by Merry Farmer
The Blushing Harlot
Merry Farmer
THE BLUSHING HARLOT
Copyright ©2019 by Merry Farmer
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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Cover design by Erin Dameron-Hill (the miracle-worker)
ASIN: B07PHVSRG8
Paperback ISBN: 9781090684653
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Created with Vellum
For Jess…
…who was the first one to read my schmexy books
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Epilogue
About the Author
Acknowledgments
Chapter 1
London – Autumn, 1815
Miss Dobson’s Finishing School purported itself to be London’s premier institution for refining young women, aged eighteen to twenty-two, from the highest levels of society. Pamphlets explaining the school’s many benefits included instruction in French, Italian, and German, lessons in deportment and etiquette, music and painting classes, and every other skill a young lady of the ton required to make her debut and to catch the eye of the noblest, most respectable gentlemen. The school offered on-premises housing, particularly for young women whose parents were traveling abroad or who didn’t care to venture away from their distant country houses. The modest uniforms which the young ladies wore may not have been particularly comfortable or fashionable, but they did give Miss Dobson’s pupils the quaint appearance of schoolgirls half their age when they were marched across the street to the gated garden that stood as the centerpiece of Manchester Square.
But not everyone shared the same sunny view of the school as its founder.
“Has it occurred to anyone other than me that we are, in fact, prisoners?” Rebecca Burgess asked her two dearest friends at the school, Miss Josephine Hodges and Lady Caroline Pepys, as they made their obligatory circuit around the fenced garden.
“Prisoners are not tutored in painting with watercolors,” Jo pointed out, hugging herself to block out the chill breeze swirling down through the stately, Georgian houses lining the square and rustling the leaves on the park’s trees.
“Perhaps not,” Caro said, “but you are aware that Miss Dobson sells the teacups and saucers we paint, and that she may or may not use the proceeds to line her own pockets.”
“And she collected a fee from Lady Spencer when she sent the two Georgianas, Jane, and Elizabeth to sing at her soiree the other night,” Rebecca added.
“I didn’t know about that,” Jo gasped. “She hired the girls out like trained monkeys?”
“She did,” Caro confirmed.
“Ladies,” Miss Dobson’s shrill voice sounded from the center of the garden. The eyes of every pupil making their way around the perimeter of the garden as mandatory exercise paused to turn to her. “No giggling. You are to have uplifting, educational discussions only.”
Across the garden, a cluster of young ladies straightened abruptly. Rebecca was certain she spotted Felicity Murdoch handing something to Lady Eliza Towers, who quickly concealed it.
“Oh dear,” Caro said. “Felicity and Eliza are plotting again.”
“Good.” Jo breathed a sigh of relief. “Perhaps their antics will earn the rest of us a reprieve from evening recitations later.”
Rebecca hoped her friend was right and that Felicity and Eliza were planning something. The only thing more tedious than boring meals of bland food in which no one was permitted to speak was the hour of reciting Bible verses that followed. Unless one of the pupils was able to distract Miss Dobson long enough for her to cancel the tedious practice and to send them all off to their rooms. Even though Miss Dobson insisted the recitations improved the wicked souls of the ladies under her charge, it was widely known that she would rather bustle her pupils off to their rooms in the evening so that she could enjoy a tipple of whatever hard spirits she’d been given by the parents of her pupils as thanks for keeping them out of trouble.
For as much as Miss Dobson attempted to advertise her school as an institution of refinement and perfection, the truth was whispered and giggled about at Almack’s and at court. It was shared with sympathy and superiority when a young woman of good breeding went bad. And it was the most poorly kept secret in all of high society.
Miss Dobson’s Finishing School was, in fact, a reformatory for young ladies who teetered on the brink of an utterly ruined reputation. It was the last resort of desperate parents—many of whom stood on thin ice with the ton themselves—to reverse the downward course of their daughters’ fortunes. Miss Dobson—a former jade, but also the illegitimate daughter of a duke with close ties to the royal family—claimed to have turned sow’s ears into silk purses and to have married several of her former pupils into the highest circles of the aristocracy. Or at least to social-climbing men of wealth.
“Stand straight,” Caro whispered as she, Rebecca, and Jo continued their parade around the garden. “She’s glancing this way.”
“Look respectable,” Jo hissed, shifting into perfect posture and putting on a bland smile.
Rebecca did her best to appear as innocent and stately as possible as she ambled slowly along the garden’s gravel path. But it was no use. Miss Dobson glared at her, no matter what manner she adopted. The reasons were all too obvious. Miss Dobson had been present at Lord James Grey’s house the night that Rebecca—along with her dear friend, Sophie Barnes—had posed completely nude and covered with sugar.
Rebecca still couldn’t believe she’d been so scandalous. It had been Sophie’s idea. She had discovered that Lord James Grey was a spy, selling secrets to the French. Worse still, Rebecca’s own sister, Mary, had been in league with him. Rebecca had known that her sister and Lord Grey were involved, but part of her had assumed they were engaged in nothing more than the shocking sex acts she had witnessed the two of them partaking in through secret passages and voyeuristic spots that were built into the Burgess family house. Rebecca had received quite an education in carnality through watching her sister’s congress with Lord Grey. But when it was discovered Lord Grey had dragged Mary into his traitorous deeds, Rebecca had joined Sophie’s plan to bring him to justice.
Justice had involved quite a bit more sugar than Rebecca had anticipated. And far less clothing. Along with Sophie, she had stripped down to nothing, had the greater part of her body hair—including that in tender areas—forcibly removed with wax, and had splayed herself, covered in confections, on a table of sweets at Lady Charlotte Grey’s engagement party. The ruse had worked. Lord Grey had incriminated himself in front of witnesses,
including a Bow Street Runner, Mr. Nigel Kent.
Rebecca tripped at the thought of Nigel, stubbing her toe on a rock. Her cheeks heated. No, her whole body heated. The same way it had when Nigel had looked at her naked, sugar-covered body the night of the engagement party. His ravenous gaze had ignited feelings inside of her that had left her shivering and restless that night—feelings that she wouldn’t have minded the huge, hulking man sucking on sugared parts of her as though trying to drink the liquid center out of a chocolate.
“Are you quite well?” Jo asked, reaching out to steady her.
“Yes,” Rebecca said.
Caro peeked sideways at her, a knowing grin tugging at the corners of her lips. “You don’t look quite well to me.”
Rebecca could feel her face heating even more. “I was merely contemplating the reason I am a prisoner at Miss Dobson’s school,” she said.
It was the truth. No sooner had Nigel brought her home, after Lord Grey’s arrest had effectively ended Lady Charlotte’s engagement party, than other Bow Street Runners had arrived at the Burgess home to question Mary. Rebecca had done everything she could to keep her sister from being implicated in the espionage—though she wasn’t certain Mary deserved her help—but suspicion fell on her all the same. And on her parents. Nigel had managed to keep Rebecca from being caught in the same net by making clear to the authorities she had played an instrumental role in catching the spy, but the damage had been done. Mary had been shipped off to the Caribbean along with Lady Charlotte, their reputations in tatters. Rebecca’s parents had taken the “opportunity” presented by the kerfuffle to travel abroad to Canada to visit her father’s cousin. But before they went, they deposited Rebecca unceremoniously in the care of Miss Dobson and her school, giving her strict instructions to forget everything that had happened, reform herself, and marry as dull a member of the peerage as would have her.
The prospect made Rebecca’s soul ache in misery. The last thing she wanted to do was offer herself up on the altar of respectability to save her family’s fortunes. She loathed the idea of shackling herself to whatever kind of man would be faultless enough to allow her parents to return to London on the merits of the marriage. Rebecca was repulsed by the idea of marrying any man when her heart—and a few more unspeakable parts of her anatomy—was captivated by one man and one man alone—Nigel Kent.
“You don’t suppose my parents would consider anything less than an immaculate marriage to a member of the peerage, do you?” she asked her friends as they resumed their walk.
Miss Dobson was no longer looking in their direction, otherwise she would have censured Caro for laughing sharply.
“None of us are destined for the immaculate marriages our parents seem to think this bout of reeducation will afford us,” she said in her usual, learned tone of voice. Caro was a bit of a genius, as far as Rebecca was concerned. She’d certainly read more books than her and Jo combined, which was part of the reason she’d been locked away at Miss Dobson’s. Her parents had discovered that she’d been writing—and publishing—scandalous novels. “Reputations, once ruined, remain ruined,” Caro said.
“I don’t think so,” Jo said. “Didn’t Lady Alice end up marrying an earl upon completing her course of study here?”
“She did,” Rebecca said, glancing to Caro to see how she would argue the issue.
Caro pursed her lips and arched one brow. “Alice had an arrangement with Lord Donnelly prior to being enrolled with Miss Dobson,” she said. “An arrangement that was helped along by the alarming rate at which she increased in size shortly after beginning here.”
Rebecca and Jo hummed knowingly in response. Lady Alice had only lasted a few months at the school before the futility of keeping her and Lord Donnelly apart had emerged. The ensuing wedding had been hasty and quiet, and the couple had removed to Lord Donnelly’s home in Ireland with lightning speed, where his heir was born two months later.
“What about Miss Eloise Glenn?” Jo asked. “She was imprisoned—I mean, enrolled—at the school for more than a year before she caught the eye of Mr. Lewis.”
“Mr. Lewis was a foreigner,” Caro said. “An American. And the only reason Eloise agreed to marry him was because she heard that Johnny ran off and married a butcher’s daughter in Norfolk.”
“She cried for days,” Rebecca remembered with a sigh. Eloise was the daughter of a newly wealthy shipping merchant and Johnny was a sailor that worked on one of his ships. Mr. Glenn had needed the marriage to solidify a trading alliance, thus Mr. Lewis.
Miss Dobson’s school was filled with similar tales of illicit and unadvised love affairs, some that had been consummated, like Alice’s, and some that had not, like Eloise’s…and Jo’s. Or so Jo insisted. Rebecca still wasn’t certain what she’d done to land at Miss Dobson’s. Only a few tales—like Caro’s and Rebecca’s own—had involved indiscretions of a unique nature.
“My point is that it is folly to think that condemnation to an institution that is known to harbor women of less than spotless reputation will result in acceptable marriages that will reverse a fall,” Caro went on.
“But Miss Dobson promises otherwise,” Jo argued.
“Miss Dobson is a pirate,” Caro insisted. Her expressive mouth twitched into a wide grin. “Though I have to say I admire her originality and ingenuity.”
Rebecca made a distasteful sound and glanced to the center of the garden, where Miss Dobson continued to stand like a sharp-eyed sentinel. She was exceptionally tall for a woman and built rather more like a Norse warrior than a delicate flower of femininity. Her figure might once have been pleasing, but now that she was in her sixth decade, she was rather solid. Her grey hair was pulled up into a style that may have been intended to appear soft, but still managed to look tight and forbidding with the harsh lines of her face under it. She glared as she studied her charges, ambling around the park like convicts set to work turning the gears of a large mill. She couldn’t have appeared more forbidding if she wielded a whip and cracked it every time a group of pupils slowed down or whispered.
“Caroline Pepys. You cannot admire a battleax like that,” Rebecca said.
Caro shrugged. “If all of us were as indomitable as Miss Dobson, we might not be here in the first place. We would be too busy conquering the world instead.”
Rebecca laughed, but the sound only lasted a few seconds. Not because she feared Miss Dobson’s wrath, but because a sudden commotion had broken out on the street just on the other side of the fence from where she, Caro, and Jo were walking.
A flood of men poured into the street from the house that stood just next door to the school. The neighboring house was owned by the East India Company, and while few of its residents lived there permanently, it was home to whichever trade officials needed a place to stay in London before taking to sea or returning to the subcontinent. The young women of Miss Dobson’s school had spent more than a few hours pressing themselves to the windows in their pseudo-prison, gaping and gawking at the men of all descriptions who came and went from the East India House—dark men and light, Englishmen and Indians, those dressed in finely tailored suits and those wearing the exotic garb of cultures and religions that were as fascinating as fairy tales.
They were all rushing into the street from the East India House’s front door. Rebecca, Caro, and Jo skipped off the path and pressed themselves against the fence as they watched the commotion. They weren’t the only ones. Within seconds, half the young ladies of the school were clinging to the fence’s bars to get a better look.
“Is it a fire?” one of them asked.
“Is it a riot?” another gasped, sounding excited by the prospect.
“Is that Lord Lichfield?” still another squealed.
A chorus of giddiness followed. Sure enough, Lord Lichfield hurried out of the house in close conversation with another man that Rebecca recognized as Lord Rufus Herrington.
“He’s so deliciously wicked,” one of the growing crowd of Miss Dobson’s pupils
that had rushed to the fence sighed.
Rebecca smirked. Lord Lichfield was wicked indeed. She’d heard from Sophie, who had heard from her sister, Honor, all about how the courtesans and actresses of London lusted after Lord Lichfield because of his unique talents. And while Rebecca still didn’t understand what whips and riding crops had to do with the sort of things she’d seen her sister and Lord Grey engage in, that didn’t stop half the rest of Miss Dobson’s pupils from sighing and mooning over him.
“Girls!” Miss Dobson snapped, charging toward them at last, as Rebecca had known she would. “Get away from that fence at once. You are meant to be walking in peaceful contemplation of a moral and virtuous life.”
The young women who had rushed to the fence groaned and muttered complaints. Some peeled away from the fence willingly, but others stubbornly continued to look at the dispersing men. Rebecca was one of the latter. Something about the sudden flight of so many didn’t sit right with her. There was no smoke so there couldn’t be a fire. Why, then, did a dozen men of all sorts suddenly rush out into the street?
“What are you doing?” An Indian gentleman shouted as he, too, rushed out of the house, looking far more alarmed than the rest of the men. “Don’t let them leave. One of them has the diamond.”
“Diamond?” Caro said with a frown.
“Diamond?” Jo perked up, her eyes shining.
“Stop them,” the Indian gentleman said as a few of the men—like Lord Lichfield and Lord Herrington—who had lingered near the house’s front steps turned and walked off at a swift pace. “The thief is getting away.”