It beggared belief.
‘Still, nothing ventured, nothing gained,’ said Aunt Susan, fluttering her fan wildly and smiling for all she was worth in his direction.
While Harriet did her best to shrink into the meagre upholstery of the chair upon which she was sitting. Oh, where was a potted plant, or a fire screen, or...a hole in the ground when she needed one?
Ulysses—for that was the only name she knew him by—ran his eyes round the ballroom as though searching for someone before setting off in the direction of a group of military men gathered in the doorway to the refreshment room.
‘Oh, I see,’ said Lady Tarbrook with resignation. ‘He must have wanted to speak to one of his...associates. I don’t suppose he will stay long.’ She folded her fan as though consigning him to history.
While Harriet fumed. The...the beast! He’d looked right through her, as though she wasn’t there. Without the slightest sign he recognised her.
Well, he probably didn’t. He probably kissed random women senseless every day of the week. The kiss that she’d spent so many nights recalling, in great detail, before she went to sleep, and at odd moments during the day as well, had obviously completely slipped his mind.
Because it had meant nothing to him.
Because she meant nothing to him.
Well—he meant nothing to her, either. And nor did that kiss. Just because it was her first and still had the power to make her toes curl if she dwelt on it for too long, did not mean that...that...
Oh, bother him for getting her thoughts into a tangle.
A loud burst of laughter gave her the excuse she needed to let her eyes stray to the doorway of the refreshment room and the group of men who’d opened up to admit him to their company.
She couldn’t help noticing several other women turning their heads in his direction, too. And eyeing him with great interest. Which came as no surprise, seeing the way he moved. There was a vitality about him that naturally drew the eye, for it was so very different from the languid stroll affected by the other men present tonight. And in the candlelight his hair, which had just looked a sort of dull brown in the shade of that chestnut tree, gleamed with traces of gold.
She flicked her fan open and plied it vigorously before her face. Which she turned away from the part of the room in which he was standing. She would not stare at him. She would do nothing to attract his attention, either, in case he did have a dim recollection of her. You could sometimes get even quite stupid people to remember things if you constantly reminded them of it, or so Aunt Susan had told her, when she’d despaired of ever grasping the myriad rules of etiquette that seemed to come naturally to Kitty.
But then Kitty had been drilled into good behaviour from the moment she was born.
‘I don’t know what your mother was thinking, to leave you to run wild the way she has,’ Aunt Susan had said upon discovering that Harriet had only the vaguest notion of how deeply to curtsy to people of various ranks.
‘She didn’t let me run wild, precisely,’ Harriet had countered, because there had definitely been times when Mama had applied the birch. When she’d used phrases she’d picked up in the stables at the dinner table, for instance. ‘It’s just that she doesn’t think things like teaching me to curtsy are terribly important.’ Nor having a Season, come to that. In fact, she was beginning to think her mother might have a point. How on earth could anyone pick a life partner this way? Nobody really talked to anyone. Not about anything important. Everyone in Town seemed to Harriet to behave like a swarm of giddy mayflies, flitting above the surface of a glittering pond.
‘Clearly,’ Aunt Susan had said frostily. ‘But even if she couldn’t prise herself away from her books and bottles to do it herself, she could have engaged a sensible woman to take over that side of your education. In fact,’ she’d said, shifting in her seat as though she was itching to get up and stride about the room to make her point, ‘for a woman who goes on so about how important the life of the mind is to her, you’d think she would have wanted you to have had the same education as her sons. Instead of no education at all. Why, if it hadn’t been for me sending you that Person to teach you how to read and write you could have ended up as ignorant as a savage!’
Harriet had hung her head at that reminder of how much she owed to Aunt Susan, stifling the flare of resentment she’d been experiencing at being forced to curtsy over and over again until she got it right. Because the truth was that Mama had been too interested in her books and bottles, as Aunt Susan had so scathingly referred to Mama’s laboratory, to concern herself with something as mundane as the education of her daughter. Papa had arranged for the education of his sons. But a girl’s education, he’d said, was the province of her mother.
Between Papa’s focus on his three fine sons and Mama’s absorption with her hobbies, Harriet had been forgotten entirely.
And if her own parents could forget her existence for weeks at a time, it stood to reason that Ulysses would do the same.
Although perhaps it was just as well. Far better that, than that he should come over and start talking to her as if she was an old acquaintance, or something. Which would make Aunt Susan ask questions. All sorts of awkward questions.
At which point, naturally, he sauntered over to where they were sitting and bowed punctiliously to her aunt.
‘Good evening, Lady Tarbrook,’ he said in a voice that struck like a dart to her midriff.
‘Lord Becconsall, how delightful to see you,’ simpered her aunt.
Lord Becconsall?
Well, obviously, Ulysses couldn’t be his real name, but she was still surprised he had a title.
Though perhaps she shouldn’t have been. The kind of men who were out in the park after a long night of drinking could only be men who didn’t have jobs to go to in the morning. She should have known he was titled, really, now she came to think of it.
And for all she knew, Ulysses was his real name. She had an Uncle Agamemnon, after all. And a distant cousin by marriage by the name of Priam. The craze for all things classical seemed to have affected a lot of parents with the strangest urges to name their children after ancient Greeks lately.
She snapped back to attention when she heard her aunt say, ‘And you must allow me to present my niece, Lady Harriet Inskip.’
‘Lady Harriet?’
Though he bowed, he did so with the air of a man who wasn’t sure he should be doing any such thing. How did he do that? Inject such...mockery into the mere act of bowing?
‘Oh, you have not heard of her, I dare say, because she has lived such a secluded life, in the country. This is her first visit to London.’
Harriet gritted her teeth. For this was the excuse Aunt Susan was always trotting out, whenever some society matron quizzed her over some defect or other. Or a gentleman drew down his brows when she made an observation that ran counter to some opinion he’d just expressed. ‘Oh, fresh up from the country, you know,’ her aunt would say airily. ‘Quite unspoiled and natural in her manners.’ Which invariably alerted her to the fact she must have just committed a terrible faux pas for which she’d be reprimanded later, in private. Though the worst, the very worst fault she had, apparently, was speaking her mind. Young ladies did not do such things, Aunt Susan insisted. Which shouldn’t have come as such a surprise, really. She should have known that females, and their opinions, were of less value than males. Hadn’t that fact been demonstrated to her, in no uncertain terms, all her life?
Except when it came to Mama. Papa never found fault with anything she ever said, or did. Even when he didn’t agree with it.
‘That would account for it,’ said Ulysses, with a knowing smile. And though Aunt Susan heard nothing amiss, Harriet could tell that he was remembering their