The Society Catch (Harlequin Historical)

by Allen, Louise

  ‘Badly.’

  ‘Tell me,’ she persisted gently.

  ‘He demanded to know what had happened to make me lose my nerve and to want to sell out, like some coward of a Hyde-Park soldier,’ Giles said harshly. Hebe gasped.

  ‘He doesn’t mean it.’ Giles continued more easily now the shaming words had been said. ‘He expects me to be a general too—and even younger than he had been. I think in his heart he knows why I am talking of selling out and he is railing against his own weakness, not mine.’

  ‘I shouldn’t think that makes it hurt any less,’ Hebe said, lifting her hand to touch it softly to his face. Giles turned his cheek against her knuckles, comforted. Lucky, lucky Alex.

  ‘No. And of course he knows he has been unjust and doesn’t know how to put it right. So he managed to find yet another sin to throw at my head to justify his anger.’

  ‘What else?’

  ‘He wants to know what I think I’m about, flirting with Lady Suzanne Hall and not making her an offer. Damn good catch, the old boy says with considerable understatement, and he isn’t going to stand by hearing stories about me trifling with her affections.’

  ‘Are you?’ Hebe asked.

  ‘Flirting or trifling?’

  ‘Intending to marry her,’ Hebe said tartly.

  ‘None of those things. I’ve known Suzy since I was ten and she was toddling. She’s the sister I never had and I’d as soon marry a cage full of monkeys. I feel nothing but the deepest sympathy for whichever poor idiot marries her. That girl is the most outrageous minx I have ever come across.’

  ‘So you are not in love with her?’ Hebe persisted.

  ‘I love the girl—but just as a sister—and she and her parents know it. She has been practising flirting and wheedling on me since she was eleven because she knows I’m safe and her mother likes me to squire her about when I’m in town because she knows I’m safe. I scare off the bucks and the fortune hunters and Suzy can play the little madam to her heart’s content.

  ‘But she’s probably the best catch of the Season, as my father is all too aware. Some old pussy has been telling him I was seen with her driving in the park and dancing with her rather too often and that’s enough for him. And that’s another thing,’ he added bitterly. ‘Her father didn’t want her to learn to drive because his own sister was hurt in a bad accident, so what must she do but wheedle me into persuading the poor man that I can teach her.’

  ‘Well, you are a very good whip, Giles,’ Hebe pointed out.

  ‘Yes, and I’m well known for not letting ladies drive my teams, so Father puts two and two together, gets six and then finds no sign of me doing the right thing. And, of course, as he points out, it’s about time I was getting married and setting up my nursery and look at Lord Tasborough with one heir to his name already and that pretty little wife of his increasing again…’

  ‘Oh, poor Giles,’ Hebe said with indignant sympathy. ‘You have been giving your head for a washing, haven’t you? What are you going to do? Oh, listen, I think that’s Alex.’

  The door opened to reveal the Earl, his face breaking into a grin when he saw who was with his wife.

  ‘Giles! No, don’t get up, stay there.’ He bent down and gave his friend a powerful buffet on the shoulder, wrung the hand that was held out to him, and dropped to the carpet by his side. ‘Are you here to stay? Is that why I find you here flirting with my wife?’

  ‘He isn’t flirting,’ Hebe said, half-anxious, half-laughing. ‘He thinks I’m expecting twins.’

  ‘Good God!’ The Earl twisted round to regard both his wife and friend. ‘Are you serious? And what do you know about it, might I ask?’

  ‘He says he’s delivered a baby.’

  ‘But not twins,’ Giles hastened to say. ‘No, don’t hit me! It is merely that kissing your delightful wife is like trying to reach her over a pile of sofa cushions and either someone’s mathematics are out, or it’s twins. Or triplets…’ he added wickedly, ducking away from Alex’s punch.

  ‘Oh, stop it!’ Hebe cried, slapping at black and blond heads impartially. ‘I might as well have two more small boys on my hands as you men. Giles is staying until we go back to Tasborough: he is having a perfectly horrible time at home. Giles, tell him.’

  Giles recounted his story again. When he reached his father’s reaction to his plan to sell out, Alex went quite still, then simply reached out and gripped his arm. Giles found his vision suddenly blurred and rapidly finished the rest of his tale.

  ‘Just how angry is the General?’ Alex asked. No one ever referred to Lord Gregory by his title.

  ‘Angry enough to disinherit me.’

  ‘Can he?’ Alex enquired.

  Giles shook his head with a rueful grin. The morning’s final, painful, interview was beginning to seem less painful and more farcelike now he could talk about it. ‘There’s the entail, and the money I inherited from Grandmama Ingham—he can’t do a thing about either of those. If he really puts his mind to it he can find about sixty acres and a couple of farms—and the furniture, of course—to leave elsewhere. But he doesn’t mean it.’

  ‘What will you do?’ Hebe was still not reassured.

  ‘I am under orders from Mama to come up to town and embark upon a life of reckless dissipation.’ He twisted round to smile at Hebe. ‘I’d already taken rooms at Albany as a pied-à-terre, but they aren’t fitted out yet, which is why I had hoped you’d take me in.’

  ‘Dissipation? But why?’

  ‘She says he will soon hear all about it and order me back home to be lectured. At which point he will decide that the best thing for me is to rusticate on the estate for a while.’

  Hebe laughed. ‘How clever of your mama! Of course, if he thinks you don’t want to do it and would rather be in London, then helping with the estate will be just the thing to punish the prodigal, and after a few weeks he’ll be so used to it, and will enjoy having you there so much, that you will get exactly the result you want.’

  ‘Has it ever occurred to you that your mother is a better strategist than your father?’ Alex enquired.

  ‘Frequently. She always outflanks him and the poor man can never understand how she has done it.’ He shifted his position and one hand flattened a sheet of paper, which crackled. ‘Sorry, I appear to be crushing the letter you were reading.’

  ‘Oh, goodness!’ Hebe exclaimed, taking the crumpled pages. ‘I had quite forgotten in the excitement of Giles arriving. It is from Aunt Emily,’ she explained to the two men. ‘She sent a footman with it this morning, just after you had left, Alex. It is the most incredible thing. She says she is to send Joanna to stay with her great-aunt in Bath because she is in disgrace.’

  ‘I will go into the library.’ Giles started to get up. ‘You will want to discuss this in private.’

  ‘No, stay, please. You are one of the family, Giles, and besides, you are staying here and will have to know what is going on.’ She started to re-read. ‘And it is not as though it is anything actually, er, indelicate.’

  ‘What, not an elopement with the apothecary or the unfortunate results of an amorous encounter with the footman?’ Alex enquired, earning a look of burning reproach from his wife.

  ‘I still think I had better leave,’ Giles persisted. ‘I can go to an hotel until my rooms are ready at Albany. Your aunt will want to call and discuss the problem, that is obvious, and she will not feel at ease if she knows I am staying here.’

  ‘Nonsense, Giles. We need you to help us get to the bottom of this puzzle. Aunt Emily says it all began at the Duchess of Bridlington’s ball. Joanna got drunk on champagne, flirted outrageously and then went on to commit just about every act in the list of things she could do to be labelled fast. And, to cap it all, she is wilfully refusing an offer from a highly eligible nobleman—discreetly unnamed.’

  ‘Joanna? Drunk on champagne?’ Alex looked incredulous. ‘That girl is a pattern-book of respectability and correct behaviour.’

  ‘The Duchess of
Bridlington’s ball?’ Giles sat down again. ‘Oh, lord.’ His friends looked at him incredulously. ‘Don’t look at me like that! I haven’t been seducing the girl! But I think I may have started her off on the wine—’ He broke off, his eyes unfocussed, looking back into the past. ‘You know, she had had a bad shock of some kind: that’s why I gave her a couple of glasses of champagne.’

  He had forgotten about his encounters with Joanna in the face of his estrangement with his father, but, looking back in the light of Mrs Fulgrave’s letter, things began to make sense. ‘At the ball I found her sitting outside one of the retiring rooms looking shocked,’ he began.

  ‘You mean someone might have said something risqué or unkind to her?’ Hebe ventured.

  ‘No, not that kind of shock.’ He remembered the blank look in those wide hazel eyes and suddenly realised what it reminded him of. ‘Alex, you know the effect their first battle had on some of the very young, very idealistic officers who came out to the Peninsula without any experience? The ones who thought that war was all glory and chivalry, bugles blowing and flags flying?’

  ‘And found it was blood and mud and slaughter. Men dying in something that resembled a butcher’s shambles, chaos and noise—’ Alex broke off and Hebe could see they were both somewhere else, somewhere she could never follow. ‘Yes, I remember. What are you saying?’

  ‘Joanna had the same look in her eyes as those lads had after their first battle, as though an ideal had disintegrated before her and her world was in ruins. She was white, her hands were shaking. I asked her what was wrong, but she would not tell me. I assumed it was a man. We talked of neutral subjects for a while. After two glasses of champagne she was well enough to waltz, which helped, I think. Movement often does in cases of shock—’ He broke off, remembering the supple, yielding figure in his arms, those wide hazel eyes that seemed to look trustingly into his soul, his instinct to find and hurt the man who had so obviously hurt her.

  They discussed the matter a little more, speculating on the spurned suitor to no purpose and, after a while, left Hebe to rest.

  Giles went up to his usual room. While Alex’s valet unpacked for him he paced restlessly, fighting the urge to drive straight back home to see how his father was. To distract himself from his cantankerous parent, he thought about Joanna Fulgrave. To his surprise he found he was dwelling pleasurably on the memory. He frowned, trying to convince himself that he was merely intrigued by what had turned a previously biddable débutante into a fast young lady. But there was more than that, something that lay behind the desperate hurt in those lovely eyes, something which seemed to speak directly to him.

  He shifted in the comfortable wing chair where he had finally come to rest. His body was responding to thoughts of Miss Fulgrave in a quite inappropriate way.

  It was two months since he had parted from his Portuguese mistress. There were, of course, the ladies of negotiable virtue who flourished in town. They had not featured on his mother’s list of dissipated activities that she had suggested to him. ‘Cards, dearest, drink—I know you have a hard head for both, so they are safe. Be seen in all the most notorious places. Perhaps buy a racehorse? Flirt, of course, but no young débutantes, that goes without saying… Do you know any fast matrons?’

  ‘Only you, Mama,’ he had retorted, smiling into her amused grey eyes.

  After an hour, Hebe, thoroughly bored with resting, summoned both men back to her salon, announcing that she had not the slightest idea what she could do to assist her aunt.

  ‘Send Giles to listen sympathetically,’ Alex was suggesting idly when there was the sound of the knocker. ‘Who can that be?’

  Starling appeared in the doorway. ‘Mrs Fulgrave, my lady.’ He flattened himself against the door frame as Emily Fulgrave almost ran into the room, ‘Oh, Hebe, my dear, Alex… Oh!’ Both her niece and the Earl regarded her with consternation from the chaise where Alex was sitting beside Hebe who, he had insisted, was to stay lying down for at least another hour. Mrs Fulgrave burst into tears.

  It took quite five minutes and a dose of sal volatile before she could command herself again. Giles, his escape cut off by a flurry of hastily summoned maid-servants and general feminine bustle, retreated to the far side of the room, hoping that his presence would not be marked. Hysterical matrons, he felt, were even less his style than fast ones.

  Finally Hebe managed to ask what was wrong. Her aunt regarded her over her handkerchief and managed to gasp, ‘Joanna has run away.’

  Eventually the whole story was extracted. Joanna had vanished from her room, but was not missed until it was time for luncheon because she was assumed to be hiding herself away until her unwanted suitor was due that afternoon and Mr Fulgrave was not in a mood to be conciliatory and seek to encourage her to emerge.

  When her mama had finally opened her bedchamber door she was gone, with only a brief note to say she was going ‘where she could think.’

  After several hours of sending carefully worded messages to her friends in town, all of which drew a blank, her parents were at their wits’ end. Mr Fulgrave was prostrate with gout, dear Alex had seemed their only resort.

  Alex shot one look at Hebe’s white, shocked face and said firmly, ‘I am sorry, Aunt Fulgrave, but I simply cannot leave Hebe now.’

  ‘I know, of course, you cannot,’ Emily Fulgrave said despairingly. ‘I should have thought. It will have to be the Bow Street Runners, but we will have lost a day…’

  ‘I will find her,’ Giles said, standing up and causing all of them to start in surprise.

  ‘Oh, Giles, thank you,’ Hebe said warmly. ‘I had quite forgot you were there. Aunt Emily, Giles is staying with us. What could be more fortunate?’

  Giles wondered if Mrs Fulgrave would consider that the family scandal coming to the ears of someone else, however close a friend, to be a fortunate matter. ‘You may trust my absolute discretion, ma’am, but you must tell me everything you know about what is wrong and where she may have gone,’ he began briskly, only to stagger back as the distraught matron cast herself upon his chest and began to sob on his shoulder. ‘Ma’am…’

  Eventually Mrs Fulgrave was calm, sitting looking at him with desperate faith in his ability to find her daughter. Giles was already bitterly regretting his offer.

  Damn it, what else can I do? he thought grimly. Alex and Hebe would fret themselves into flinders otherwise, and the Fulgraves had welcomed him into their family. And the thought of the girl with the pain in her hazel eyes tugged at him, awakening echoes of his own hurt.

  Chapter Five

  On the thirtieth of June, two days after Mrs Fulgrave had arrived distraught at the Tasboroughs’ house, her errant daughter sat up in bed in the best chamber in the White Hart inn at Stilton and decided that, just possibly, she was not going to die after all.

  It had been the meat pie she had so incautiously eaten at Biggleswade that had been her downfall. She had known almost at once that it had been a mistake, but she had been so hungry that when the stage had stopped she had eagerly paid for the pie and a glass of small ale.

  Up until then the entire undertaking had seemed miraculously easy. She had packed a carefully selected valise of essentials and had donned the most demure walking dress and pelisse in her wardrobe. Her hair was arranged severely back into a tight knot, she had removed all her jewellery and her finished appearance, as she had intended, was that of a superior governess. And governesses were invisible; young women who could travel unregarded on the public stage without the slightest comment.

  Finding the right inn from which to depart had taken a little more initiative, but careful study of the London map in her father’s study showed her which area the Lincoln stage was likely to leave from, and a shy governess enquiring at six in the morning for the right departure point for Lincoln was apparently an unremarkable event.

  In fact, she had felt remarkably pleased with herself and her tactics. Giles would have been proud of her, she caught herself thinking before that fancy
was ruthlessly suppressed. Her only worry was how to get from Peterborough to Wisbech and Georgy, but that would doubtless become apparent once she had reached Peterborough.

  Joanna pressed her arm against her side, feeling the reassuring bulge of the purse tied to her belt under her pelisse. She had only just received her quarter’s allowance and still had, quite unspent, her birthday present from her generous godmother. Of all her worries, how to pay for her journey was the least of them.

  Then she had eaten that wretched pie. Goodness knows what it had been made from, or how long it had been sitting in a warm kitchen before she had eaten it. By St Neots she was feeling queasy, past Eaton Socon she knew that at any moment she was going to be violently sick.

  The stage had drawn up at the White Hart and she had staggered off, just finding enough voice to request the coachman to throw down her valise before she dived behind the shelter of a barn and was hideously ill. When she emerged shakily some time later the coach was gone, but thankfully the landlady proved motherly and kind to the white-faced young governess who explained that she was travelling back to her employer in Lincoln and had been taken ill.

  ‘I am sure it is something I have eaten,’ Joanna explained weakly, ‘but I cannot travel like this. Fortunately Lady Brown does not expect me for another week so she will not worry. Is there any possibility of a room?’

  The landlady was impressed by the genteel appearance and cultured accents of the young woman before her, and even more reassured by the sight of her guinea-purse. Such a pity that a young lady like that had to demean herself as little more than a superior upper servant.

  ‘You come along, my dear,’ she had urged. ‘By good luck the best bedchamber is free and I’ll have the girl see to you.’

  The girl in question was kept more than a little busy over the next night and day. Joanna was thoroughly sick and at one point the landlady considered sending for the doctor, but by the following morning she was pale but recovering and could manage a little plain bread and a glass of water without it promptly returning.