It had been easier to accept the idea that all men were, in fact, terrible when the only models for good had been her brother and her brother-in-law. But now there was also Clayton. Clayton, who was kind to children and playful, and who, regardless of whether she’d wished it or not, had forced Sylvia to look at him, and because of him, all men, in new ways. Clayton, who’d also stated his intentions . . . to marry.
“I don’t find that to be the case,” Lila was saying. That statement was met with another round of horrified gasps. “I don’t . . . disagree with Miss Milsom. In fact, I very much agree with her.” She paused to smile at the other woman. “Not all men are bad.”
Miss Milsom grew several inches under that support and praise.
Chaos descended upon the room, with women shouting over one another, calling out Lila and Kate as traitors to the principles.
“If it weren’t true, they wouldn’t be destroying our names and reputations in their silly scandal sheets . . .”
“And voicing all their ill opinions of us . . . ill opinions when they do not even know us or what happens here . . .”
While the members shouted over one another, Sylvia sat there through the tumult, silent. She shared the same outrage as everyone present. If only—
She sat up straighter and turned to Brenna. “What was that you said?”
“Men are the worst!”
“No, the point after that,” she urged. The girl puzzled her brow. “You said they have ill opinions of us . . . ill opinions when they do not even know us or what happens here . . .”
“Just like our brother,” Cora muttered.
Excitement crested in Sylvia’s breast as an idea came to her. “Precisely!” It was madness, and yet it was something she and the other ladies present absolutely had to consider. Not only for Sylvia and her son but also for the preservation of their group.
Not even a day earlier, battling wits and opinions with Clayton in Hyde Park, she’d been so very adamant that she would never allow him near her society. But that was before. Before the gossip. The bad gossip.
“What is happening?” Miss Dobson whispered. “Why is Lady Norfolk looking like that?”
Because she was equal parts horrified and hopeful at the very ideas now rolling through her head.
And yet . . . before she thought better of it, before she could talk herself out of the idea that had come, she said, “I propose we reconsider the policy of our membership.” When the room looked back at her, she realized she had to say it. She just had to be completely specific in what she was calling for. “I am making a motion that we admit a male member into our society.” There—she’d said it. She looked around the room at the stone-silent ladies before her. That wasn’t so very—
The quill slipped from Valerie’s fingers and clattered to the floor. “Whaaat?” she squawked.
Several girls rushed over at once to retrieve the other woman’s pen, with Cora rescuing it first.
“Don’t like that . . .”
“Not at all . . .”
“Terrible . . .”
All the responses rolled together, but their meanings remained clear.
Valerie ignored her feathered quill, all her focus on Sylvia. “Surely you aren’t suggesting we admit men into our society?”
“Rather defeats the purpose of an all-female society,” Annalee drawled. “Doesn’t it?”
“I don’t understand how speaking ill of us and our society should merit membership within our group,” Cora said.
The ladies around them murmured their agreement.
It was a fair point, and yet . . . “If we allow them to continue and the gossip continues”—Sylvia picked up a newspaper in each hand and held them both aloft—“then what happens to Miss Dobson’s presence here?” The bespectacled lady dropped her eyes to her lap. “Or what, then, happens to Emma and Isla? Or Miss Langston?” Sylvia dropped those gossip sheets onto the mahogany center table alongside a tray of untouched refreshments. Thwack. “And those of us here who are young mothers: Lady Caroline. Myself. We run the risk of having our children taken away.” Sylvia drew in a slow breath through the fury, refusing to give in to the uncontrollable rage she felt at her and so many other women’s circumstances.
“How does having a gentleman amongst us make any of this”—Annalee waved at those newspapers that had derailed the day’s agenda on the topic of marriage—“go away?”
“I’m not speaking about just any man,” Sylvia clarified. “A specific man. One who is beyond reproach and admired and liked by all, a gentleman who is respected but also respectful.” Clayton had proven himself all that over the years. And also, a gentleman who had shown respect for the decisions, strengths, and capability of women within his own household. Granted, he’d shown a great lapse when he’d come to her and questioned her about the Mismatch Society. But he had not been stubborn in his opinion. She’d been able to reason with him, and he’d respected her enough to speak with her. And, of course, there was still the matter of him not interfering with the wishes of his sisters, as most any other man in Polite Society would have.
The women collectively eyed her like she’d sprouted a second head.
“Oh, and where do we go about finding such a paragon of a man?” Annalee asked around a robust laugh. “After all, if such the gentleman did, in fact, exist, then there’d be a good deal fewer of us advocating against that miserable state of marriage.”
Sylvia smiled. “The Viscount St. John.”
There were several lengthy beats of silence.
“As in . . . my brother?” Anwen blurted, adjusting her spectacles as if that might somehow help her properly hear what Sylvia was saying.
Sylvia nodded. “The very same. He was so very determined to ask us to cease our meetings, while having no idea of what truly happens here. We can understand why these gentlemen feel so threatened, and can bring him around to our progressive thinking.”
The Kearsley sisters collectively recoiled.
She’d get no help there. “This would be an honorary membership. A temporary one . . . where we”—Sylvia searched her mind—“peer within the minds of the male species.”
“Go on,” Annalee said suddenly, looking far more interested in Sylvia’s shocking proposal.
“The benefits could be twofold.”
“Finding even a single benefit to having a man around, let alone two good reasons? Now, this I have to hear,” Valerie said under her breath.
Sylvia neither blamed nor faulted her friend for that opinion. After all, they’d both been betrayed by the same man. They’d both learned a cold, hard lesson at his hands. This, however, was different. In the sense of who Clayton was, in the past she’d had with him, and the purpose he would serve for all of them. Ignoring the other woman’s sarcasm, Sylvia warmed to her idea. “I recently had”—a discussion with Clayton—“thoughts,” she substituted, sidestepping any further talk about her exchange with the viscount, “that mayhap we might learn why men make the decisions that they do where ladies are concerned.”
“So . . . use a man to study them,” Annalee murmured, her brow creasing contemplatively.
Sylvia expanded further. “How they think and why they think as they do . . . And we, in turn, might educate our honorary member . . . this temporary member,” she hurried to elucidate, “which might bring him and other men around to our progressive thinking.”
That pronouncement was met with a long silence.
Lady Olivia was the first to speak. “And why, exactly, do we care what the gentleman thinks of us and our society?” she asked without inflection.
Indeed. Why should they? And yet . . .
Sylvia sat forward in her seat. “Men are of the opinion that we don’t have real thoughts or real dreams. They go to their clubs and sip their whiskeys”—Annalee toasted with her glass of that very spirit—“but we are foreign to them. The idea that we might exact change that is necessary is something they cannot fathom. And mayhap if he sees it and shares tho
se realizations with the men he calls friends, and that spreads, perhaps we can influence even greater change than we’d believed. Perhaps the lords who previously looked at ladies as solely the means to continue their line will see real people, and in so doing, mayhap we might alter the marriages that women who must marry make.”
There came another roll of murmurs throughout the parlor as the membership collectively considered that proposal, and Sylvia braced for an inevitable rejection.
“I, for one, do not disapprove of Clayton being here,” Anwen announced.
“You wouldn’t,” Cora muttered, turning a page in her book.
The eldest Kearsley sister pinched the other girl in response.
“Ouch,” Cora exclaimed.
Anwen scowled. “I’m merely saying Clayton will eventually want us to marry. Having him here, viewing us in a new light, can only benefit us.”
“I . . . hadn’t considered that.” Cora wrinkled her nose as if it were painful to admit her eldest sister might be correct in any regard.
“And I, for one, rather like the idea of having a society that is open to both men and women,” Miss Dobson chimed in.
“Well, I, for one, despise it,” Emma Gately shot back. “I have no interest in hearing what they think or feel about anything.”
“Hear, hear, to that,” Annalee said, exhaling another cloud of smoke from the corner of her mouth.
“A vote. We put it to a vote.” Valerie accepted her pen from the lady still holding it, and turned to a new page in her notebook. “Those of us opposed to naming the honorary member Lord St. John, who is also temporary to our ranks, raise your hand and acknowledge your vote with a ‘nay.’” Six hands shot up. “And those in favor of naming and adding the temporary member Lord St. John, raise your hand and acknowledge your vote with an ‘aye.’”
Along with Sylvia, Lady Olivia, Miss Langston, Miss Dobson, and Anwen and Cora Kearsley added their votes as one.
The last voter, Brenna, undecided, shifted in her seat, and then ever so slowly lifted her hand.
Silence fell.
“It is decided, then,” Valerie announced. “Lord St. John is our newest member.”
She banged the gavel, making the decision official.
“Now there just remains the part of convincing him,” Anwen said. “Which one of us will be tasked with that impossible job?”
Slowly, each member slid her gaze over to Sylvia.
“Me?”
“You were the one who suggested it,” Annalee pointed out, her words beginning to slur as they invariably did when she reached her fourth glass of whiskey.
Yes, that much was true. And yet, having presented the idea and had it be a realized, actual thing that was happening now forced her to consider that which she’d not allowed herself to: facing him again after their embrace in Hyde Park.
“Unless you’re having second thoughts and wish to change your vote?” Valerie volunteered, her tone filled with hope.
“No.” Sylvia shook her head. “This is best for the society. We cannot properly dismantle society and change it without knowing the subject of our discontent. I shall speak to him.”
It was decided.
Chapter 11
The following afternoon, Clayton found himself nearly escaping his sisters and mother.
Nearly.
“Your sister has requested your presence in the parlor,” Georges murmured as Clayton reached for the worsted wool overcoat from a nearby footman, who helped him into the article before immediately scurrying off. But not before Clayton caught the sympathetic glance he shot in the old butler’s direction.
This boded ill. “Which sister, Georges?” he asked, hastily buttoning the hard tartan garment.
“Misses Anwen, Cora, and Brenna.” Georges dropped his gaze to the floor. “And . . . your mother.”
His three eldest sisters and mother? Well, that decided it. “If you can let them know I have business to attend and I will speak to them upon my return?” He reached for his hat.
Georges tucked the article behind his back. “They suggested you might have said as much, in which case I should tell you that it is solely Miss Anwen,” he said, his expression pained.
Clayton could commiserate. He knew what it was to accidentally thwart whatever games his sisters were up to.
For a moment, he considered taking the meeting. For a moment.
Alas, he was more a coward, and a selfish one at that. “Just tell them I’d already gone off for a meeting before you were able to locate me and deliver their instructions,” he suggested.
“You have turned to lying now, have you?” a voice cried from overhead.
They looked up to where Eris sat perched on the upper hall railing, as if she were on a swing a foot off the ground and not a precarious, makeshift seat fifty feet high.
His stomach flipped over. “Eris,” he said in slow tones meant not to agitate his sister into doing anything that might see her plunge accidentally to her death. Clayton started for the stairway. “I want you to please come down and meet me.” White hair. Forget grey. He was going to go straight to white before the girl even reached her fifth birthday.
“You’re worried I shall fall, Clayton.” Her voice echoed around the foyer, highlighting even further the enormity of the space between her and the marble floor. “But you needn’t. I intend to be a funbottomist.”
A—? He looked desperately over to his butler, who shook his head.
Eris pumped her legs and, somehow even fifty feet above him, managed to roll her eyes. “A funbottomist,” she repeated for them. “You know, like when you took me to the Royal Circus.”
Understanding dawned. “A funambulist.”
“Yes. And it is going to be such fun.”
He stopped at the middle of the stairs. “How about we strike an agreement. You come down, and I’ll go see what the sisters want?”
The proposed agreement hadn’t even left his mouth before she was hopping safely back to the pine floor. “Splendid. They are in the Brodie Parlor.” With a cheeky smile and even cheekier wave, Eris skipped off in the opposite direction.
Clayton glanced back to Georges. “Have I just been . . . ?”
“It appears you have, my lord.”
Again.
Bloody hell. Annoyance filled him as he took the stairs quickly and headed for the Brodie Parlor, so named for the poor sod of an ancestor whose appellation not only translated into mud but who also had fallen face-forward from his horse, perishing, not unironically, in a puddle of mud. Drowning in mud was an apt way to describe all his meetings of late with his sisters.
“Shall I take your jacket, my lord?” Georges called after him.
“That won’t be necessary. This shan’t be a long meeting.” He’d go, hear what it was they intended to put to him now, and then he’d get the holy hell out of here.
The moment he reached the Brodie Parlor, he let himself inside. “You have three min—”
Sylvia sailed to her feet, and he was left with his warning hanging unfinished in the air.
Of any of the people he’d expected to find standing before him, Sylvia had not been one of them. Sylvia, whom, after their . . . exchange . . . in Hyde Park, he hadn’t anticipated he’d again see. Ever. Which would have been expected, given his forwardness. What he’d not thought about, however, was that, given her relationship with his sisters, he would have to one day face her. He glanced about for his family. Trying to make sense of their absence, and more, the presence of the lady before him. “Sylvia. Forgive me. I trust you are here to meet with my sisters. They should—”
“With you.”
He tried to make sense of any of that . . . of any of this . . . and failed. “I beg your pardon?”
“I said, I am here to meet with you.” She placed a delicate emphasis on that last word. A little smile teased at those bow-kissed lips. “With you, Clayton,” she repeated, the husky quality of her voice enveloping the two abrupt, coarse syllables, transforming t
hem into something melodic and enthralling.
“I don’t understand.” Which was an increasingly familiar state he found himself in where the lady was concerned. “There isn’t a meeting between me and my sisters, then?” He did another glance about, more than half expecting his brood of unruly siblings to jump out and yell “Trapped!” as they caught him in whatever scheme they’d concocted this time.
“There isn’t. As propriety doesn’t permit ladies and gentlemen to meet privately, they were helpful, however, in coordinating an exchange between you and I.” Her lips slipped into a wry half grin. “Propriety hardly permits a lady the right to visit a gentleman, and as such, we ladies are required to use creativity to conduct private meetings.”
At her pointed look, he followed her stare, searching for the sisters at his back.
“The door,” Sylvia gently urged. “I was suggesting that you close the door so we might steal a private moment.”
Steal a private moment.
Four words that conjured all manner of improper thoughts. Heat flared to life, just as it had yesterday in Hyde Park, when in a moment of madness he’d taken her in his arms and—
She lifted an eyebrow, startling him into action.
You are a Devil. A caddish, wicked Devil. Clayton pushed the panel shut a tad too hard, shaking it in its frame. “Is there something you require assistance with?”
Just see that they are well. Occasionally check in on them . . .
And yet, as that perfectly formed mouth moved, that last meeting with Norfolk was there. Haunting him. Taunting him. How much did she even really know of that treachery? The depth of it?
“Are you . . . all right, Clayton?” she asked hesitantly.
“Forgive me,” he said, clearing his throat. “I’m fine.” Except he wasn’t. He was the exact opposite of anything even remotely all right. Shoving thoughts of that day and the guilt to go with them into the place in his mind where he wrestled it shut and forgot it, Clayton joined her. “Please?” He motioned to the seat she’d quit upon his entrance.
After she sat, Clayton claimed the more functional George II Chippendale armchair. “You were saying?”
Someone Wanton His Way Comes Page 13