Never Trust a Rake

Well, now she knew better.

She popped one half of the biscuit into her mouth, consoling herself with the fact that at least she had not confided her romantic aspirations with regard to Richard to anyone. Which meant she was the only one who knew what a stupid, pathetic fool she’d been.

Unfortunately, it also made it quite impossible to go home. If she were to start talking about leaving, everyone would want to know why she wanted to cut her stay short. And she had no plausible excuse to give. She couldn’t possibly offend her dear Aunt Ledbetter by letting her think she was in any way responsible for her present unhappiness. And she was absolutely never going to let anybody know what a fool she’d made of herself over Richard. Her heart might be bruised, but at least her pride was still intact.

And that was the rub. If she insisted on going home without confessing the full truth, they would all assume she wanted to go back to the countryside because town life was, indeed, too much for her.

Given the choice between looking like a silly girl who’d pursued a man who didn’t love her to London, or a feeble-minded ninny who couldn’t cope with being more than five miles away from her parish church, or putting a brave face on it and staying in town when all the lustre had gone from the experience, Henrietta had decided on the latter course. She would stay in town.

Besides, she owed her aunt and cousin even more since her ignominious departure from Miss Twining’s ball. They had been so gracious about it. They had fussed over her in the coach when they’d seen her tears, and expressed the kind of sympathy for the fictitious headache she’d claimed which she had never in her life experienced before. She would never have invented a headache to explain her distress if she’d known how concerned they would be. She had just assumed they would pat her hand and send her to her room for a quiet lie down, like her brothers or her father would have done.

Instead, they’d come to her room with her, with vials of lavender water to dab on her temples, and had stayed with her while she drank a soothing tisane, sharing

anecdotes about their own monthly fluctuations in health until she’d been almost crushed with guilt.

Particularly as they’d both been so thrilled to get an invitation to the house of a genuine baronet—Aunt Ledbetter so that she could gossip over the details of the interior of a baronial town house with her circle of friends and Mildred because she hoped to attract the attention of one of the sons of the lower ranks of the nobility who were bound to fill the house. She had robbed them both of at least half their pleasure, just because she’d been unable to control her temper when she’d seen that cat Miss Waverley attempting to snare yet another poor unsuspecting man in her clutches.

Even when she’d tried to apologise, their response had heaped coals of fire on her head.

‘We would not have spent even that one hour in such elevated company had you not become friends with Miss Twining,’ Aunt Ledbetter had said. ‘In fact, I thought it most gracious of her to include us in your invitation at all.’

‘Yes,’ she had replied weakly. ‘Miss Twining is a lovely person.’ Which short statement had been the only truthful remark she could make about the entire affair. For she really had liked Julia Twining for the way she had not looked down her nose at Henrietta’s London connections, nor made any disparaging remarks about their background.

Unlike some people.

‘I cannot help wondering where on earth your father dredged up this set of relatives,’ Richard had said, eyeing her aunt askance on the one visit he’d paid to this very drawing room. ‘Never heard of ’em before you took it into your head you wanted a Season. And now I’ve met ’em, I’m not a bit surprised. Oh, not that there’s anything wrong with them, in their way. Cits often are very respectable. It’s just that they’re not the sort of people I want to mix with, while I’m in town. And if your father ever took his nose out of a book long enough to notice what’s what, he’d have known better than to send you to stay with people who can’t introduce you to anyone that matters, or take you any of the places a girl of your station ought to be seen.’