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‘Yes. And that he cut you off without a penny to your name, as though it was something to be proud of,’ put in the Duchess grimly.
‘Yes. And I don’t suppose even my mother has ever said one word in my defence…’
‘The poor creature was so browbeaten by that bully she married I don’t suppose she dared,’ said the Duchess.
‘No, she wouldn’t,’ said Cassandra, marvelling at how clearly the Duchess saw what had happened back then. She wondered if perhaps her mother had written to her, explaining, and asking her to help her only daughter… No, no, that couldn’t be it. Stepfather would never allow any kind of missive to leave the house without scrutinising it carefully.
‘But if I,’ continued the Duchess, ‘were to spread a rumour that it was all a plot he made up to swindle you out of your inheritance, plenty of people would be ready to believe it nowadays. Because, let me tell you, my dears, since the time he turned you out of doors he has shown his true colours often enough that he is generally held in aversion.’
‘But, Your Grace, that is not true! I mean, yes, I’m sure he did leap at the chance to get his hands on what money should have come to me, because he is that sort of man. But he didn’t have to make up any scandal about me. I did run away with a soldier, you know, and I did return home unmarried…’
The Duchess held up her hand to stop her saying anything further. ‘I am glad that you are being so frank with me. But you cannot restore your reputation if you go round blurting out the truth to all and sundry.’
Cassandra’s heart gave a little lurch. Could it be possible? Could she really slough off the cloud of disgrace she could always feel hanging over her head, even when everyone was polite to her face these days? Could she find a place in polite society again? Become respectable once more?
But at what cost? ‘I won’t tell lies to try to persuade people I am something I am not,’ she said firmly.
‘There will be no need,’ said the Duchess after a pause. ‘From what you have just said, it sounds as if your so-called scandal was little more than a brief escapade, which could have been brushed over if your mother had not married such a monster.’
‘Well, yes, but…’ she clasped her hands at her waist as another barrier to the Duchess’s scheme sprang to mind ‘…am I not too old to make a come-out?’
‘Not at all. You cannot be more than twenty years of age?’
‘I am three and twenty.’
‘You look much younger. Besides, there are plenty of men who do not want a bride right out of the schoolroom. Someone more mature, with a bit of sense. And you are so pretty that I am sure there will be someone who is willing to overlook all that other business,’ she said, waving her hand to dismiss Cassandra’s Fatal Error as though it was no more than a bothersome fly.
‘But… I’m not at all sure I wish to marry,’ said Cassandra with a guilty look at her aunts, whose views on marriage she had begun to absorb. ‘I am very happy here.’
‘I am sure you are,’ said the Duchess soothingly. ‘And if you don’t find a husband and wish to come back here after your Season, why, of course you may. But there’s more to having a Season than catching a husband. There are all the balls and parties, and picnics and shopping, and visiting the theatre, and galleries and exhibitions. I vow and declare you deserve to enjoy all that has been so long denied you—through, I’m sure, no fault of your own.’
‘That’s true, Cassandra,’ said Aunt Cordelia. ‘And even though we both turned our backs on society, at least we had the luxury of choosing to do so.’
‘You see?’ The Duchess turned to Cassandra with a smile of triumph. ‘Your aunts would love you to be able to find a husband, if that would make you happy, even if it wasn’t for them,’ she declared with a candour that was slightly shocking.
‘And even if your experiences have put you off men altogether, that is no reason not to come to London with me. Wouldn’t you like to go to balls and see the sights, Cassy darling?’
Cassy twisted the hands she still held clasped at her waist. Because not five minutes earlier, she had been wishing for just that very thing. And to be honest, if she could find a man like her real papa, a man who’d been kind and jolly from what she could remember of him, then she wouldn’t mind marrying, either. For one thing it would mean she wouldn’t have to work for her living any longer. And for another, she might have children. Adorable little chubby babies, who’d grow into people who would love her.
‘You know,’ pointed out Aunt Eunice, gruffly, just as Cassy had begun to get a real pang of longing to feel a warm little bundle in her arms, while another pair of youthful arms hugged her knees, ‘it wouldn’t do you any harm to go up to Town just to see the latest fashions being worn.’
‘And visit some of the silk warehouses and see what’s on offer,’ said Aunt Cordelia.
‘There, you see? These dear ladies are in agreement. Even if you cannot find a husband, there are plenty of other useful things you can do in town. And we shall have such fun,’ said the Duchess, clapping her dainty little hands in delight. ‘Oh, I knew this was going to answer.’
‘Well,’ said Cassandra, wondering why she was bothering to argue when everyone in the room, including her, thought that a trip to London was just what she needed. ‘It is very good of you, Your Grace…’
‘Oh, don’t start off calling me that. I am your godmother and it will be of the utmost importance to remind everyone of that fact. So you had better get into the habit of calling me Godmama right away. And as for being good,’ she added with a rather mischievous grin, ‘that is not altogether true. Since you have been honest with me, my dear, it is only fair that I return the favour by being completely honest with you.’ She cleared her throat. ‘You see, although it is true that, for a while, at one point in our lives, your mother and I were great friends, that is not the only reason I have offered to bring you out.’ She tilted her head to one side, setting her golden ringlets dancing, and smiled in what Cassandra thought of as a positively coaxing manner.
‘It is my stepson,’ she said, her smile fading. ‘He has practically ordered me to leave Town and go to live in the Dower House. Which I shall never do! I have such horrid memories of my years at Theakstone Court that I vowed never to set foot anywhere on the estate ever again. But when I told him so, he said I would have no choice if he were to turn off all the London servants. Well…’ she leaned back as both aunts gasped in outrage ‘…that was all he knew! For the moment I warned the staff of his threats, they all swore they would stay on without wages, if necessary. Isn’t that loyal of them? The dears. Which meant that of course I could not abandon them, either. And so I started cudgelling my brains for a solution which would mean that we could all stay on in Grosvenor Square. Which,’ she said, holding out her hand to Cassandra in a way that looked like an appeal for help, ‘is where you come in…’
Chapter Two
Colonel Nathaniel Fairfax stood for a moment just inside the doorway of the ballroom, scouting the terrain. Dance floor directly ahead, full of couples performing complicated manoeuvres at the trot. To his right, a dowagers’ bench, fully occupied by well-fed matrons. Beyond them, a trio of fiddlers sawing away industriously. There were two exits, he noted, apart from the doorway in which he was standing. One led to a refreshment room, to judge from the tables he could spy through the crowds gathered there, and the other led to the outside. A terrace, probably. Most houses of this size had them.
There was a sort of corridor between the terrace door and the dance floor, formed by a set of pillars, and several strategically placed urns stuffed with foliage behind which sharpshooters could crouch, should they wish to prevent uninvited guests getting in through any set of doors.
Not that he was expecting to encounter sharpshooters in a ballroom. Though he was scouting the terrain for something potentially far more dangerous.
A woman.
She wasn’t one of the ladies cavorting about the dance floor. Only a couple of them had dark hair, but neither of them were anywhere near as pretty as he recalled her being.
She was not on the dowagers’ bench. Not unless she’d aged a couple of decades and put on several stone in weight during the six years since he’d last clapped eyes on her.
Was she among the crowd loitering in the corridor by the terrace doors? That was where a lot of young females were standing, watching the dancers, and fluttering their fans. He ran his eyes along the rank of them. A tall thin blonde, a short squat ginger piece, a medium-sized brunette with…
Good God. His sister, Issy, had not lied. She was here. Cassandra Furnival. Brazenly pushing her way back into society when by rights she ought never dare show her face. But then he should already have known she was brazen. Why hadn’t he learned his lesson when it came to her behaviour? She was the kind of girl who could entice a man to follow her out into a moonlit stable yard and almost make him forget the moral code by which he lived. The kind of girl who could, not one month later, entice an entirely different man to elope with her.
And that when she’d been scarce out of the schoolroom.
Back then she’d been pretty enough to cause two officers within the same regiment to lose their heads over her. Since then she’d only grown lovelier. To look at, that was. According to Issy, all that loveliness concealed the heart of an avaricious, designing baggage.
‘Nate,’ Issy had wailed, with tears trickling down her face, ‘if you don’t do something about her I don’t know who can.’
‘Do?’ He’d flung down his pen in exasperation, since not only had she burst into his study unannounced, but had also taken a chair even though she could see he was busy. And the tears meant she was not going to leave until she’d said her piece. ‘What do you expect me to do?’
‘Stop her! Before she gets some other unsuspecting male in her clutches and wheedles his fortune out of him, the way she did to poor Lady Agatha’s brother.’
Typical of Issy to use such emotionally charged words, in such a biased manner when, from what he’d observed of Lieutenant Gilbey and Miss Furnival, they’d both been equally culpable.
‘And just how,’ he’d said rather irritably, ‘do you think I could do such a thing? Even if you could convince me it was any of my business, which I don’t believe it is.’
Besides which, he had no wish to browbeat any female. It was not behaviour befitting an officer of His Majesty’s Army.
‘Of course it is your business! Lady Agatha’s brother was one of your junior officers. You can’t have forgotten poor Lieutenant Gilbey, can you?’
No, he hadn’t forgotten the lovelorn young man. He hadn’t forgotten any of the men who’d died while serving under his command. His life would now be far less uncomfortable if he only could.
‘Surely,’ Issy had persisted, ‘you can see that you owe it to his memory, to…to his family, too, who are all devastated to learn that Furnival girl is trying to worm her way back into society.’
He did owe the fallen a great deal. And their families. But surely not to the extent of coming the heavy with Miss Furnival? Not the Miss Furnival he recalled, anyway. She’d seemed a rather timid little thing, not this brazen harpy his sister was describing.
‘If she is as bad as you claim—’ and he wasn’t totally convinced of it ‘—I hardly think anyone is likely to receive her. You are probably making a fuss over nothing, Issy.’
‘It’s not nothing! Not to Lady Agatha. She was so cut up when she heard that girl had been taken up by that pea goose the Duchess of Theakstone that she left Town for fear she might accidentally come face to face with the designing baggage who cast her spell over her poor deluded brother.’
There had been a good deal more of the same. About how she’d brought some friend with her, too, who was from a background of trade and had no place in society ballrooms at all. Until, seeing that the only way he would be able to get his sister to leave him in peace to get on with his work would be to say that he would see what he could do.
Even though he had suspected much of what Issy claimed as fact would probably turn out to have no substance. He’d been certain that nobody would invite the girl anywhere, after what she’d done, even if she had taken up residence in London.
And so he hadn’t got as far as working out what he could really do about her, even if he did run her to ground.
So, for a moment, all he could do was stand stock still, staring at her. Just staring at her. Until she bent to listen to something the short, ginger girl was saying, and laughed.
Laughed!
As though she hadn’t a care in the world. When he…
He flinched as a series of stark and dreadful images surged to the forefront of his mind. Images he kept firmly locked away behind a sort of door in his memory. A good portion of them relating to Lieutenant Gilbey.
Gilbey sitting with his head in his hands. Gilbey pacing back and forth, his face tortured, after reading one of those damned letters she’d sent him. Gilbey’s shattered body staining the snow scarlet…
He found himself stalking across the room, dazed to discover that Issy had been right. And, that being the case, he did have to do something. Even though he didn’t know exactly what. Because, even though the hostess, Lady Bunsford, was hardly a leader of society, if the Furnival girl had got in here she would not stop until she’d gained the objective Issy had painted in such lurid colours. And that he could not allow.
The very moment he began to stalk towards her, she turned, as though sensing his interest. Looked at him. Frowned a bit, as though trying to work out why his face looked familiar.
And then her face lit up. As though she was delighted to see him again.
The power of that smile almost, almost made him falter. It was so warm. So welcoming. And promised so much. For a moment or two it felt as if she’d cast some kind of net, formed from invisible gossamer threads, and that she was reeling him in rather than him marching across a crowded ballroom to challenge her because that was his choice. The same way she’d done the very first time he’d met her, at that assembly near where the regiment had been based for a time. All she’d had to do, that long-ago night, was to look over her shoulder at him, wistfully, as she went through a door that would take her to the stable yard, and he’d trotted after her like a…like a dog called to heel. Even though he’d resisted the temptation to ask her to dance before that moment. Even though she was too young for him. For any man, so he’d thought. She’d been all promise. Blossom. Not ready to be plucked. And yet, oh, so damned alluring.
It was her mouth. The way the top lip pouted, as though inviting a man to suck it into his own mouth and…
No, it was her eyes. The liveliness that danced in them, making a man yearn to drown in their greeny-brown depths…
No, it was her skin. Which wasn’t blandly perfect like that of so many debutantes who reminded him of brittle porcelain. It was creamy and warm, and dotted here and there with moles which made his fingers itch to trace the course of their intriguing pattern…
‘Colonel Fairfax,’ she said, holding out her hand with the practised grace of a seasoned seductress.
No man could have resisted taking it, bending over it and bestowing the kiss she demanded. Least of all, as it turned out, him. Which infuriated him.
‘How delightful to see you again,’ she cooed, ‘after all this time.’
He straightened up and dropped her hand. Just because he acknowledged her beauty, her allure, it did not mean he was going to fall under her spell. Thanks to Issy he knew what she was, now, what she was capable of. Saying she was delighted to see him again, for instance. Making him believe, with the radiance of that smile, that she meant it when he knew it must be impossible. She was too young, too lovely to genuinely have any interest in a dried-up husk of a man like him.
‘Miss Furnival,’ he said, his wounded pride smarting so much that his voice sounded harsh, even to his own ears. ‘Still up to your pretty little neck in mischief, I see.’
The hand he’d just kissed flew to that neck, as though inviting his eyes to follow. Inviting his lips to do the same, at some later date. Or perhaps his teeth. If she was everything Issy had said, then she wouldn’t care which.
Even though he’d just thrown down the gauntlet? Perhaps because he’d challenged her. Perhaps it was a declaration that she would fight back, with all the weapons in her arsenal. And a fight it was to be, now, he realised with a pang of what felt like loss. The warmth had gone from her smile. From a distance it probably looked the same, but this close to her, close enough to smell the floral fragrance she was wearing, he knew different.
‘Mischief?’ She gave a little frown, as though she could not understand what he could possibly be implying. ‘Whatever do you mean?’
For a moment, he wished she really didn’t have any idea what he meant. That they were not on opposing sides. That he’d been able to bask in the warmth of that first smile, rather than having to make it freeze in place. That he could have taken her hand without reservation and begun to converse with her the way any man would talk to a pretty woman he’d met and felt drawn to.
But that outcome had never been possible. When they’d first met, he’d known he would shortly be going abroad and that he might be away too long to even suggest, let alone hope, she might wait for him. Known that she’d been too young for him and now…now his mission made fraternising with her an impossibility.
He tore his eyes from her before her loveliness gained sufficient power to weaken his resolve and focused on the girl next to her. The girl Issy had told him was the daughter of a mill owner. ‘To begin with, foisting a girl like that,’ he said to Miss Furnival, though he kept on looking at the ginger girl, ‘on to a featherbrained creature like the Duchess of Theakstone.’
The ginger girl flinched. Scowled. And, as he’d regained command of his wayward tendency to wish for the impossible, he turned his head to address Miss Furnival directly. ‘I don’t know how you have managed to persuade her to take part in one of your schemes, but I do know that you are encroaching upon her good nature.’
‘One of my schemes?’ Miss Furnival added a shake of her head to the mystified frown she’d manufactured for his benefit. ‘What schemes?’
‘Don’t think you can fool me by that look of innocence,’ he snarled at her through a mixture of bitterness and disappointment that she had, apparently, already done so once. ‘Nor anyone else, not for very long. There are those who know what you have done, what you are…’
She flung up her chin. ‘And what am I?’
Where to start? ‘An adventuress. A heartbreaker.’ Not that she’d broken his heart. He’d only got as far as wishing she was older, wishing he could get to know her better before the regiment left England, wishing he could ask her to consider waiting for him…
Thank goodness. Otherwise, when she’d turned up on the quayside, clinging to Gilbey’s arm as the lad stammered out his intention to marry her and carry her on board with them like so much baggage…
But then, according to Issy, she was a baggage, wasn’t she?
‘Do you think,’ he said, ‘I could ever forget what you did to Lieutenant Gilbey?’ According to Issy, that was. Although he still wasn’t completely convinced. And it wasn’t just because she was acting so surprised. Part of him really didn’t want to believe she could look so lovely, yet be so hard-hearted. Perhaps, if he flung her supposed crimes in her face, she would refute them in such a way that he could go back and inform his sister she’d been mistaken. ‘You cajoled him to make a runaway match of it,’ he ventured. ‘And then when I believed I’d managed to extricate him from your clutches, you still managed to wheedle his fortune out of him.’
‘You…got him out of my clutches?’ Her eyes widened, briefly, then turned hard.
His heart sank as she revealed a side of her he’d kept on hoping, right to this very minute, had been a figment of Issy’s imagination.
But then wasn’t that always the end result of hope? Shattering disappointment. Nothing ever lived up to a man’s expectations. Not military glory, not social preferment and most definitely not, he’d just discovered, a woman.
‘If that is your opinion of me,’ she said frostily, ‘then I fail to see that we have anything further to discuss.’ She turned aside as if to cut him. He prevented her from doing so by simply stepping sideways and so maintaining his position directly in front of her.
‘On the contrary,’ he said, bitterness and disappointment driving him further than anything Issy could have provoked from him. ‘I have come here tonight specifically to warn you that I have received intelligence as to your manoeuvres. I suppose you have run through Lieutenant Gilbey’s fortune by now. That is why you have come to London. You are hoping to be able to dupe some other gullible fool into loosening his purse strings.’ That was certainly what Issy believed. And, believing it, had not been able to sit back and watch Miss Furnival get away with it all over again.
‘I have no intention of doing any such thing,’ she denied hotly.
‘Why else would you be using the Duchess to parade you about town, if not to catch yourself a husband?’
She frowned. Glanced at her companion. Took a breath. But before she could utter a single excuse, he said, ‘You will not get away with it. I will not allow you to get away with it.’ Issy had been right. He owed it to Gilbey, and Gilbey’s family, and every other vulnerable male of marriageable age in England, to put a stop to her scheming before she could really get going.
‘Get away with it?’ Her eyes flashed with fury. ‘And just how, pray, do you intend to stop me?’
If he’d had any doubts about her plans before, that statement exposed them. Because he could not very well hinder non-existent plans, could he?
‘For a start,’ he said, thinking on his feet, while wishing he’d taken the precaution of forming some kind of contingency plan, ‘I shall inform the poor woman you have deceived into giving you house room exactly what you really are. And then I will make sure everyone knows that she,’ he said, indicating the ginger girl, ‘the one you claim is your friend, has no right to appear in decent society, either.’
‘Cassy…’ The ginger girl took hold of her arm, a look of concern on her face. He turned to address her.
‘My quarrel is not with you, miss. If you withdraw from society quietly, I shall pursue you no further. And if you—’ he turned to Miss Furnival once more ‘—confess your crimes to the Duchess, before any harm is done to her, and leave Town, I shall not expose you, either. I am, after all, a man of honour.’
‘A man of honour?’ Miss Furnival turned up her nose in scorn. ‘Men of honour go about interfering in matters that are of no concern to them, do they? Flexing their muscles and threatening defenceless females?’
He hadn’t flexed any muscles, in a literal sense, but somehow by referring to them he suddenly felt aware of several. One in particular that had been lying dormant for some years.
If she’d really been defenceless, that reaction might have given him pause. But she wasn’t. The ease with which she could arouse a man who’d been practically dead in that department just went to prove it. So he gave a bitter laugh.
‘Defenceless? You are about as defenceless as those sirens were, luring all those sailors to their deaths.’
She looked taken aback. It was a small victory, but one he was prepared to accept. And on the principle that it was better to withdraw while he had the advantage, he turned on his heel and quit the ballroom.