The Chaperone's Secret Read online

Once they were in London, ensconced in the ducal mansion, Amy found it to be the literal truth that Lady Rowena was everywhere proclaimed as the perfect picture of English purity and demureness. Anew she was puzzled by the duke’s desperate insistence on attaching Amy as chaperone to his daughter. Why, with such a sweet and gentle daughter, known throughout society as a paragon of English feminine virtue, had he needed to employ a woman most famous for making a match for a difficult young lady?

  She dare not ask the duke. She had been forced to accept the position for lack of any alternatives, but Lady Rowena’s doting father had also offered, as an incentive, such a staggering sum to achieve the object—Lady Rowena’s marriage to an acceptable suitor—that Amy had begun to dream. With that sum she could go home to the village of her birth down in Kent and buy a certain perfect little cottage. She was a talented seamstress, and if she was assured of enough to go on for a while, she knew she could make a living doing what she loved.

  That had become her inspiration, and as she helped her charge recover her strength, she had felt her heart’s desire as close as this one Season. Surely it would not be difficult to find a husband for such a little turtledove as Lady Rowena!

  Reality came as a shock. Once fully recovered, Lady Rowena was a headstrong, determined, obstreperous, demanding termagant, as similar to Bridget Donegal as a willful mule was to a ewe lamb. Like her father, she was difficult and temperamental, and with such a low opinion of men that she had sworn never to marry.

  She was in her fourth Season. His Grace had apparently already tried, with threats and intimidation, to force his child to choose a suitor and marry, but she knew him far too well. He would never carry out any of the horrible threats he made, nor would he ever force her to marry against her will. And yet it was Amy’s duty to find a gentleman and promote a match. It was her only hope of securing the promised reward, and she did not even want to consider what would happen should she fail. The duke had made it abundantly clear that failure was unthinkable.

  So she was chaperone to a lady who had no intention of marrying, even though she was willing to entrance any young man who came within her sphere of influence. The duke, as impetuous as his daughter but with the power to make his hotheaded rashness dangerous, had hired Amy away from the Donegals without even asking if she had any entrees into society. The result was that Lady Rowena knew far more about society than her chaperone, and that situation could not be conducive to any reliance or respect between them.

  This was only the second week of the Season and Lady Rowena had already turned down the hands of a foreign prince and a duke’s second son. If only things could have gone on in the way of being Lady Rowena’s companion without the relentless pressure of finding her a husband and convincing her to marry, Amy could have lived with it. The girl was inconsiderate in private, but not completely unbearable. There were whole minutes when she was sweet-tempered and obliging.

  It was the pressure from the duke that was wearing Amy down. He had seemed so accommodating and gentlemanly in their only interview. But as his daughter recovered her health and showed her true character, he too had revealed himself as demanding, unpredictable, choleric in the extreme and virtually unapproachable. His unreasonableness was showing; he was now blaming Amy for her lack of society connections, though she had never claimed to have any.

  It was going to be an impossible task, one that could ruin her, leaving her destitute.

  She glanced through the dimness at the beautiful girl, whose head had now lolled back as she fell asleep against the squabs in the carriage. If only she was the wraithlike, gentle girl Amy had first met. Many men equated femininity with that kind of wan helpless lethargy. But then, the problem was not in finding a man who would want to marry Lady Rowena—there were many suitors for her hand—but in convincing Lady Rowena that she wanted to marry at all.

  If she didn’t succeed in marrying Rowena off by the end of the Season, it would be deemed by the duke as her failure and he would blame her wholly, as unfair as that was. She wouldn’t be able to get another position with that on her head, nor would she be able to go back to the Donegals, for they would never risk angering the duke.

  What was she going to do?

  Two

  “Pay the girls, Rupert,” Pierson said, staggering into his townhome and sagging onto a bench in the hall. It felt so good to rest after that arduous crawl through the streets of London. He had a hazy recollection of trying to hail a hackney, but no one would take him. Vomit was ruinous and he had no doubt looked like he would cast up his accounts any moment.

  His valet, Rupert Charpentier—that name sounded so much better for a proper valet than the “Robert Carpenter” he had been born with—resplendent in a cast-off silk robe of Pierson’s, held his candle high and looked the two girls over, but he merely said, “You are dripping on the carpet.”

  Maisie looked him up and down with an insolent gaze, stuck out her grimy hand, snapped her fingers and said, “You ’eard ’is nibs; money!”

  Rupert gave them a couple of shillings apiece even though they demanded gold. They called him a couple of foul names as Pierson watched in foggy amusement, but then finally the viscount said, “Go on, give ’em more, Rupert, old man. They’ve been good girls and should be rewarded.” He sat up a little straighter and shook his head. Droplets of scummy water showered the carpet and sprinkled the valet. “And besides, I think my fortunes are on the mend. I feel kindly toward the world tonight.”

  “You do not even look of this world tonight, my lord.” The valet shook a stray drop from his bare hand and gave more money to the girls. They stuck their tongues out at him, he made a rude gesture, and they left. “Come, my lord, let’s get you upstairs. You smell like the sewer, but I doubt we’ll be able to do anything about that tonight, with you in this state.”

  “Where is Dorcaster?” Pierson said as his valet pulled at his arm, trying to haul him to a standing position. Though the bench was hard, being a rococo monstrosity brought back from Germany by one of his more respectable ancestors, it still felt better than moving at the moment. He resisted.

  Rupert released his arm and looked down at him thoughtfully. “Mr. Dorcaster said he could not remain as butler in a household that had no form nor dignity. He said he was leaving to work for a gentleman as deserved the name, and though he wished you well, he daily expected to hear your demise announced in the papers. I am quoting him exactly, my lord.”

  Pierson put one hand over his heart. “Oh, the arrows! Pierced through the heart by a butler’s disrespect!” He fell back giggling on the bench. Then he frowned. He gazed up at his valet. “Am I so very bad, Rupert? Am I beyond hope? Can a fellow as far gone as I reform?”

  Rupert, his pale eyes steady on his employer, said slowly, “Do you want to reform?”

  Pierson, his mind clearing, looked down at himself. He was filthy and he stank. Nightly he haunted the hells and dens of the worst parts of London out of boredom and a restless desire for excitement. Granted, he met with many others of his own ilk, gentleman of good social standing and low tastes. But most, like his friend the Marquess of Bainbridge, drank in moderation, gambled no more than they cared to lose and then left before the evening devolved into the kind of melee that had erupted that very night at the Bacchanal Club. Perhaps he needed to consider why he, unlike Bainbridge, was adrift in such a sea of squalor. It’s not that he hadn’t tried; he had visited the tamer entertainments considered suitable for a gentleman of his standing, but boredom and an irritated awareness of how unwelcome he was in better society always sent him back to the underbelly of London life.

  “I do,” he said, more to himself than Rupert. “I am heartily sick of myself and my life. But do I dare? Do I dare seek her out?”

  “My lord, who is ‘her’?”

  Pierson gazed up at his valet. His shaggy hair, the despair of Rupert, flopped in his eyes, clumps curling wetly against his forehead. “Her. Her is the vision, the fair angel I have seen this very evening and wh
o holds out to me the possibility that there’s more to life than this wretched existence. Somewhere, somehow there is grace and beauty and sweetness.” Very good, old man, Pierson thought, he was slurring only a little now. He gazed up at his valet. “Why do you continue to work for me, Rupert, old boy?”

  “Truthfully, my lord?” The valet again tried to pull the viscount to his feet, this time succeeding. They started out the dim hallway, through the dining room toward the stairs.

  “Of course, truthfully! Why do you work for me?”

  They started up the gloomy, chilly stairs, stopping only occasionally for the viscount to catch his breath and once for him to sneeze. When they got up to the third-floor landing Pierson looked up and saw three pairs of eyes staring down at him from behind the railing. The housemaids, he thought, watching their master come home.

  “Pretty maids all in a row,” he giggled, and then abruptly stopped. He straightened as the girls retreated into the shadows with a collective gasp and murmur of nervous chatter. “What a bloody mess I am,” he said, passing one filthy hand over his hair. Somehow, somewhere he had lost the very correct gloves he had started the evening wearing. That would make three pairs of lost gloves that week, as well as a miscellany of missing stickpins, a pocket watch, and even a ring. He looked up again into the shadows. “I am sorry, all of you,” he called. “And if it is possible, I shall do better in future.”

  Rupert opened the master chamber’s door and guided the viscount toward his bed. Pierson was sleepily aware of his boots being pulled off and his clothes being removed, none too gently. He slipped naked under the clean sheets and sighed, almost asleep.

  He thought he heard, as he drifted, his valet speak again.

  “I have stayed, sir,” Rupert murmured, “for the rare flashes of good breeding you display. And because I hoped this day would come. I knew this day would come.”

  • • •

  “I still cannot forget that ridiculous man on the street and how he looked, filth all over him and his hair down in his face. What a wretch!”

  Amy, pacing behind Lady Rowena’s vanity table as the duke’s daughter allowed her lady’s maid to put her tresses up for the night, stopped and glared at her charge’s back. “It was not humorous. Poor fellow.”

  “He was a drunk and those two girls were his whores. Who knows what they were going to do once they got wherever they were going.” Rowena’s tone displayed her disgust.

  Amy sighed but did not bother remonstrating with Lady Rowena. The girl knew how she felt about such language, and only used it more as a result. Instead, Amy consulted the small book she held in her hands. “Tomorrow is Lady Bainbridge’s literary tea, and then tomorrow evening is the ball at the Plimptons’. Wednesday evening, of course, is Almack’s, and the day after that is the Venetian breakfast at Lord and Lady Sayres . . . they reside in Varden Square, I believe?”

  “Do I care?” Rowena twisted her head and slapped at her maid’s hand. “Jeanette, you pulled my hair! Be more careful.” She gazed back into the mirror and met Amy’s gaze in it above the candlelight. “And as to the other, I won’t go to Lady Bainbridge’s. I have heard she is the veriest old scold and that her teas are the height of boredom.”

  “We must go! Lady Bainbridge was a friend of your mother’s, I have heard, and she will expect that notice from you! She knows you are in London for the Season. It would be the height of ill manners not to show her that notice.” Amy, shocked, stared at the girl’s back.

  “I don’t care. Make an excuse.”

  “I won’t; Rowena, you must go!”

  The young woman turned in her chair as Jeanette patted the last fastened braid into place and retreated. Rowena fixed her icy gaze on Amy. “Never, ever do that again! Do not tell me what I must do. I won’t go.”

  “You will,” Amy said, refusing to be cowed by Lady Rowena’s obstreperous behavior. Ultimately it was the duke Amy must please, not his daughter. But she would rather not quarrel, and so, employing a cunning she seldom utilized, she continued, “You will, or you risk looking like an ungrateful wretch, and then Prince Verstadt—who will be there, for he never misses a literary experience and I know he has been invited—will learn of your ingratitude and ungraciousness and will be glad he has had an escape from your . . .” She took a deep breath. “From your clutches, instead of being heartbroken as he is now. Lady Francis Mortimer is just waiting for you to make a misstep so she can cast her nets for the prince.”

  A calculating expression crossed Rowena’s fair face. “Lady Francis will not be there, will she? She may never learn of my absence.”

  Amy knelt at the girl’s knee. “She may or may not be there, but Lady Harriet, Lady Bainbridge’s daughter, will most certainly be there and she, I have heard, is Lady Francis’s most particular friend.”

  “We shall go. But only so I can pay my respects to Lady Bainbridge, for poor Mama’s sake.” She turned back to the mirror.

  Amy sighed and sent up a silent prayer of thanks to whatever divine power had directed her to Mrs. Bower, a chaperone of extraordinary ability who had taken Amy under her wing and given her a few tips and much gossip about who was who, and who hated whom. Mrs. Bower also, without saying so, seemed to understand Amy’s predicament with Lady Rowena and had subtly encouraged Amy to use such tactics as she had just employed. Until now Amy had hesitated to use manipulation, but it was a matter of survival.

  She gazed up at the girl, who was fussily primping one wayward curl, and wondered what had made her the way she was. “Lady Rowena,” she said. “Do you know how fortunate a young lady you are? I am not one to flatter, but there is not another in London, I think, who unites your beauty, wealth, good health and position.”

  “I know that,” she said with a self-satisfied smile.

  “Then why do you insist on behaving like a spoiled child much of the time? It is not becoming in one with so many blessings.”

  “I do not act like a spoiled child,” Rowena said, her face pinched into a frown.

  There was a disbelieving snort from the maid, who was tidying Rowena’s washstand.

  It was hard to believe, but it appeared that Lady Rowena truly didn’t fathom how her behavior appeared to others. Amy sighed and stood. “Good night, then, my lady. Sleep well.”

  “I always do,” Rowena said, crossing the room, shrugging out of her dressing gown—the waiting maid caught it before it hit the floor and then pulled her mistress’s covers back—and climbed into the bed. Jeanette, very French but very dour, pulled the covers up for her.

  Amy retreated to her own room, which was a grand suite just next to Rowena’s. It was a beautiful room, with high molded ceilings and gilt-carved wood panels on the walls. She drifted around the perimeter to the ornate wardrobe, took her clothes off and put them away, donning her nightgown as she thought of the past few months, her descent from hope to despair, and then her slow ascent to the determination she now had. She could not fail in her quest. Somehow, some way she must convince Lady Rowena that what society said was true, a married lady had much more freedom than a single lady. Restrictions would vanish overnight and many things that had been closed to her would then be open, travel, more daring clothes, more freedom of movement.

  Even though Lady Rowena must have known it was true, she sniffed at such reasoning, for she was having such fun as a sought-after unmarried lady, how could marriage improve her lot? After all, when married she would be expected to pop out baby after baby, she said disdainfully, and everyone knew what that meant. She would be immured at some country estate, fat and haggard and with no company except servants, for her husband would no doubt come to London and make merry while she suffered.

  Amy had been shocked by the forthrightness of her speech but had not been able to completely counter such reasoning with any contrary proof. And yet . . . children; didn’t Lady Rowena want children? Perhaps, the duke’s daughter said, but she was young and had years and years to worry about that.

  Amy snuffed her can
dle and climbed into bed. If she was honest, she would say that if her own self-preservation was not involved, she would have advised her charge to never marry if she had those opinions, because there were already enough unhappy marriages and neglected children in the world.

  She turned onto her side. What did she truly want out of life? If she could just choose, would she choose marriage?

  Moonlight filtered through the sheer curtains. The maid had neglected to draw the drapes in her room again, likely because she knew that Amy was not one to complain about such negligence. If she wanted them closed, she’d do it herself. The moonlight was lovely and shimmery, and gave a soft glow to the cavernous room.

  She pondered that question. Marriage would make life easier in some ways, but there might be a whole new set of difficulties with a man to please, not the least of which was the necessity of being intimate with a gentleman one might not care for in that very personal way. On the whole she had relied on her own good sense up until now. If it wasn’t for the unpredictable nature of the duke, she would be content in her current position. It was only uncertainty that made life unbearable, she thought, and her present situation was extremely uncertain.

  She closed her eyes. Who was that poor gentleman in the gutter, she wondered, picturing him anew, turning her mind away from her own difficulties to a fellow inhabitant of the earth. In that one second she had not been able to get a very clear idea of what he looked like. He was kneeling, so she didn’t know his height. His hair was likely brown, but with the darkness, the fog, the odd color of the gaslight and mostly the filth that was sprayed over him, it could have been blond.

  But in his distress she found him an interesting subject. If she had been mistress she would have stopped the carriage and offered him aid, even if the ladies with him were, as Rowena conjectured, ladies of the evening. It reflected poorly on her own moral character, she feared, but she could not consider them as anything but other creatures on the earth, fellow travelers on the path of life, doing what they had to do to survive the vagaries of this world.