“Can you tell me what happened?”
She looked up at him, her gaze steady and solemn. “I can tell you what I know.”
It began innocently enough, late in the summer of 1791, when Lady Emily was just sixteen, young and beautiful and filled with a joyful zest for life.
A message arrived one afternoon at Pleasant Park from the Irvings of Maplethorpe Hall, inviting Lady Heyworth and her daughter to a country house party to be held the first week of September. Predictably, Lady Heyworth turned up her nose at the invite, saying with a sniff, “How impudent of them. Do they seriously think I would even consider accepting? The family positively reeks of the shop. Why, when I encountered Mrs. Irving at the assembly in Ludlow last spring, she told me her great-grandfather was a butcher!” Her ladyship gave a scornful titter. “Can you imagine?”
But Lady Emily was eager to attend her first real, grown-up house party. And so she assembled a carefully rehearsed list of arguments and approached her mother in her sitting room several mornings later.
“About the house party at Maplethorpe Hall . . . ,” she began.
Lady Heyworth was busy embroidering a fire screen and barely glanced at her daughter. “What about it?”
“I agree that Mrs. Irving isn’t quite the thing,” said Emily, clenching her hands behind her back. “But I do like her daughter, Liv. And you said yourself that I need more practice going into company before my Come Out in London next spring.”
Lady Heyworth kept her attention focused on her needlework. “Your Come Out is precisely why you must take care to avoid such entertainments. It would do you no credit for it to become known that you had lent your presence to a gathering of vulgar, pushing mushrooms.”
“But that’s just it, you see; the guest list is quite select—Liv wrote me all about it. Lady Dalton is taking Julia, and . . .” Here Emily paused to draw a deep breath in preparation for what she hoped would be her most persuasive argument. “Lord Stone will be there.”
Lady Heyworth’s hands stilled at their task as she looked over at her daughter. “Stone? You’re quite certain?”
Edward, Lord Stone, might be only a baron, but his estates were worth forty thousand pounds a year. Set against so grand a fortune, the fact that he was thirty-five years old, stout, and addicted to opera dancers and highflyers was inconsequential; Lady Heyworth had decided he would make a marvelous catch for her daughter and was already scheming of ways to bring Emily to his lordship’s notice. Emily had no intention of satisfying her mother’s ambitions in that direction, but she wasn’t above using the lure of Lord Stone’s presence to achieve her own ends.
“Well, why didn’t you say so before, you silly chit?” exclaimed her ladyship. “Of course you must go.” She pulled a face. “Although I won’t deny that the thought of having to endure that Irving woman for a good week is enough to bring on my spasms.” Then a happy thought occurred to her. “You say Lady Dalton will be there with Julia? I wonder if I could prevail upon her to take you into her charge.”
A letter of inquiry was duly dispatched to Lady Dalton, and a favorable response received. The fact that Lady Heyworth would be sending her sixteen-year-old daughter off to a country house party under the lax chaperonage of a woman known to be as lazy as she was fond of card games and discreet love affairs was not seen as an impediment.
“I had serious forebodings,” the former governess told Sebastian now as they paused beside an ancient, moss-covered stone wall to gaze out over the churchyard. “But between Lady Emily’s determination and her mother’s ambitions, no one would listen to me.”
“She went?”
“She did, yes. She had a marvelous time at first. How could she not? She was away from her mama’s censorious eye, and she was so pretty, and she was in the company of a good dozen men with whom to strike up a flirtation.”
“Who was there besides Stone?”
“Let’s see. . . . Lady Dalton brought her twenty-two-year-old son, George, as well as Julia. And Stone had several boon companions in his train—men of a similar ilk, I’m afraid. There were others as well, although I can’t recall them now. She wrote me a letter while she was there, talking about some of the people she’d met. I saved it. In fact, I showed it to Emma Chandler.”
“May I see it?”
Sarah Hanson pushed away from the churchyard wall and turned back toward the inn. “If you think it would be helpful, yes.”
Chapter 36