The Famous Heroine/The Plumed Bonnet Read Free

Bridgwater.
    Her grace and the girls would not even have been in such a questionably fashionable place as Bath at such anunfashionable time as spring if Lady George had not been suffering through a difficult confinement. But her grace was fond of her daughter-in-law and of her grandchildren and had deprived herself and her daughters of all the pleasures of the first half of the Season in London. Perhaps fortunately for them, the incident of little Henry seemed to have precipitated the arrival into this world of his sister, who was delivered a mere two days later. Mother and child were doing remarkably well and were now being coddled with affectionate indulgence by the proud father.
    And so at last, when it was already June, her grace had set off for London with two impatient daughters and a rather alarmed protégée, who wondered how a usually strong-willed young lady like her could find herself in such a predicament. Over the past few years, she had turned down no fewer than three proposals of marriage from remarkably eligible men merely on the grounds that she felt no more than a passing affection for any of them. As if
that
had anything to say to anything, her father had commented each time, rolling his eyes at the ceiling and making clucking noises of frustrated disgust.
    Her father was rather tickled over the idea of her marrying a gentleman. So was Edgar, her brother, who had pointed out that she must marry someone and it might as well be a gentleman who might awe her into something like meek ladylike submission. She would make a horrid spinster, he had warned her, all stubborn will and bossiness with no domain over which to exercise her tyranny. She was fond of Edgar. It was a pity that some people had concocted the idea that he had behaved with cowardice in the incident of little Henry. How stupid and how totally untrue. But public opinion was remarkably difficult to manipulate, she had found.
    Cora frowned and contorted her face until she couldbite the flesh of her left cheek. But she was seating herself in the carriage as she did so and the duchess was seated opposite, watching her.
    “You are nervous, dear,” she said with gracious condescension. “It is understandable. But you must remember that you are dressed as well as anyone and that you have the manners to equal anyone else’s. And the fact that you have my sponsorship will silence any question about your eligibility to be at Lady Markley’s ball. Bridgwater has undertaken to present you with some eligible partners. I will do the like, of course. Now do smooth out the frown and the facial contortions, my dear. They are not becoming.”
    Cora had already smoothed out the frown and had stopped biting her cheek. And a wonderful antidote to her sense of unfairness over what had happened to Edgar with reference to the little Henry incident was remembering why she was in the carriage so grandly dressed—with clothes Papa had been quite adamant about paying for.
    She was on her way to a ball. Well, there was nothing so remarkable about that. She had danced at assemblies at Clifton and Bristol and of course in Bath. She loved the vigor of country dances.
    But this was a ball in
London
.
    This was a ball exclusively—well, not quite exclusively, considering the fact that she was going to be there—for people of the
ton
.
    Cora’s stomach chose that inauspicious moment to rouse itself out of its quiet and comfortable lethargy in order to tie itself in knots. And then her dinner decided to protest the fact that it was sitting inside a knotted stomach.
    She smiled vacuously at her carriage companions.
    *  *  *
    “S HE IS A diamond of the first water, Frank,” Lord Hawthorne said, sighing and gazing at the lady in question across the expanse of the ballroom. “She refused me a dance last week. Said her card was full. And then granted a set to Denny when he arrived late.”
    Lady Augusta Haville’s bad manners in behaving thus only enhanced her reputation