Winning the Wallflower: A Novella (17 page)

“The devil you say. He’ll never manage to find anyone. I have a reputation, you know.”

“Your title is weightier than your reputation,” Prufrock said. “Additionally, there is the small matter of your father’s estate.”

“You’re probably right, damn you.” Piers decided he could manage another small glass. “But what about my injury, hmm? You think a woman would agree to marry a man—what am I saying? Of course a woman would agree to that.”

“I doubt many young ladies would see that as an insurmountable problem,” Prufrock said. “Now, your personality . . .”

“Damn you,” Piers said, but without heat.

C
HAPTER
T
HREE

T
he moment Linnet returned to the drawing room, her father groaned aloud. “I turned down three marriage proposals for you last month, and I can tell you right now that I’ll never receive another one. Hell, I wouldn’t believe you a maiden myself. You look four or five months along.”

Linnet sat down rather heavily, her skirts floating up like a white cloud and then settling around her. “I’m not,” she said. “I am not pregnant.” She was starting to feel almost as if she truly were carrying a child.

“Ladies don’t use that word,” Lord Sundon said. “Didn’t you learn anything from that governess of yours?” He waved his quizzing glass in the air the better to illustrate his point. “One might refer to a delicate condition, or perhaps to being
enceinte
. Never to pregnancy, a harsh word with harsh connotations. The pleasure, the joy of being of our rank, is that we may overlook the earthy, the fertile, the . . .”

Linnet stopped listening. Her father was a vision in pale blue, his waistcoat fastened with silver buttons inset with ivory poppies, his Prussian collar a miracle of elegance.
He
was very good at overlooking anything earthy, but she’d never been as successful.

At that moment a long banging sounded at the door. Despite herself, Linnet looked up hopefully when their butler entered to announce the visitor. Surely Prince Augustus had rethought. How could he sit in his castle, knowing that she was being rejected by the
ton
? He must have heard about the disastrous events of the ball, the way no one had spoken to her after he left.

Of course, the prince had taken himself away while the news was still spreading through the ballroom. He had walked out the door with his cronies without a backward glance at her . . . and after that every face in the ballroom turned away from her. Apparently they were only waiting to see what his reaction was to being told she was carrying a child.

Yet he, if anyone, knew it to be a taradiddle. At least, he knew the child wasn’t
his
. Maybe that was why he threw her over so abruptly. Perhaps he too believed the stories and thought she was pregnant by another man.

The cut direct from an entire ballroom. It had to be a first.

The caller wasn’t Prince Augustus, but Linnet’s aunt, Lady Etheridge, known to her intimates as Zenobia. She had chosen that name for herself, realizing as a young girl that Hortense didn’t suit her personality.

“I knew this would come to grief,” she announced, stopping just inside the door and dropping her gloves to the floor rather than handing them to the footman to her right.

Zenobia relished a good drama, and when inebriated was prone to informing a whole dinner table that she could have played Lady Macbeth better than Sarah Siddons. “I told you once, if I told you a hundred times, Cornelius, that girl is too pretty for her own good. And I was right. Here she is,
enceinte,
and all of London party to the news except for me.”

“I’m not—” Linnet said.

But she was drowned out by her father, who chose to avoid the question at hand and go on the attack. “It’s not my daughter’s fault that she takes after her mother.”

“My sister was as pure as the driven snow,” Zenobia bellowed back.

The battle was properly engaged now, and there would be no stopping it.

“My wife may have been snowy—and God knows I’m the one to speak to that—but she was certainly warm enough when she cared to be. We all know how fast the Ice Maiden could warm up, particularly when she was around royalty, now I think of it!”

“Rosalyn deserved a king,” Zenobia screamed. She strode into the room and planted herself as if she were about to shoot an arrow. Linnet recognized the stance: it was just what Mrs. Siddons had done the week before on the Covent Garden stage, when her Desdemona repudiated Othello’s cruel accusations of unfaithfulness.

Poor Papa was hardly a warrior like Othello, though. The fact was that her dearest mama had been rampantly unfaithful to him, and he knew it. And so did Aunt Zenobia, though she was choosing to play ignorant.

“I really don’t see that the question is relevant,” Linnet put in. “Mama died some years ago now, and her fondness for royalty is neither here nor there.”

Her aunt threw her a swooning look. “I will always defend your mother, though she lies in the cold, cold grave.”

Linnet slumped back in her corner. True, her mother was in the grave. And frankly, she thought she missed her mother more than Zenobia did, given that the sisters had fought bitterly every time they met. Mostly over men, it had to be admitted. Though to her credit, her aunt wasn’t nearly as trollopy as her mama had been.

“It’s the beauty,” her father was saying. “It’s gone to Linnet’s head, just as it went to Rosalyn’s. My wife thought beauty gave her license to do whatever she liked—”

“Rosalyn never did anything untoward!” Zenobia interrupted.

“She skirted respectability for years,” Lord Sundon continued, raising his voice. “And now her daughter has followed in her footsteps, and Linnet is ruined. Ruined!”

Zenobia opened her mouth—and then snapped it shut. There was a pause. “Rosalyn is hardly the question here,” she said finally, patting her hair. “We must concentrate on dear Linnet now. Stand up, dear.”

Linnet stood up.

“Five months, I’d say,” Zenobia stated. “How on earth you managed to hide that from me, I don’t know. Why, I was as shocked as anyone last night. The Countess of Derby was quite sharp with me, thinking I’d been concealing it. I had to admit that I knew nothing of it, and I’m not entirely sure she believed me.”

“I am not carrying a child,” Linnet said, enunciating the words slowly.

“She said the same last night,” her father confirmed. “And earlier this morning, she didn’t look it.” But he peered at her waist. “Now she does.”

Linnet pushed down the cloth that billowed out just under her breasts. “See, I’m not
enceinte
. There’s nothing there but cloth.”

“My dear, you’ll have to tell us sometime,” Zenobia said, taking out a tiny mirror and peering at herself. “It’s not as if it’s going anywhere. At this rate, you’ll be bigger than a house in a matter of a few months. I myself retired to the country as soon as my waistline expanded even a trifle.”

“What are we going to do with her?” her father moaned, collapsing into a chair as suddenly as a puppet with cut strings.

“Nothing you can do,” Zenobia said, powdering her nose. “No one wants a cuckoo in the nest. You’ll have to send her abroad and see if she can catch someone there, after all this unpleasantness is over, of course. You’d better double her dowry. Thankfully, she’s an heiress. Someone will take her on.”

She put down her powder puff and shook her finger at Linnet. “Your mother would be very disappointed, my dear. Didn’t she teach you anything?”

“I suppose you mean that Rosalyn should have trained her in the arts of being as dissipated as she herself was,” her father retorted. But he was still drooping in his seat, and had obviously lost his fire.

“I did not sleep with the prince,” Linnet said, as clearly and as loudly as she could. “I might have done so, obviously. Perhaps if I had, he would have felt constrained to marry me now. But I chose not to.”

Her father groaned and dropped his head onto the back of his chair.

“I didn’t hear that,” Zenobia said, narrowing her eyes. “At least royalty is some sort of excuse. If this child is the result of anything less than ducal blood, I don’t want to hear a word about it.”

“I didn’t—” Linnet tried.

Her aunt cut her off with a sharp gesture. “I just realized, Cornelius, that this might be the saving of you.” She turned to Linnet. “Tell us who fathered that child, and your father will demand marriage. No one below a prince would
dare
to refuse him.”

Without pausing for breath, she swung back to her brother-in-law. “You might have to fight a duel, Cornelius. I suppose you have pistols somewhere in this house, don’t you? Didn’t you threaten to fight one with Lord Billetsford years ago?”

“After finding him in bed with Rosalyn,” Linnet’s father said. He didn’t even sound mournful, just matter-of-fact. “New bed; we’d had it only a week or two.”

“My sister had many passions,” Zenobia said fondly.

“I thought you just said she was white as snow!” the viscount snapped back.

“None of them touched her soul! She died in a state of grace.”

No one was inclined to argue with this, so Zenobia continued. “At any rate, you’d better pull out those pistols, Cornelius, and see if they still work. You might have to threaten to kill the man. Though in my experience if you double the dowry, it’ll all come around quickly enough.”

“There’s no man to shoot,” Linnet said.

Zenobia snorted. “Don’t tell me you’re going to try for virgin birth, my love. I can’t imagine that it worked very well back in Jerusalem. Every time the bishop talks about it at Christmastime, I can’t help thinking that the poor girl must have had a miserable time trying to get people to believe her.”

“I can’t imagine why you’re bringing scripture into this conversation,” Linnet’s father said. “We’re talking about princes, not gods.”

Linnet groaned. “This dress just makes me look plump.”

Zenobia sank into a chair. “Do you mean to tell me that you
aren’t
carrying a child?”

“I’ve been saying that. I didn’t sleep with the prince, or anyone else either.”

There was a mournful pause while the truth at last sunk in. “God Almighty, you’re ruined, and you didn’t even eat the gingerbread,” her aunt said, finally. “What’s more, just displaying your waistline to its best advantage would be no help at this point. People would simply assume that you had, as one might say, taken care of the problem.”

“After the prince refused her to marry her,” the viscount said heavily. “I’d assume it myself, under the circumstances.”

“It’s unfair,” Linnet said fiercely. “With Mama’s—ah—reputation, people naturally expected that I might be rather flirtatious—”

“That’s an understatement,” her father said. “They thought you’d be a baggage, and now they know you’re one. Except you’re not.”

“It’s the beauty,” her aunt said, preening a little. “The women in my family are simply cursed by our beauty. Look at dear Rosalyn, dying so young.”

“I don’t see that it’s cursed
you
,” the viscount said, rather rudely.

“Oh, but it has,” Zenobia said. “It has, it has, it has. It taught me what could have been, had I not had the chains of birth holding me back. I could have graced the world’s stages, you know. Rosalyn too. I expect that’s why she was so—”

“So what?” the viscount said, leaping on it.

“Irresistible,” Zenobia said.

Linnet’s father snorted. “Impure, more like.”

“She knew that she could have married the finest in the land,” Zenobia said. “And you see, that same dream caught our darling Linnet in its coils and now she’s ruined.”

“Rosalyn could not have married the finest in the land,” the viscount said. “There’s a reason for the Royal Marriage Laws, you know.” He pointed a finger at Linnet. “Didn’t you even think of that before you created such a scandal with young Augustus? For Christ’s sake, everyone knows that he up and married a German woman a few years ago. In Rome, I believe. The king himself had to get involved and annul the marriage.”

“I didn’t know until yesterday,” Linnet said. “When the prince told me so.”

“No one tells girls that sort of thing,” her aunt said dismissively. “If you were so worried about her, Cornelius, why didn’t you trot around to those parties and watch over her yourself?”

“Because I was busy! And I found a woman to chaperone her, since you were too lazy to do it yourself. Mrs. Hutchins. Perfectly respectable in every way, and seemed to grasp the problem, too. Where is that woman? She assured me that she would keep your name as white as the driven snow.”

“She refused to come downstairs.”

“Afraid to face the music,” he muttered. “And where’s your governess? She’s another one. I told her
and
told her that you had to be twice as chaste to make up for your mother’s reputation.”

“Mrs. Flaccide took insult last night when you said she was a limb of Satan and accused her of turning me into a doxy.”

“I’d had a spot or two of drink,” her father said, looking utterly unrepentant. “I drowned my sorrows after I was told to my face—to my face!— that my only daughter had been debauched.”

“She left about an hour later,” Linnet continued. “And I doubt she’s coming back, because Tinkle says that she took a great deal of silver with her.”

“The silver is irrelevant,” Zenobia said. “You should never make the best servants angry, because they invariably know where all the valuables are kept. Far more important, I expect your governess knew all about any billets-doux that royal twig might have sent you?”