Page 146 of The Ladies Least Likely
“A man may—admire a woman he has no intention of marrying,” Harriette said finally.
“In fact men are capable of—admiring women they feel very little affection for whatsoever.” She knew she ought to guard her speech around Amalie, a clear innocent.
She was not among the experienced, forthright women of her aunt’s household.
Amalie’s delicate brow wrinkled. “I do not think my brother is one of those.”
“And neither should any of your suitors be,” Harriette said.
“You must insist that any man who pays court to you honor you with intentions of marriage. Don’t give a moment of your time to a man who does not cherish you as you deserve.
” She turned away from the sight of the cluster of curious, flirtatious women growing around Ren.
“Me, with suitors. When pigs fly. I don’t see why you won’t give George a chance to court you,” Amalie went on stubbornly.
“He cannot marry one such as I,” Harriette said.
The very thought gave her a strange, hollow ache in the center of her chest. For a dizzying moment, she imagined herself married to him.
Stepping out to parties and balls as the Countess of Renwick.
Holding teas for the wives of his political colleagues and funding causes dear to their hearts.
Having the gossip paragraphs pore over her every move and hold her flaws to Ren’s account rather than her aunt’s.
Watching her time to paint disappear before household duties, social calls, the demands of eventual children.
As his wife she would have the right to his bed and his attention, possession of that beautiful body she had traced with her crayon onto paper.
But she had watched the British nobility from the fringes long enough to know how closely guarded, how treacherous those circles were.
She would bring Ren nothing but amusing companionship and passionate bedsport, when a properly trained and well-bred wife could bring him so much more.
“Besides, you forget I am notorious. I don’t wish to meddle or come in the way between him and the girl he chooses to marry.
I—I want him to be free to give his full affection to his wife,” Harriette said, and tried her best not to sound miserable about it.
There was little point adding that Amalie might come to be tainted by her brush as well.
“And then there is Franz Karl.” Harriette sighed. “My intended.”
Her eyes flitted back to Ren and the coterie of females cooing and bustling about him, using their fans, lashes, and bosoms to capture his attention.
He looked dazed and a tad alarmed, not delighted by the attention, as a man ought.
Harriette tamped down the urge to rescue him.
She had wanted this for him—orchestrated it, actually, with those blasted prints.
“He wrote, you know.”
Harriette watched as a plump, curvy blonde sidled close to Ren and gazed rapturously into his face. Her bosom was not as fine as Harriette’s, but she made certain Ren had a full view of it.
“Wrote who?” Harriette muttered.
“You. George wrote you piles of letters. I found them in the desk in his study when I was looking for Elizabeth Griffith’s volume on Shakespeare’s plays, which he bought for me.”
Harriette dwelled a moment on the lovely, wistful image of Ren and his sister sitting cozily in the morning room at Renwick House, reading to each other.
“He never wrote me letters.” She turned quizzical eyes on her companion.
“My mother would have prevented me from seeing them, but she would have told me letters were being withheld.”
“He never sent them,” Amalie said. “But he wrote them. Weekly, if not monthly, up until the time he left for his tour of the Continent. And there is a whole journal of entries addressed to you, which I assumed…” Amalie wore a puzzled expression. “He’s never shared this with you?”
The sun was suddenly very hot, falling through the canopy of trees onto the thick embroidered silk of her open robe and tight stomacher. “Ren wrote to me?”
Amalie’s eyes widened, the blue slightly wider than the brown. “Proof that he loves you,” she whispered.
“Proof of—” Harriette caught herself and looked back at Ren.
What, indeed, did it mean? She’d written him heaps of letters, too, but knowing that receiving letters from a girl would make him a subject of ridicule among his classmates, she’d hidden most of them away, reused the paper for sketches, or burned the ones in which her thoughts were too frankly confessed.
She’d written him letters because he was her first and for a time her only friend.
When she went to school at Miss Gregoire’s and a new world opened up to her, one with girls of her own age and ambitions, she’d wanted to tell Ren all about it.
Writing to Ren sorted her thoughts and made her feel close to him, even if he were leagues away, in distant countries she’d never visit.
But the knowledge that he’d written to her as well, letters that had never reached her—she burned to know their contents, and yet she was afraid at the same time. What had he said in them that he decided not to let her see?
A secret cache of letters—whether they were affectionate or not—put the trail of satisfied courtesans in a different light. It meant Harriette wasn’t one of their sighing numbers. It meant she was something else.
“Ahem. Lady Harriette,” came a fawning voice. “What an unrivaled pleasure to find you here. In the pleasure gardens. Indeed, a meeting most apt, if not fated.”
Harriette tore her eyes away from Ren and the soft, sentimental thoughts swirling through her head at this revelation. Before her on the Grand Walk stood the three macaronis who had accosted her in Leicester Square, but with a marked change in their demeanor as well as their dress.
Instead of the towering wigs of before, they wore small perukes with curls along the brow and sides and a tidy queue in back, very similar to Renwick’s.
Their frock coats still boasted a multitude of buttons, but the waistcoats were muted, of a complementary rather than a contrasting color with their coats, and they had reduced the number of fobs and chains by half.
Harriette’s surprised gaze stopped at their footwear.
Each of the three men wore polished black leather boots with white bands about the top and a small dangling tassel. Exactly the style of Ren’s.
She swallowed a laugh as she brought her gaze back to their faces.
Pasty, powdered, and patched, they were still, but with not quite as much rouge on their cheeks, nor as bright a red to their lips.
It was unlikely that Ren’s sun-bronzed skin tones would set the fashion for a culture that prized paleness, but they had clearly borrowed his pattern in everything else.
Satisfaction mixed with her disdain. She had meant to make him admired, and she had succeeded.
“Lady Harriette, where is your sketchbook? I insist you draw me,” said the one who had chosen an ensemble of canary yellow.
“I recall you abused my poor sketchbook on the occasion of our last meeting,” Harriette replied.
Amalie hugged her muff tightly and shrank into Harriette’s side, shaking with terror.
Harriette considered making introductions, which courtesy demanded, but she was not of a mind to be courteous to these fops.
“A print by Lady Harriette is the done thing,” said the second, outfitted in orange. Harriette did not care for his petulant tone. “I want one. Indeed, several.”
“I do not wish to be sketched in the altogether, however,” said the third, garbed in a bilious green. “May I at least keep my waistcoat on?”
“I am not in the business of providing sketches to any man who asks,” Harriette said sharply.
“I say, aren’t you?” demanded the first. “You did Runtwick and the Graf Hardy-ho?—”
“ What did you call him?” Harriette glared.
“Renwick.” The man hastily corrected himself.
“ Renwick .” He cleared his throat. “Can’t imagine what you heard, eh?
But see here, miss—er, your ladyship—this is the very pattern of male beauty, ain’t it?
” He flourished a beringed hand through the air, indicating himself.
“Share the profits with you! Put this heavenly visage in the hands of every ladybird in London—er, lady in London, that is—and that’ll be quite a leap up for you, won’t it?
That is—er, as the daughter of a, what’s it, a foreign duchess, you—I—” He finally foundered to a stop, daunted at last by Harriette’s gimlet stare.
She felt cold fury and hot shame running through her in the same veins.
It was an extraordinarily uncomfortable sensation.
Did these men think she was some sort of street artist they could engage at a village fair?
She’d been striving for this, for patrons, moneyed patrons, begging them to capture their image.
And she wanted nothing so much as to find the nearest pile of carriage horse dung and push each one of these mincing dandies into it.
“I’m afraid I have left off sketching gentlemen,” Harriette said, trying to control the unwanted quaver of regret in her tone. “I regret that I cannot consider your requests. Good—good day.”
“Oh, but Lady Harriette!” They leapt after her as she tried to pull Amalie away. “Do walk a bit with us, at the very least. Don’t you and your friend wish for an escort? Two lovely ladies ought to have the most fashionable gents on their arm.”
“Renwick is our escort,” Harriette retorted, hugging Amalie to her as she kept moving.
“Lady Harriette!” said a new voice, a woman’s. “I am not surprised at all to find you in the thick of a crowd of admirers. You are enjoying your new status very much, I suppose?”