Not Quite a Lady (The Dressmakers 4)

“You know very well I will not—cannot—refuse when you put it that way,” Darius said. “When does my year start?”

“Now,” said Lord Hargate.

Cheshire

Saturday 15 June 1822

The pig’s name was Hyacinth.

She lay in her pen, patiently nursing her numerous offspring. The fattest and most fertile sow in the county, she was the pride of her owner, the Marquess of Lithby, and the envy of his neighbors.

Lord Lithby leaned on the sty fence, admiring his favorite swine.

The young woman standing beside him was thinking that she and the sow had a good deal in common, both being prize specimens upon whom his lordship doted.

Lady Charlotte Hayward was seven and twenty years old. Lord Lithby’s only child by his first marriage, she was his only daughter and his pride and joy.

Society’s sharpest critics could not fault her looks. They agreed that she was neither too short nor too tall, neither too plump nor too thin. Pale gold hair framed a face that met all the standards of classic beauty: Wedgwood blue eyes, an elegant nose, and Cupid’s bow lips, all of which a porcelain complexion set off most artistically. The many women who envied her found, to their exasperation, that it was impossible to hate her, because she was so good-natured, generous, and gracious.

They had no idea how much work it was to be Lady Charlotte Hayward, and would have been flabbergasted to learn she envied a pig.

She was wondering what it was like to roll about in the mud and root in the muck and not care what anyone thought, when her father said, “Charlotte, you really must marry, you know.”

Her insides froze, and I really must kill myself, she thought.

Within, it was as though she looked down from a cliff edge into an abyss. Outwardly, she offered no sign of uneasiness. Concealing undesirable emotions was second nature, after all.

She turned an affectionate smile upon her father. She knew he loved her dearly. He didn’t mean to make her desperate. He had no idea what he was asking of her.

How could she marry, and risk her secret being found out on her wedding night? The man whose property she’d become—how would he react if he realized his bride was not a virgin? How would she react? Could she lie well enough to persuade him he was mistaken? Did she want to begin her marriage with a lie? But how could she trust any man with the truth? How could she reveal her secret to him? How could she admit to all the betrayals she’d committed, and risk further betrayals of those she loved?

She’d asked herself these and many other questions long ago. She’d pictured all the possible outcomes in her mind.

She’d decided she’d better die a spinster.

She could not say so to Papa. It was unnatural for a woman to wish to remain single.

Since it was equally unnatural for a father to wish such a thing for his daughter, she could not be surprised at his bringing up the subject. Another father would have done so years ago. She ought to be grateful for the period of freedom she’d had. Yet she wondered, Why now? And she couldn’t help thinking, unhappily, Why ever?

“A girl ought to marry, I know, Papa,” she said.

But I can’t, she thought. I cannot marry with this secret burdening me, and I cannot reveal it.

“You have been too unselfish for too long,” her father said, innocently unaware how he stabbed her guilty conscience. “I know you have put off your own happiness in order to be of help to your stepmother during her confinements. I know you love her. I know you love your little brothers. But my dear, it is time for you to have a household of your own, and children of your own.”

Oh, it cut deep then, the grief, deeper than it had done in a long time.

Children of her own.

But he didn’t know the truth of what had happened ten years ago. He didn’t know what he was saying to her. He didn’t know how it hurt. He must never know.

“I blame myself,” her father went on. “I have made a selfish habit of treating you like the son I thought I’d never have. Even now, though you’ve four brothers in the nursery, the habit is hard to break.”

Her mother had died when she was not fifteen years old. To her shock, her father had wed again only a year later. Her stepmother Lizzie, a mere nine years older than she, was more like an older sister than a mother…though Charlotte had failed to grasp this at the time. Stupid, so stupid she’d been.

“You’ve spoiled me, that is the trouble,” her father went on. “Not once since that terrible time when you were ill have you given me reason to worry or grieve. Instead, you’ve given of yourself—to all of us.”

After bearing the baby he knew nothing about, she had been ill, truly, for a long time. After that terrible time, she’d vowed she never would again cause anyone she cared about a moment’s anxiety or sorrow or shame. She’d done enough damage—damage she could never undo—to last a lifetime.

“Perhaps, too, I did not think any of the young men who swarmed about you could properly appreciate you,” Papa continued, explaining his thinking as he’d always done with her. “Naturally, you are kind to all your admirers, though not overly so, for your behavior is always above reproach. Yet none, I think, truly engaged your affections?”

“None,” she said. “It is merely fate, I suppose.”

“I am not sure one ought to trust to fate,” he said. “It worked in my favor, I readily admit. I was lonely after your mother died. I might have made a foolish mistake.”

She, too, had been lonely after her mother died. When her father remarried, Charlotte had been—oh, she could hardly remember now, beyond a general recollection of a great misery. She had been vulnerable, at any rate. And Geordie Blaine had been there to take advantage.

Her father was too kind to remind her of the mistake he believed she’d almost made. He thought he’d sent Blaine packing before any real harm was done.

Even the two people who knew the truth never reminded her.

Charlotte didn’t need reminding.

Her father turned to her, his grey eyes unusually serious. Lord Lithby was a cheerful man, and most of the time his eyes sparkled with good humor. “Life is unpredictable, my dear. We cannot be sure of anything, except that we will all die one day.”

Not many months ago a fever had nearly killed him.

Her gloved hands tightened on the sty fence. “Oh, Papa, I wish you would not say such things.”

“Death is inevitable,” he said. “In the winter when I was so beastly ill, I thought of so much left undone. One of my great anxieties was you. When I was gone, who would look after you?”

Servants, she thought. Lawyers. Trustees. An heiress could always pay someone to look after her, and there would never be a shortage of people willing to take the job. The last girl in the world who needed a husband was a rich girl.

Charlotte was a very rich girl. Her mother’s marriage settlement had included a generous provision for offspring. The marriage having produced only one child, Charlotte’s portion was considerable even for the daughter of a marquess.

“I’m sorry to be a worry to you,” she said.

He dismissed this with a wave of his hand. “Fathers are supposed to fret about their children. This is hardly a worry. It is simply a problem to be solved. Granted, I have never tried matchmaking before. I have given the business a great deal of thought, however. Once I was well again, I began to observe closely what went on during the Season.”

The London Season was, among other things, the time for unwed aristocrats to find mates. Like the other unmarried ladies, Charlotte dutifully attended all the required social functions. Like the others, she put herself on display at the weekly subscription balls at Almack’s Assembly Rooms, to which only the cream of Society was admitted—for the meritorious purpose, it seemed to her, of confining excruciating boredom to a small, select circle.

“Most girls find a husband during the Season,” Lord Lithby said. “But you have had eight Seasons. Since one cannot fault your behavior, the fau

lt must lie elsewhere. Having studied the matter, I have arrived at two conclusions: Firstly, the method is too haphazard. Secondly, London offers too many distractions. We must approach the problem scientifically, you see.”

Lord Lithby was an agriculturalist. A member of the Philosophical Society, he was constantly reading pamphlets or writing papers on farming. He went on to explain that some of the principles employed in agriculture might be applied to human beings. What one needed was a system, and he had devised one.

He had no idea how careful his daughter had been not to achieve the desired result. He had no idea how scientifically she had approached the problem of How Not to Get Married. Charlotte had devised a system years ago and continued to refine it.

She had been blind once about a man. Never again.

Thanks to the prolonged illness—of spirit as well as body—resulting from that error, she had made her debut belatedly at the age of twenty. Long before then, though, she was studying the gentlemen of her social circle, gauging their characters as carefully as her father gauged the characteristics of his turnips and beans, his cows and sheep and pigs. As her father studied ways to make his livestock and crops thrive, she studied ways to make men’s interest wane.