Contents
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Epilogue
Dedication
To my beautiful baby princess kitty girls, Penelope Anne Yowleypants and Beatrix Amelia Yowleypants (of the Yorkshire Yowleypantses, formerly of the Hampshire Howleybritches).
Your constant presence on my lap is a joy just as much as it is a terrible, terrible burden. If you could please stop whacking Mommy in the face whenever she is even the tiniest bit late to wake up and feed you, it would be much appreciated.
Prologue
March, 1816
London, England
“Debauchery!”
Poppy flinched at the shrill screech, sloshing tea over the rim of her teacup, and splattering the skirt of her day dress. Before she could utter a single word, the book held in her other hand was wrenched free, and her fingers grasped only air.
“Debauchery!” Lady Winifred screeched again, waving the thin volume before Poppy’s nose in much the same manner as she might brandish a rolled-up newspaper at a dog who had messed on the carpet.
Poppy resisted the urge to hold up her hand to ward off a potential blow. “Now, Lady Winifred—”
“I won’t have this…this depraved literature in this house! I won’t! What sort of example are you setting for the girls?” Lady Winifred’s birdlike features contorted as if the mere thought of delicate young minds being so grievously tainted was enough to send her straight to St. Peter’s pearly gates.
“It’s only a Gothic novel,” Poppy said, rather defensively. “It’s fiction, Lady Winifred. Harmless fiction.”
Lady Winifred shuddered as if the word were the basest of curses. “You pollute your mind with these lurid novels, Miss Fairchild. Perhaps you cannot hope to make an advantageous marriage at your age, but your sisters still have a chance, I daresay. You ought to have a care for them, at least.”
I am thinking of them. The words were on the tip of Poppy’s tongue, but she dared not voice them. Lady Winifred was, after all, sponsoring Victoria and Isobel for the Season. Although she was being paid for her services, she was well within her rights to resign her position if she pleased. Not that Poppy suspected she would, given the circumstances that had lead to her sponsoring them.
“I do have a care for them,” she said, striving to modulate her tone. “It is why I have brought them up to London.”
Lady Winifred gave an inelegant sniff and looked down her nose at Poppy. “Miss Fairchild,” she said, “Although you may have gained some manner of wisdom, having reached the grand age of twenty-eight—”
“Twenty-six,” Poppy corrected stiffly.
“—you simply do not understand London society as I do.” Lady Winifred brandished the novel again. “This sort of lewd reading material is not well-received.”
“I’m not sure that’s true,” Poppy said. “I had to visit five separate book shops to find it. The first four had sold out all of their copies.” A fib, but only a small one—she had been informed of its scarcity.
“Miss Fairchild, you would do well to bow to my greater wisdom in these matters,” Lady Winifred snapped. “No one who is anyone would purchase such rubbish let alone read it.”
That was not quite true, either. Poppy had heard more than a few people discussing it at the last ball she had attended, while chaperoning her sisters along with Lady Winifred. Miss Merriweather’s Downfall had shocked and titillated the whole of London society. Gothic novels were all the rage, and this one had been especially popular.
Delicately holding the volume between her thumb and index finger as if its taint might permeate gloves, Lady Winifred scowled. “A gentleman does not wish to marry a lady who chooses to rot her brain with such drivel,” she reiterated.
Poppy opened her mouth. Closed it against the unwise remark that had risen to the forefront of her brain. Then opened it again. “As I’m not in the market for a husband, I fail to see how that signifies.” Setting down her teacup, she rose from the low sofa, cognizant of the fact that she quite towered over the petite Lady Winifred. “I would like my book back, please,” she said. Although her words were polite enough, they were also firm, and they did not invite argument. Which was not to say that it would have stopped Lady Winifred from offering it anyway.
“Miss Fairchild—”
“Lady Winifred, I bow to your wisdom of London society where it concerns my sisters,” Poppy said, “And I will ensure that I keep my reading material out of their reach, lest my choices in literature corrupt their fragile minds,”—this, with more than the slightest touch of sarcasm—“but I am a woman grown, and I will make my own choices. You are not my mother, Lady Winifred, to condemn me. You are my employee.”
Lady Winifred gave a startled gasp, her free hand touching her chest in dismay. “Miss Fairchild, I must ask that you not speak of such things so openly,” she said, color bursting high in her sallow cheeks.
Poppy gave a disdainful, decidedly unladylike snort. “I don’t see why not,” she said. “It’s only those with money who can afford not to speak of it.” But for Poppy’s employ, Lady Winifred—a woman who had never taken on the marriage mart despite being the born with all the right bloodlines—might have withered away in genteel poverty. Still, she did not want to give the impression that she thought herself any better than the poor woman, so she added, “My sisters and I might have starved, were it not for the modest bequest our grandmother left to me,” she said. “Cousin Rupert couldn’t wait to throw us out when Papa died.” Nor had he waited to move his whole terrible family into Hallston House, the only home Poppy and her sisters had ever known, pushing them out of it at the very same moment.
“Be that as it may,” Lady Winifred said tightly, “it is not good Ton to talk so freely of such matters. For your sisters’ sake, remember that.”
Poppy extended her hand. “My book, please.”
With a grimace of distaste, Lady Winifred extended the book and placed it in Poppy’s outstretched hand. “Pray keep such things to the confines of your room,” she said. “For your—”
“I know. For my sisters’ sake. I will remember it.” Poppy forced her legs to bend in a stiff curtsey with the aim of soothing Lady Winifred’s ruffled feathers, but her knees popped in the doing of it, eliciting a disdainful sniff from the older woman. While Poppy might not agree with all of the woman’s pronouncements, certainly Lady Winifred had done her job ably enough thus far. Victoria and Isobel could not be in better hands. They would have the chance that Poppy had never had her
self, and with any luck they would both make good marriages.
She removed herself from the drawing room, retreating toward the stairs. A skitter of movement from the second floor caught her attention. Twin blond heads poked out over the railing, identical pairs of green eyes peering down at her. The mischief glinting in those eyes suggested that both girls had been eavesdropping.
“Did you get in trouble?” Isobel asked, her voice pitched low.
“Just a bit,” Poppy whispered back, grinning. The girls tittered like the pair of delightful eighteen-year-olds they were, and for just a moment Poppy wondered if she had ever been so young, so carefree.
“I want to read it when you’re through with it,” Victoria said, her eyes sparkling with glee, nodding to indicate the thin volume held in Poppy’s hand. “It sounds delicious.”
Poppy glanced over her shoulder, ensuring that Lady Winifred hadn’t followed behind her. “Dearest, you may read it now, if you like,” she said. “Just don’t let Lady Winifred catch you with it, or she’ll have my head.” She lifted herself onto her toes, offering the book through the railing, and Victoria’s hands closed upon the coveted volume with a gasp of near-rhapsodic joy.
“You are the best of sisters,” Victoria opined, and Isobel made a small sound of shock and elbowed her straight in the ribs. A good-natured sisterly squabble broke out, and Poppy could only smother her snickers in her hand. She probably should have put an end to it and taken the opportunity to reinforce the fact that grace and dignity were qualities a lady didn’t surrender even in private.
But it had been so long since they had laughed like that. So long since they had had anything at all to laugh about.
How could she possibly have taken it from them?
Chapter One
“Miss Ainsworth,” the viscount intoned, his face half-shadowed in the glow of the moon. “I must warn you not to prowl these halls at night.”
Julia suspected that she was meant to be intimidated by the words, that perhaps he had deliberately chosen this particular room to highlight his devilish demeanor to dramatic effect. But her curiosity was piqued, and she found herself moving closer instead.
“Are you suggesting, my lord, that perhaps the rumors are true? That Carrowith Manor is truly haunted?”
The viscount’s grim smile was a slash of white in the corner of the room. “I am suggesting, my dear, that there are worse things living in the shadows than ghosts. That you would be better served to…”
To…
Damn. She’d hesitated too long, and a blotch of ink began to spread across the page. Poppy absently grabbed for a handkerchief, blotting at the drop of ink as carefully as she could in the hopes of keeping it from leaking through to the pages beneath. Then she recalled, with no small amount of horror, that she had few enough handkerchiefs that remained free of ink stains, and she’d certainly just cut down her remaining supply down by one more.
Blast. The first three books had come so easily to her. But this one had been a struggle from the first. Despite the round criticism from the papers, her novels were being devoured voraciously all across London and beyond. People might say that they reviled such lurid novels, but they certainly snapped them up quickly enough. The public simply could not get enough of them, and her publisher had been struggling to meet demands. Miss Merriweather’s Downfall had been the best seller yet, and it had put coin enough in her pockets to see her sisters through a Season, perhaps even two if they did not take immediately.
Only now she was running out of ideas. She had whetted appetites for salacious novels, and as vivid as her imagination might be, she had certainly never lived a life that could be said to be even salacious-adjacent. How could one be expected to write of things they’d never experienced, hold a reader in thrall with words that held little meaning and certainly no understanding?
How was a woman who had never sailed across a dance floor in a man’s arms, who had never conducted an illicit rendezvous or anything that might be called a liaison by any stretch of the imagination, meant to describe such a thing? How much more scandal could she splash upon a page without revealing her own lack of knowledge?
With a sigh, she corked the ink bottle and set down her pen. The words would have to wait—it was going past two already, and the twins were scheduled to attend a garden party in the morning.
She glanced down at her ink-stained fingers with dismay. It seemed they were always ink-stained nowadays, whether or not she’d managed to achieve any sort of progress on her fourth novel. Even when she scrubbed them with soap until her hands were raw, it still left vaguely grey marks, as if her skin had soaked it up permanently, like a thief’s brand. Thank God for gloves.
She shuddered. If anyone found out—if anyone ever discovered where her money had truly come from—they would all be ruined. Victoria and Isobel would never make good matches, not with such a notorious sister.
But for the moment, they had a roof over their heads, food in their bellies, and clothes on their backs. Fine clothes, at least for the twins. Certainly better than what they’d had in Bristol, with Papa frittering away all of his money at the racetrack, until he’d taken a rather sudden illness from which he had never quite recovered. But there had never been much to go around even before his illness, and by the time he’d finally passed on, they hadn’t had so much as a handful of shillings to rub together. If not for the fact that she’d sent her first novel off to a publisher for consideration the same week he’d taken ill, they might have been ruined entirely.
Cousin Rupert had arrived shortly after the funeral, when Papa was not yet cold in his grave, and pronounced to all that he was now Viscount Hallston, and he didn’t intend to let his three cousins live off of his largesse. So Poppy had packed their belongings beneath his watchful eye, as if he thought her a thief, and she and the girls had trundled off to Bath, where Poppy had taken the lease of a small house that they could hardly afford. At least until her second novel had sold.
And it had sold well. Well enough for the girls to have a governess to train them in social graces and deportment, and a dancing master besides. Well enough to keep her in paper and ink and pen nibs. Well enough to hire Lady Winifred to sponsor the girls for their first Season and take them up to London the very moment they had all come out of mourning.
Perhaps it was too late for her, but the twins ought to have a chance. Papa might not have cared enough to set aside even a pittance to bring them out, but she would never let their lives be determined by the fickle whims of men.
Poppy tamped down the rising indignation that burned in her chest. The past was in the past—she would do better to let it stay there. Her anger at their circumstances had the regrettable tendency to slip over her face if she did not make a concentrated effort to exorcise it, and though the twins would likely find suitors on their own merits, she could just as easily erase their chances with her penchant for looking like a ‘pinch-faced prune,’ as Cousin Rupert had put it.
She wasn’t a prune. She wasn’t.
But even she could see the peevishness, the fury that fate had so crossed her, in her face in the mirror. She scrubbed at her cheeks with her hands and turned away from her reflection with a sigh. Time for bed at last.
∞∞∞
“Miss Fairchild, you really must do something with your hair,” Lady Winifred chided as she accepted the glass of lemonade that Poppy had brought to her.
Resisting the urge to pat her dark hair to check it for herself, Poppy pursed her lips against the unkind response. “Rather like trying to make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear, I’d think,” she said. “The girls have a lady’s maid for their toilettes. I’m certainly not about to hire one for myself.” Or overburden poor Becky.
“I don’t know,” Lady Winifred said, squinting up at her. “If you gave it any effort at all, I suspect you could almost achieve prettiness.”
Almost pretty. What lovely praise. Any woman would be grateful for it, surely. But she let the back-handed compl
iment wash over her like water and took her seat beside Lady Winifred. She wasn’t quite sure how, exactly, Lady Winifred had wrangled this invitation from the Duchess of Rushton, but the twins certainly seemed to be enjoying themselves.
Of course they were enchanting; two pure and perfect visions of feminine loveliness. Victoria had chosen a rose-hued gown while Isobel had gone for a summery yellow, and they were both petite and elegant and everything that Poppy had never been, even at that age.
They were both currently engaged in conversation with a group of young men, one of whom looked quite lovestruck indeed. Poppy allowed herself a vicarious flutter of satisfaction—they might not have much in the way of a dowry to recommend them, but girls of their rare beauty wouldn’t need it. No fortune hunters for her sisters; they could very well have any man they pleased eating straight from the palms of their hands.
“You could do with a new gown or two as well,” Lady Winifred sniffed. Poppy had quite forgotten, in the intervening time between the first such remark and this one that she was meant to be embarrassed.
“What’s wrong with this one?” she asked in surprise.
“You look like somebody’s maiden aunt,” Lady Winifred said, which was rather a bit too much coming from a woman who was herself somebody’s maiden aunt. “Your gown is years out of date, and is that an ink stain I see upon your skirt?” She gave a sniff of disapproval as Poppy tried, surreptitiously, to layer the pleats of her skirt over the offending mark. She had thought the navy muslin had camouflaged the mark rather well, but it seemed that nothing could escape Lady Winifred’s gimlet eye.
“I suppose,” Lady Winifred began magnanimously, “that were you to take some pains with your appearance, you still have enough youth left in you that you might make a match of your own. Oh, you certainly can’t aspire to any great heights,” she said, gesturing to a cluster of noblemen standing near the duchess, who was on the terrace, holding a small pink bundle of fabric in her arms that Jilly suspected must contain the duchess’ young daughter. “But perhaps a widower,” Lady Winifred suggested. “A man looking for a mother to his children.”
His Reluctant Lady Page 1