“I don’t believe it,” Octavia said stoutly.
But Betsy’s brother North was fascinated by horse breeding and gave near-nightly disquisitions on which traits were making themselves known in the ducal stables. Betsy knew, better than most ladies, that traits were indeed inherited.
A strange tingle coursed through her body, as if a wall had opened, revealing something frightful behind it, something she’d never imagined. Her Aunt Knowe had never allowed the second duchess’s children to become embittered about their mother’s absence.
“Your mother didn’t belong in a marriage to your father,” Aunt Knowe often said. “Thank goodness, she recognized it, because it allowed the duke to find Ophelia.”
Family lore had it that the ink on the divorce decree wasn’t dry before Aunt Knowe ordered her brother off to London to find a third duchess. Since Betsy adored her dearest papa, her darling stepmother, and even those annoying brothers, she had never given the matter much thought.
Yet it seemed that other people—all of polite society, or so Clementine Clarke was shrilly declaiming—had given her mother’s circumstances a great deal of thought.
“There is no need to be rude,” Octavia said.
“Everyone thinks it,” Clementine said, her eyes sliding over Betsy, nose still slightly wrinkled, as if Betsy were a piece of spoiled mutton.
“Are you saying that every girl in this school will think that I am lascivious because my mother was unfaithful?” Betsy asked, just to be very clear.
Octavia turned a hot pink and closed her lips tightly.
“Will think?” Clementine retorted. “They do think, and so does everyone else important.”
Betsy tried not to hear her harsh breath echoing in her ears. Her father was important, but he must not know, because he never would have left her in a den of lionesses.
She almost jerked up from her chair and ran for the door. Perhaps the ducal coach was still at the curb. Or Miss Stevenson could send a groom to the townhouse and they would return and take her and her sisters away.
“Everyone says that the second duchess was never, shall we say, unsullied,” Clementine said. “Your mother gave the duke a son—though my mother says one has to question his bloodlines—and she was dallying with the Prussian well before you were born.”
“My brother Leo is not illegitimate,” Betsy said, her voice thick with disbelief and horror. “And neither am I!”
Adulterous mother or no, Betsy stemmed from a long line of dukes, and she was named after a great female warrior. She listened to Clementine until she didn’t care to listen any longer.
Then she rose to her feet. “You are quite despicable,” she said, controlling her temper as Aunt Knowe had taught her. “Petty and small-minded. I shall not share a parlor with you.”
Clementine laughed shrilly. “You should be grateful to sleep in the attic! You’re no more than a by-blow, who will be lucky to marry a squire. It would take a miracle for you to attract a spouse from the peerage.”
Betsy snatched up a glass of water from the tea tray and dashed it into Clementine’s face. “I am a duke’s daughter,” she stated, enjoying the way Clementine’s starched curls wilted onto her shoulders like yellow seaweed. “I have never heard of your family. Clarke?” She curled her lip and said the first consciously nasty thing that she’d said in her life. “I gather you had an ancestor who was a clerk? How amusing to meet you.”
Sobbing loudly, Clementine flung herself out of the door.
“Are you going to throw water at me as well?” Octavia asked, her eyes rounded.
“If you say anything unkind about my mother, I shall dump that pitcher of water over your head,” Betsy said. “In the middle of the night. I am trained in the art of war.”
“I shan’t say a word,” Octavia said hastily. “I don’t like cold water.”
Betsy stared at her. Octavia’s face wasn’t piggish like Clementine’s.
“I apologize for Clementine’s rudeness,” Octavia said. She glanced at her fingers twisting in her lap and then looked back at Betsy. “She’s frightfully bad-tempered and considers everyone beneath her. She only allowed me to share the parlor because Miss Stevenson said that she would have to leave the school otherwise. I like your name.”
“Boadicea was a warrior queen,” Betsy said. She was trembling a little.
Octavia bit her lip. “You’ll need that here,” she said slowly. “The girls aren’t always terribly nice.”
Betsy sat down.
“We’re supposed to be learning history and the like,” Octavia explained. “But in reality, it’s all about marriage. Sometimes the only conversation at supper is about how many proposals one should get during one’s debut. Clementine’s parents have three houses, but that’s not enough, of course.”
“She’s afraid she won’t have any suitors.”
Octavia nodded.
“If all those girls believe that I won’t have any suitors,” Betsy said, “I shall prove them wrong.” The sick feeling in her stomach was replaced by a red-hot bolt of fury. “I shall have more marriage proposals than anyone.”
“I have no doubt,” Octavia said, looking rather awed.
Boadicea had come surprisingly close to winning her rebellion against the Roman invaders, according to the expert on military history the duke had hired to teach all his children, girls included.
By June, three years later, when the time came for Betsy to debut . . .
She won.
She came, she saw, she conquered.
Veni, vidi, vici, to quote another warrior, Caesar.
By October 1780, Betsy had received—and refused—proposals chaperoned and unchaperoned, in her father’s study, in a gazebo, in an alcove at Westminster Cathedral.
She had turned down four peers and fourteen untitled gentlemen, which said something about the paucity of English titles, or the relatively lenient standards of the gentry compared to the aristocracy.
The biggest fish of all—a future duke—had so far eluded her, but she had the feeling that the deficit would soon be mended.
She was standing in the midst of a costume ball being thrown at Lindow Castle for the wedding of her brother North when her aunt Knowe loomed up at her shoulder.
“Ah, Betsy! I must ask my dear niece to escort Lord Greywick to see the billiard table that just arrived from Paris.”
Betsy looked up—and up. The future Duke of Eversley stared down at her.
Did she say that she’d won the battle?
Battles are only won when the biggest fish of all is in one’s net.
She smiled.
Chapter Two
Lindow Castle
A Costume Ball in Honor of the Marriage of
Lord Roland Northbridge Wilde to Miss Diana Belgrave
October 31, 1780
Only one gentleman had found his way to the billiard room from the ballroom at Lindow Castle; most revelers were too busy flaunting their charms or their costumes to search out a chamber containing little more than a walnut gaming table and a few armchairs.
Since the castle was larger than most garrisons, no music could be heard in the corner where Lord Jeremy Roden—late of His Majesty’s Royal Artillery—sat with his legs sprawled before him, one hand clenched around a glass of whisky.