Betsy lay watching and trying to think through a fog of happiness. Just at the moment, she didn’t care about wearing breeches to the auction, or playing billiards in a men’s club. She was contemplating a far more scandalous move, from the view of polite society: rejecting a future duke in favor of a war-damaged man with a lesser title.
She was out of the bath and dressed by the time Winnie discovered Jeremy’s bundle tucked behind a chair. “What on earth is this?” her maid asked.
“Oh, that’ll be my breeches,” Betsy said airily. “There’s an auction in Wilmslow this afternoon, and I plan to wear boy’s clothing.”
“Lady Boadicea!” Winnie cried—using Betsy’s full name as a measure of her distress—“after all the work we’ve done to make you into a proper duchess! With the future duke and his mother in the inn. You mustn’t, you really mustn’t!”
“The duchess plans to wear men’s clothing as well, if they can be made to fit in time. Her great-aunt tried to escape a marriage by fleeing in breeches. Think of it like a fancy dress party.”
“How very peculiar,” Winnie observed. “I have no wish to wear men’s clothing.” She took a pair of green velvet breeches from the bundle. “I suppose if Her Grace . . . I can’t imagine her in men’s clothing!”
“My Aunt Knowe will wear breeches as well.”
“I wouldn’t want to put on nasty old breeches.” Winnie shook out the matching coat. “I think it will fit you, but this costume is wretchedly out-of-date.”
“There’s a portrait of my brother Alaric wearing it in one of the east wing bedchambers. I think he was around twelve. He threatened to slice the painting to ribbons and feed it to the goats, so it had to be stowed in a guest room.”
“He’s a wild one,” Winnie sighed. Like the rest of the nation, she had succumbed to Alaric’s books depicting his adventures. No one had cried harder when Wilde in Love was performed at the castle and Alaric’s supposed fiancée was eaten by cannibals.
“I suppose if I steam these carefully, I can make them look respectable.” And with that she tucked them under her arm and set off for the nether depths of the inn.
Aunt Knowe poked her head in the door shortly afterward. “Breakfast, Betsy.”
“Mayn’t I stay here and read?” Betsy was seated with her toes close to a burning log, reading a rather bawdy play she found on the mantelpiece.
“You, my dear, are wearing a pink morning gown, the better to dazzle Emily. Why waste it?”
Betsy looked down, disconcerted. She hadn’t registered that Winnie had dressed her to suit the duchess’s taste. “I don’t feel dazzling.” She inched her feet a little closer to the fire. “I feel like staying here until it’s time to leave for the auction.”
“Emily has gone to church, but she will be back soon. Given that she’s a lackadaisical church-goer at best, I think she means to pray that the three of us be forgiven for our breeches-begotten sins. You must come to breakfast and thank her. She’s so pleased that you are both perfectly behaved and wild, not with an E.”
Betsy sighed.
“You’ve made her happier than she’s been in years. From Emily’s point of view, the curtain is rising on a new duchess who promises to perform the role with verve. She can’t wait to play a supporting role.”
“She understands my so-called perfection is a performance?”
Aunt Knowe waggled her eyebrows. “Everyone does. Most of polite society is agog, waiting to see you throw off the shackles of propriety and arise from the ashes like a phoenix. That would be the female half, as the men are too foolish to discern that you are no demure maiden.”
“You mean those ladies are waiting for a Prussian to cross my path,” Betsy pointed out. The prediction of her disgrace still stung, but it had lost the power it wielded when she was fourteen.
“You’re a Wilde, my dear. Your mother was not a Wilde. Those are the only two facts that matter: My friends are intrigued by the fact that one of the Wildes appears to be a model of propriety.”
“You’re wrong,” Betsy said with conviction. “They’re waiting to see me make a fool of myself over a yellow-haired man.”
A tremendous frown gathered Aunt Knowe’s forehead into pleats. “Are you jesting, Boadicea?”
“No,” Betsy said. “I assure you, Aunt Knowe, I learned that lesson on the very first day I went to school.”
Aunt Knowe closed the door and sat down in the chair where Jeremy had seated himself the night before. Not that the fact was relevant.
“My dear,” she said, “you’re moonstruck. Batty. Mad as a March hare. Put your book aside.”
Betsy obeyed, because she was used to obeying her aunt.
“I have wondered why you constructed such a medieval portrait of a lady to perform before polite society,” Aunt Knowe said. “I see now that I have been a very bad aunt because I thought you deserved privacy. I considered your perfection a result of nervousness. It seemed unlikely, but one never knows. That wasn’t it, was it?”
Betsy shook her head.
“I’m a fool,” her aunt muttered.
“The story of my mother and the Prussian was a dragon that had to be slain before I could join society without whispers behind my back.”
“You are a Wilde, Betsy! You have no need to genuflect before foolish matrons who gossip at the side of ballrooms.”
“Because my eyebrows mark me a Wilde?”
“Among other things,” Aunt Knowe said. “No one could possibly think that you were illegitimate.”
“My legitimacy doesn’t alter the fact that my mother ran away with a man and left her children.”
“Yvette’s flight doesn’t mean that her daughter must collect proposals the way a boy collects butterflies. Just sticking in a pin and turning the page.”
“School was difficult—”
“You think I don’t know that?” Aunt Knowe’s cheeks had become as red as her hair. “I heard about the unpleasant gossip; the headmistress warned us. But I never thought you’d pay attention to that rubbish! You are a duke’s daughter.”
“Yes, but—” Betsy began.
“Just look at Joan,” Aunt Knowe said, talking right over her. “She can’t wait to debut—and she has the Prussian’s hair! Why on earth would you think that jealous gossip can define a Wilde? Rubbish!”
“It’s not rubbish,” Betsy said, fumbling to defend herself. “Horses inherit characteristics, so why not people?”
“Characteristics!” Aunt Knowe waved her hands in the air. “Rubbish! Double rubbish! Your mother fell in love. Have you ever asked your father about their marriage?”
“It’s not my business.”
“It is if you behave like a brainless widgeon on account of it,” her aunt retorted. “Your father believed that Yvette would be a good mother to his orphaned sons, but he was wrong.”
Betsy nodded. “The matrons believe I’ll be overcome by lust and invite a man to my bed, as Yvette did.”
“Yvette did nothing remarkable. Just think of your brother Alaric having to flee Russia in order to escape a command visit to the royal bedchamber. Behave like an empress, not like a mouse, Betsy. Although,” she added, “if you intend to invite someone to your chamber, you must be prepared to marry him.”