Never Trust a Rake

It made her feel a bit like one of those performing monkeys in a travelling circus. Especially when Miss Waverley added, ‘But once the novelty has worn off, she will drop you again and you will sink back into obscurity where you belong.’

Like those performing monkeys, shut back in their cages once the show was over.

With that, Miss Waverley lifted her skirts and swirled away, leaving Henrietta standing stock still in the corridor. She was rather shaken by that display of venom, which was, in her view, completely out of proportion. Miss Waverley, she mused as she pulled herself together and set out for the drawing room where she’d left her aunt and cousin, must be all about in her head. For one thing, had Henrietta not intervened, she would have been at the centre of the most almighty scandal. Though she was not to know that. She had no idea what kind of a man she’d attempted to manipulate. That she’d done the equivalent of poking her hand through the bars of a lion’s cage.

And as for predicting that she would sink back into obscurity—well! If the members of the ton were all like Miss Waverley, and those yahoos who’d invaded her drawing room and flung insults left, right and centre, then the sooner they lost interest in her the better. She had only accepted the invitation here tonight because she’d seen it would mean so much to her aunt and cousin. And they, she observed from the doorway, were now enjoying themselves immensely. Not only had Lord Deben convinced the waiters to serve them, but in the short time she’d been out of the room, Mildred had managed to acquire a brace of admirers. One of them was leaning over the back of the sofa and trying to murmur in her ear, and the other, who had pulled up a spindly chair to her side, was shooting him dagger looks.

Neither of them were in earnest, she didn’t suppose, and anyway, Mildred had learned a salutary lesson the afternoon of the brawl. Men of this class did not take women of her class seriously. They might flirt with her, but behind all the flattery lurked a contempt for her background that would prevent any but the most desperate fortune hunter from offering her anything more than carte blanche. Whereas Mr Crimmer, for all that he was cursed with a stutter and a fatal tendency to blush, had more than proved the strength of his feelings with his fists.

She took her place on the sofa on the far side of her aunt from Mildred, so as not to interrupt her light-hearted flirtation, and flicked open her fan. How soon would they be able to go home? And how soon after that would she be able to return to Much Wakering, and the very obscurity Miss Waverley had taunted her with as though it would be some kind of punishment? She sighed. Although she wrote regularly to her father, it seemed an age since she had seen him.

Perhaps he would come up to town for a meeting, or a lecture. He often took off at a moment’s notice, after having read an advertisement in the paper.

Her hand slowed and stilled, as she imagined him going to one of his meetings, and unexpectedly hearing her name bandied about in the way Miss Waverley had just described, for Miss Waverley was never going to let the matter drop. She was so angry about having her plan to entrap Lord Deben thwarted that she would most likely take every chance she got to blacken Henrietta’s name. And she was so popular with the men that she would never lack an audience.

A cold sensation gnawed at the pit of her stomach. She did not care for herself, but her father would be terribly upset to find he’d pitched her into such an uncomfortable situation.

Not to mention her brothers. When they returned home on leave, what would it do to them to find their sister talked about in that horrid way?

Oh, they would understand without having to be told how it was that their absent-minded father had come to send her to stay with the Ledbetters, which was what had led to the general assumption that she had a background in trade, but it would not make their chagrin on her behalf any the less. And even though Lady Dalrymple

had enlightened some people, there were others, like Miss Waverley, who would prefer to believe the worst.

But it wasn’t that, so much, which would worry her whole family. It was the nature of her entanglement with Lord Deben. She had done absolutely nothing wrong, but Miss Waverley was sure to make it sound just as bad as it could be.