Livia covered her mouth. Dear God, no. This couldn’t possibly have been Charlotte’s response to Sir Henry. Lady Shrewsbury raged on, her words sloshing in and out Livia’s hearing, a tide of undifferentiated syllables, carrying no meaning except wrath and ruin.
At some point Lady Shrewsbury stopped and Sir Henry spoke, his words too soft for Livia to hear. Lady Shrewsbury laughed derisively. “Keep it from spreading? No, my good sir, that horse has bolted the barn. By dinnertime tonight everyone in London will know what your daughter has been caught doing today. But even if that weren’t the case, I would make sure that she is shunned from every respectable drawing room in the land. Her conduct is beyond the pale and no good family should tolerate any association with a girl of such abominably loose morals.”
“My daughter has committed an unforgivable sin,” said Sir Henry, his voice tight yet defeated. “But has your son fared any better? No gentleman would take up with an unmarried young lady from a good family. Does he not share some of the blame?”
“He does.” Lady Shrewsbury sounded as if she were speaking through a mouthful of sand. “And he will hear from his wife and myself. But men are creatures of unbound lust. It is the duty of good women to keep them in check. For your daughter to lure my son from home and hearth, for her to—”
Livia turned and ran back upstairs, so that she wouldn’t kick in the door, grip Lady Shrewsbury by the front of her bodice, and start screaming. What luring of her son from home and hearth? Roger Shrewsbury already kept a mistress in St. John’s Wood. Had kept a string of mistresses there over the years, one of the reason Charlotte turned him down.
In the room she shared with Charlotte Livia paced, her footsteps heavy and frantic. She sat down for a while, rocking back and forth at the edge of a chair, before leaping up to pace again. When Lady Shrewsbury drove off in her carriage, she rushed downstairs, only to find the parlor door still closed and her mother shouting inside.
Ever since she’d been waiting for Lady Holmes to stop yelling.
At last a small silence fell. Lady Holmes trudged to a chair at the far end of the room and sank into it with a graceless whomp. Charlotte sat, very primly, with her hands folded together in her lap. Her face was splotchy with Lady Holmes’s hand marks and her coiffure appeared slightly askew, as if missing a few pins that would have better kept it in place. But otherwise she looked calm and collected, not at all like a woman about to be shunned by everyone she’d ever met.
Did she understand what had happened?
Or had this been her plan from the very beginning?
Sir Henry spoke for the first time since Lady Shrewsbury’s departure. “Is this what you intended, Charlotte, to bring discredit and reproach upon the entire family?”
Is this your retaliation for my failure to keep my word?
Or at least that was what Livia heard.
Charlotte looked in Livia’s direction, as if she knew exactly who was on the other side of the door and what questions tumbled about in Livia’s head. “No. My plan involved no publicity whatsoever. Despite my longstanding wish to seek education and respectable employment, despite promises some in this room have made to me, in the end it became clear that I was not to be allowed any path except matrimony, which is an eminently unsuitable choice for me. So I decided to take the logical next step: remove my maidenhead and therefore nullify my marital eligibility.”
Lady Holmes leaped to her feet. “But that is the most stupid, absurd, and—”
“Lady Holmes, we have heard enough from you today,” Sir Henry growled. “Charlotte, continue.”
“I needed a man. Moreover, I needed a man who cannot be compelled to marry me, therefore a married man. This presented some difficulty, as most married gentlemen I know would refuse me on grounds of either principle or caution. So I had to settle for someone who is both amoral and somewhat reckless.
“Mr. Shrewsbury fit my criteria perfectly. Unfortunately, he is also an idiot. Yesterday evening he returned home roaring drunk from a birthday celebration, mistook his wife for his mistress, and proceeded to tell her all about our agreement, time and venue included.”
Lady Holmes gasped loudly. “But that is reprehensible. Why did not Mrs. Shrewsbury or Lady Shrewsbury come to us then, so that we could prevent your execrably ill-considered plan from going forward?”
“Why indeed? But you need not be so outraged, Mamma: You would have done the same thing, keeping the intelligence quiet until such a time when you could appear with a regular jury box of witnesses to catch the offending couple in flagrante delicto.”
“I— You— It is—” Lady Holmes sputtered. “Oh, I see. You don’t think you did anything wrong, Miss Charlotte, do you? Are you so selfish that you cannot think beyond yourself? Who will marry Livia now, with the family’s reputation dragged through mud?”