the speed of flame.
The infamous Lord Daring had assayed the virtue of Miss Henrietta Wardley-Hines, and the knight’s daughter routed him, boot and bayonet, sending the villain to heel with a long list of his faults in hand.
Matrons with tender daughters thronged her for advice.
Young tulips who competed for the fashionable debutantes saw a girl not easily won and wanted her at once.
Everyone who had interested themselves in gossip over the scandalous Lord Daring wanted an introduction to the girl who had vanquished him.
Miss Henrietta Wardley-Hines, knight’s daughter, was the undeniable toast of the Bicclesfield ball.
She danced every dance, laughed at every compliment and flirtation, and drank every glass of champagne that interested suitors brought her.
But the champagne was as bitter as used tea leaves, and the sweets turned to dust in her mouth.
She saw no further sign of Forsythia Pennyroyal, though she wanted to talk to the girl.
Lord Pinochle, however, watched her closely, and when partners changed during a country dance, she could not avoid touching her hand to his clammy one without risking notice. She was glad for her kid gloves.
“I see you are becoming much talked about, Miss Wardley-Hines,” Pinochle said with an unctuous smile. “But I thought your cause was to tear unwitting girls from their safe homes, rather than reform known rakehells.”
“Safe homes?” Henrietta nearly spat on the highly polished floor.
“Do you not rather mean a home where her goodwill was taken advantage of, her virtue destroyed, her character shamed in being forced to submit to attentions she did not welcome? I call it fortunate if a girl might escape those circumstances.”
His answer was a savage sneer. “You had best watch your step, girl. You will not be sheltered for always beneath the wing of your Lady Bess. You’re treading on dangerous ground with your meddling, and taking up with Daring too.”
A chill slithered down Henrietta’s spine. She looked to the end of the line of dancers where, mercifully, their promenade would end so she could return to her partner, Mr. Lionel Havering, who had promised to sign the Minerva Society’s petition calling for the full abolition of slavery.
“I am leading a debate for the Minerva Society in a few days, milord, on a topic that might interest you. What is owed to dependents when their protectors prove unworthy.” She gave him the barest curtsy, as the dance dictated, and was astonished at her own audacity.
This gown was making her bold. “Perhaps you might attend.”
“I rather think I shall.” Pinochle glared as he rose from his bow. “But I do not think I will support your theme.”
That taunt troubled Henrietta as she jostled home with Clarinda and Althea gushing about her success and about the invitations she was sure to receive.
But once Duprix had peeled the silk robe off her and she fell into bed, sore from head to foot, the deeper hurt she had tried to push away surfaced into the quiet dark.
She had not repulsed the rake. She had craved his look of approval, reveled in it. She had clung to his arm with all the shallow pride Miss Wollstonecraft condemned, knowing the entire ballroom saw that Lord Darien Bales chose to dance with her, Henrietta Wardley-Hines, tradesman’s daughter.
When he lifted her against his body, she had reveled in the shameless desire that flooded her, in understanding, at last, what drove young women to lose their heads over a man.
It was powerful. Intoxicating. Even now, the memory of that contact thrilled along every nerve, rousing her body with a nearly painful awareness.
She was not immune. Not to his potent allure, and not to the look of bewildered shock and horror on his face when she spoke of the wars in Mysore. The hollow grief that had entered his eyes made her heart crack open.
It served her right to have her vanity thwarted, to know she, in her new gown, held no appeal for a seasoned seducer. A Henrietta Wardley-Hines did not have what it took to fascinate a man the likes of Lord Darien Bales.
But to lose the slim thread that had begun to develop between them, among their confidences, their adventures, their racketing about town together—that loss she regretted deeply.
It went far deeper than the blow to her feminine pride.
He was a man she wanted to know more of, and she had cut off any possibility for trust, for friendship, for any deeper connection, with one fell and terrible confession.
If Henrietta’s pillow and the ostrich feather beneath it grew damp with tears in the smallest hours of the night, no one save Henrietta, the pillow, and the feather knew.