Page 150 of The Ladies Least Likely

She applied herself to dishing the hearty ragout onto his plate so she didn’t stare fatuously at him, her thoughts writ large across her face.

She was hopelessly in love with this man.

His very nearness made silly fancies flutter about inside her.

Knowing that she was the focus of his attention, when everyone else here was hung upon his every move, was a sensation that was going straight to her head and bringing foolish and impossible thoughts along with it.

He’d kept her at arm’s length throughout the journey, as much as was possible in a vehicle meant to seat two, yet their conversation was free and easy.

He told marvelous tales of his travels, though she noticed he left out mention of any of the courtesans.

She sketched as they rode, often sitting on the outside seat with him for an unhampered view of the landscape, and he listened as she told him stories of the Catherine Club and the various women her aunt had taken under her wing.

The man he’d become fit so logically with the boy he’d been—thoughtful, observant, attuned to the plight of the less fortunate, slow to anger or to judge but quick in understanding.

And yet he continued to surprise her with his sly humor, the wit he’d cultivated, his sensitivity to his sister’s feelings, and the way he noticed and anticipated her comfort.

As now, when he passed her the dish of pickled salmon, knowing she adored it.

Perhaps this was what marriage was like for some, this comfortable companionship, this looking after someone in small ways.

Ordering ale for him instead of beer at meals because she knew he preferred it.

Inspecting his bedding to ensure the linens were well-aired and there were no vermin in his mattress or pillows.

Accepting his arm and making a stately turn or two around an innyard as if they were taking air while he stretched the sore muscles in his scarred leg, leaning on her to disguise his limp.

These small, nurturing touches were more pleasant to supply than she would have expected.

It was no imposition to stop the chaise and walk a bit when his leg was cramping, just as he didn’t demur when she wanted to halt and sketch a view.

It was no great burden to bring one of her linen strips to his room to dry his face with when he dropped his in the shaving bowl.

Even though she had, in the process, been exposed to the sight of Ren in an open shirt and stocking feet, his head bare of wig.

His state of undress thrilled and delighted her, and yet she’d bolted as shy as any untried maid.

Because she thought that was what he wanted.

Because she was alarmed, truth be told, by the intensity of the stirrings she felt for him. The attraction had grown deeper through continued exposure, not less, as she might have expected.

Still, she told herself firmly, that didn’t mean she would make him a good wife. She was going soft in the head.

“The squire warned us to beware of unrest in Shepton Mallet,” Ren said as he dug into the collops.

“The mill owners there have begun adopting the new spinning machinery. One spinning jenny can do the work of eight men, they say. There is some understandable concern among the workers that they will be left without jobs.”

Her heart squeezed with affection even as worry set in. “Did the squire find the concern understandable?” she asked mildly.

“Indeed not. His words were to the effect that some ruddy belligerent blokes who were already getting paid enough to keep an honest man happy were raising a breeze that their earnings might be diminished.”

“I would think a squire would be concerned about men out of work,” Harriette remarked, spooning up the cabbage. “They needs must raise the poor rates to support them.”

“Can you conceive what the squire and his ilk would say to that?” Ren replied.

His face darkened, his voice taking on a hard edge.

“The mill owners will be able to make more cloth and sell more cloth, while paying fewer workers. In the meantime, between the Corn Laws and the Poor Laws and the game laws that keep them from poaching to put meat on the table, the common folk can barely afford to feed and clothe their families. I saw the same system all over Europe, and it’s untenable.

Such great wealth for so few, earned from the suffering of so many. ”

Harriette laid her spoon beside her plate. “Very few of those enjoying the great wealth are able to see that,” she said carefully. “Or feel much for the sufferers.”

She was aware of her own good fortune in that she had never known real destitution.

Much as Mrs. Demant might have begrudged the effort, there was always food on Harriette’s plate and some castoff clothes to wear.

When she began school at Miss Gregoire’s, with her fees and a small allowance paid for by her aunt, Harriette had learned to be thrifty, but had never known real fear that she would not be provided for.

And in London, though she came often in contact with women thrown upon the streets by vagaries of fate or cruelty, her aunt’s house was a refuge where there was always the surety that, if they worked together, there would be enough for all.

Still, when she tried to imagine the fear and worry of a family that struggled to stretch their pay to cover lodging, food, clothing, and other necessities, it was not so great an act of imagination.

Ren looked into his cup of wine, swirling the liquid. “Perhaps it’s because I have spent my life feeling undeserving of the position I was born to,” he said. “Of looking as an outsider on something I shall never have. But my sympathies are with the workers.”

Unaccountably, his words squeezed her heart all the harder. Her chest ached. This man. She wanted to ask what he looked on that he longed to have for himself. Security? Admiration? A warm family? Love?

She would give him all those things, if she could.

“What kind of unrest?” she asked instead, to keep her mind from straying into paths that could only prove unfruitful.

“Protests, most like.” The innkeeper’s wife made no pretense that she had not caught their conversation as she entered the small parlor with a covered dish.

She set it on the wooden table beside Ren and tucked the cloth she’d been using to carry the dish into her apron, then went to the fireplace and picked a spill from the cup on the mantelpiece.

She lit it from the small fire keeping away the evening damps and came back to the table.

“Shepton Mallet’s always been a tinder box,” she went on, lighting the candles in their brushed silver holders, no doubt the finest The George and Dragon had on offer.

“There be riots there regular, back in the day, and don’t forget how quick they a-went for Monmouth.

We be prideful, we West Country folk,” she added.

“Will there be violence, do you think?” Harriette asked.

She had no qualms about their hostess entering into their conversation.

In the Countess of Calenberg’s unusual household, the women took turns contributing to housekeeping tasks—witness how Sorcha had taken over the cookery and marketing—and Abassi, though nominally their butler, was confidant, friend, and, Harriette suspected, her aunt’s lover.

She was more concerned with how unrest in the town might upset her mother’s fragile health. If her mother were ill, Franz Karl could not in conscience hie them back to Prussia directly, which she accounted a small providence.

But if her mother lingered, Harriette would be trapped in Shepton Mallet with a fretful parent and a grudging Mrs. Demant, and Ren could not stay and be her white knight indefinitely.

He had other properties and business that needed his attention, not to mention his sister.

Harriette hoped her new makeup would stop the progression of Amalie’s lead colic and give the girl reprieve from her symptoms, and in time, return her to health.

But how was she to hear reports if she was buried in the country, or carried far out of it?

“I shall protect you, Rhette.” Ren’s gaze filled with a dark, steady heat as he stared across the table at her. Candlelight flickered and threw shadows across his sculpted face. A tightness coiled in her belly, pulling at her insides.

The conversation moved on to other reports of unrest across the land in response to the installation of new machinery that upset the age-old way of doing things and the industries that had been livelihood to so many.

Ren was informed and level-headed, and while he understood the motives of the business owners, he was surprisingly sympathetic to the poor and displaced, a sympathy she shared.

What a wonderful contribution he would make to the House of Lords, Harriette thought, if only he had the courage to make his voice heard and would not let his difficulties with speech silence him.

She wished she could be there as his aide and support and champion.

Now there was a surprising thought. She’d certainly never before imagined herself as a prop and aide to a man, just as she’d never noticed, much less attended to small domestic details like inspecting the linens.

She still didn’t see herself as capable of bearing and raising a child; such territory was more foreign and terrifying to her than Prussia.

She also did not see herself as someone who would betray a promise made by her family, by the mother who had raised her and the grandfather who had let his daughter and heir leave the country for their safety.

But the longer she was with Ren, traveling with him, dining with him, falling into the deep inviting abyss of his eyes, the more distant Harriette grew from all the things she had always felt to be true about herself.

She was changing, becoming someone she didn’t recognize.

She was already a woman who had flouted the most basic moral conventions of her class, taking lovers before she was married, consorting with courtesans, living in a household considered on the barest fringes of respectability.

She had already determined to make her way and her name in a trade, which was utterly frowned upon for women of any sort of gentle birth.

And now she was entertaining notions of throwing herself at a man she could not have, a man whom she had promised herself she would hand, whole and unsullied, into marriage with a girl of birth and breeding who would make him a proper countess and an agreeable wife.

She had notions of violating the honor of her family and the promise her grandfather had made about her marriage.

She had a mind to forget every rule she was supposed to obey and toss it all into the gathering maelstrom of feeling.

For if she could not be near Ren, she was going to lose part of herself.

She wanted to be with him, like this, for as long as possible.

She wanted, with a greedy passion that threatened to consume her, to know him utterly, completely, and in the most intimate ways.

She wanted to throw herself into this delicious, delirious pull of attraction that dangerously blotted out all the guidelines and compass points by which she had plotted her life.

But she also suspected that if she surrendered to this passion, she would lose herself completely, and what would happen to her then?