Joan Wolf Read Free

looks,” the dowager duchess said to her with pardonable pride. “That is at least one good thing that Richard did for you.”
    “Papa did a number of good things for me, Grandmama,” said Julianne quietly. “We both of us have got to try to remember that.”
    Her grandmother took her shopping for clothes and took her up to Crewe to meet her uncle the duke, his wife, and his children. One of her cousins, Caroline, was a year younger than Julianne and the two girls were thrown together a great deal that winter. For the first time in her life Julianne led the life that a girl of her age and class and family would normally lead in the English society of her day. She and her cousin were to be presented to society in the spring and a great deal of their time was spent preparing for this great event.
    Julianne was grimly determined to forget the past and throw herself into the future her grandmother was planning for her. The most immediate goal of the dowager duchess’s campaign was to find her granddaughter a husband, and this was a plan Julianne was not at all averse to. It seemed to her that a husband and a home of her own were what she most wanted in the world. She was tired of wandering, tired of rootlessness, tired of always being a stranger. John had once said to her, “Home is wherever night finds me.” But that wasn’t good enough for her. She wanted security. And she wanted a man who could give her the security she craved—a man who would in no way resemble John Champernoun.
    Julianne spent a remarkable amount of time that winter trying not to think about John Champernoun. She visited her aunt, rode with Caroline, and went to the shops with her grandmother. She revised and reorganized the diary she had kept during her years in Africa. And she entered with determined enthusiasm into all her grandmother’s plans for her coming London season.
    The event that launched Julianne into London society was a ball, which was given jointly by the dowager duchess and the present Duchess of Crewe in honor of Julianne and her cousin Caroline. It was a very lavish affair, attended by all the right people, and was pronounced by so eminent a critic as Lady Jersey to be a great success. Julianne was a great success as well. She wore a gown of pale blue crepe over a white satin slip and looked, her grandmother thought mistily, rather like a lily. Certainly the dozens of young men to whom she was introduced regarded her with blatant admiration.
    None of the young men made a reciprocal impression upon Julianne, however. In fact, out of the entire evening there was only one person who stood out in her memory.
    She was sitting on one of the gilt chairs surrounding the dance floor waiting for one of the ubiquitous young men to bring her a glass of punch when an older man than the boys she had danced with all evening came over and sat beside her. “Miss Wells, I’m Robert Southland,” he said. “Your aunt introduced me earlier.”
    “Oh, yes,” she replied vaguely. Her Aunt Elizabeth had introduced a host of men to her this evening. She smiled politely and said, “Are you enjoying yourself, Mr. Southland?”
    The man shrugged. “They’re all the same, these crushes.”
    Julianne laughed. “Oh dear. That isn’t a very encouraging thing to say to a girl whose fate it is to attend them all.”
    He grinned at her. He had an open good-natured face with bright brown eyes. “I understand you and your father spent a good deal of time in Egypt,” he said.
    “Yes,” she responded cautiously. “We were there.”
    “You didn’t by any chance meet a man called John Champernoun?” he asked.
    At the mention of that name Julianne felt her heart turn over. “Why, yes,” she answered faintly. “I met him—briefly.”
    “I understand he’s become quite a fixture with the pasha,” Southland said. “We were together on the Tigre in 1799, you know. I was there when John pulled Mohammed Ali out of the sea. Ali was one of the