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‘Damn it!’ the Honourable Mr Peacock cried, stumbling and losing his place in the dance. The music stopped and the set came to an end a moment later, and he pushed his way off the crowded dance floor, not even pausing to take leave of his abandoned partner. He was limping.

Lady Amelia sighed, returning to stand with her aunt and await with gloomy resignation the next gentleman on her dance card.

She tried to tread softly, so that the tapping of her shoes was not too obvious to those around her.

She had learned through painful experience never to wear fashionable but flimsy silk evening slippers as the other young ladies did.

Her shoes didn’t appear all that different from theirs, at a casual glance, but they were in reality more substantial in construction, always made of stout leather, and they had a slight heel.

Most unusually – especially for dancing shoes – these heels had metal segs on them.

No doubt they scratched the floors upon which she walked, but Amelia could not be expected to care much for that. It was a matter of self-protection.

These precautions meant that when some man she’d rather not dance with, or be anywhere near, leered at her and attempted to grow over-familiar during the quadrille or the cotillion – pinching, squeezing – she could stamp down hard on the bridge of his foot, or his toes, smiling falsely all the while.

Men, providentially, wore light dancing slippers too, and so their feet were vulnerable.

The trick was partly in the angle of the heel and partly in the force applied.

She’d grown quite good at it last Season and now this one.

She’d had plenty of practice and could inflict a surprising amount of pain; anger gave her impetus, and the howls of surprise and indignation she caused gave her wicked pleasure.

For more serious nuisances, she had concealed pins about her person, and longer, more vicious examples hidden in her abundant dark hair.

The Dishonourable Mr Peacock, her most recent dance partner, had hobbled off the floor in acute discomfort just now, and would have a fine bruise to show tomorrow; she hadn’t had to resort to her sharper weapons this time.

It wasn’t clear to her whether he, or indeed any of them, just thought she was a terribly clumsy dancer.

But almost all of them came back after a while, undiscouraged, and made further attempts on her virtue.

Either they were very stupid, or they had very short memories.

Perhaps both. Or – this was a horrible thought – her obvious reluctance to be courted gave the chase spice in their eyes.

She knew that there were much worse situations one could be in than hers.

There was a war on – in all her nineteen years, it seemed there always had been.

Men were dying or being dreadfully injured every day, in Spain and Portugal, America and Canada, leaving their wives and families grief-stricken at best, destitute and starving at worst. Here in London and elsewhere in England, people, many of them children, toiled in backbreaking jobs to earn enough to eat, or begged in the street for a crust. Women and girls sold themselves, or stole, and risked the harshest of punishments: the gallows, transportation.

She’d led a sheltered life, ignorant of such things, until her brother Rafe’s marriage two years ago to a woman from a mysterious and complicated background had broadened her horizons and made her realise how privileged she was – in some respects, not in all.

With her eyes newly opened by Sophie’s influence, she’d realised too that in her own sphere of life, the haut ton, many young women much like herself might indeed be spared from the sharpest bite of physical want, but still faced the awareness that their futures were bleak indeed if they could not induce some man of property – any man of property, no matter his age or personal attributes – to offer for them.

Their entire families’ futures might depend on such an eventuality.

Amelia faced no such problems, and must be grateful that she did not.

She was grateful. The daughter of one ridiculously wealthy marquess (now deceased) and sister of another, she had no need to work.

Nor would she ever face the bitter, secret struggles of genteel poverty.

She would never be obliged to marry where her heart did not lead her: not to secure some sort of future for herself, and certainly not to increase her family’s fortune, for they had that in abundance.

And there was yet more. She had no harsh, controlling relatives, either male or female, who would think to force her into some splendid match that went against her heart’s wishes.

Her half-brother Rafe was the kindest and most loving of guardians, always considerate of her welfare and putting it above his own, which she knew to be rare, in her sphere of society or any other.

Her full brother Charlie, though nobody would ever claim he had been over-favoured with brains, loved her dearly too.

And to add to the ways in which fortune had blessed her, her health was good, as was that of both her brothers and her sister-in-law, who had recently been delivered of a strong, thriving son and heir, a tiny viscount.

She even had a grandmother living, her father’s mother, at the preposterous age of almost 102.

It was true that Lady Amelia was an orphan, which might make any girl in any walk of life an object of pity, but in her peculiar circumstances, even that could be described as a blessing, if a mixed one.

She greatly missed knowing the mother she had lost in early childhood, but she had not for as much as a second regretted the death of her father, two years ago.

What was more, nobody – not even the highest sticklers of society, not even Queen Charlotte herself – could expect her to make any show of mourning him still, because her father, the late Marquess of Wyverne, had been a man of terrible reputation, every bit of it earned, one with a positive addiction to stirring up scandal and making enemies.

Lord Wyverne had left his three adult children with a wicked stepmother, as in the fairy tales, but Amelia wasn’t obliged to live with her or suffer any cruelty from her.

She’d never even met her, and for the sake of her own good name, must never do so if it could possibly be avoided.

Rosanna Wyverne was an actress – not an actress in the mould of Mrs Siddons, admired widely for her artistry and admitted to be a respectable woman.

No, she was the other sort of actress. The disreputable kind.

She might be a dowager marchioness, but she had never been received into society and never would be.

Amelia knew that, in collusion with her late husband, Rosanna had done all sorts of hugely scandalous things that nobody, not even Rafe or Sophie, would ever agree to tell her properly about, which was most provoking.

But the world still whispered about them, just out of her hearing.

And here lay the source of the difficulties Lady Amelia Wyverne was experiencing.

Her brother Rafe had confided in her recently that he’d spent most of his adult life imagining that when their father died, as he had most providentially done after a seizure in the spring of 1811, their family’s reputation would somehow magically be restored.

His concern, she knew, was not so much for himself, or even for his wife, who had married him with her eyes open and cared little for social acceptance, but mostly for Amelia and Charlie, and for their futures and their happiness.

But soon after the late Marquess’s death, Rafe told her, he’d realised that such enormous scandal as he’d created over a long, notoriously dissolute life could never be forgotten.

The name of the Wyvernes could never be wiped completely clean, no matter what they did.

The burden fell on all of them, but not equally (since such things were always easier for men), and they’d just have to live with it.

And Amelia was living with it. She wasn’t starving, or suffering, she was surrounded by people she loved and who loved her, but she wasn’t comfortable in her skin.

She was always alert for trouble from the so-called gentlemen of the ton, and sometimes lay awake at night, worrying about what would become of her.

She’d made something of a splash on her come-out last Season, and under the aegis of her highly respectable aunt on her mother’s side, Lady Keswick, she’d curtsied to the Queen and been graciously received by the monarch who was supposed to be the ultimate arbiter of public morality.

With the chaperonage of Aunt Keswick and of Sophie, Amelia was invited everywhere, though it was possible that much of the public acceptance came from sheer curiosity, since it had been a long time since anyone named Wyverne had attempted to move in polite society.

And her debut was successful, in a way. Nobody cut her, nobody insulted her, not in plain words nor to her face, and to a casual observer, nothing might appear to be wrong, but it was wrong, all the same.

Her metal-heeled shoes bore witness to it, as did the pins.

And one only needed to understand the nature of the offers her brother had received for her hand to see exactly what the problem was.

Rafe had been punctilious in sharing the names of her formal suitors with her, and she’d been horrified to hear them, though not completely surprised, since they’d been making up to her in public in a variety of unpleasant ways since her debut.

She could even now, if she’d cared for it, have been a countess, a viscountess or a baroness.

Or she could have been, if she’d taken leave of her senses (and her brother had) and been content to marry someone whose reputation for depravity matched that of her father.

It seemed that every raddled rake in London, young or old, had decided that she, and her fortune, could be his for the asking.

It seemed too that it had never occurred to any one of them that Rafe, his own good name irrevocably tainted by the baseless rumours that his stepmother Rosanna had been his mistress, might think to refuse them; why should he?

He could hardly be a moral stickler himself, surely?

The new Lord Wyverne hadn’t told her what the men – there had apparently been a great number of them – had said to him in private conversation, and what he’d said in return, and she was grateful for that, but the set of his mouth and the sombre expression in his blue-grey eyes had been enough.

He’d refused all of them in no uncertain terms, and sent them on their way wondering.

‘Better men will come,’ he’d said gently.

‘When it is seen and understood that I will always reject offers from fortune-hunters, libertines, men of low character even if their rank is high; when your own good qualities are realised, Melia, better men will come. An honourable man who loves you for yourself, who you can love and be happy with, will come, I promise you, my dear. It is merely a matter of having a little patience.’

But no such man had come, just more who merited pins and bruised feet, and she was beginning to think that Rafe was deluding himself.

She didn’t need to marry anybody at all, and she’d never dream of marrying a rake in the pattern of her father.

She wanted a decent, honourable man if she were to settle down one day, a man like her brothers (though perhaps rather cleverer than Charlie, if possible).

But she certainly didn’t want to marry some stuffy person either, who would behave as though he were doing her a favour by singling her out, and think it his duty to reform her.

She didn’t need to be reformed, she was reasonably sure, and would not suffer to be lectured.

Such people might disapprove of her as much as they liked.

It seemed most unfair to Amelia that she should labour under all the disadvantages and discomfort of a stained reputation when she’d never actually done anything to deserve it.

Not one tiny thing. It shouldn’t be necessary to defend one’s honour so very frequently; it grew tedious.

She was aware – Lady Keswick had not failed to impress it on her with many awful, if frustratingly obscure warnings – that she was obliged to be more careful even than the other debutantes who surrounded her.

There could be no indulgence for any rash youthful folly on her part; she could not afford even the tiniest slip.

Something must be done, she thought, to set this right, and she must do it herself rather than relying on others; it was her future at stake, not theirs, no matter how much they cared for her.

If anyone had asked Amelia what her hopes for the future were, and she’d been able to answer honestly, she’d have said, To take control of my life.

To make things happen, rather than have them happen to me at the whim of others.

To be responsible for my own fate. Was that a ridiculous ambition for a young lady?

She would not concede that for a second. So, she needed a plan. But what?