The Undoing Of A Lady

her.

“Hoyden!” Lady Wheeler’s lips moved. Lizzie did not need to be able to hear her to know the words. “Wild, ungovernable, a disgrace…”

If only they knew just how disgracefully she had behaved.

Would they be kinder to her because her heart was broken?

“Lizzie!” Nat bellowed.

Lizzie took her life in her hands and dived between two carriages, hearing the coachman swear and feeling the heat of the horses’ breath against her face. Over the parapet, under the bridge, along the water’s edge, up into the village on the other side of the river, into the cabinetmakers where her unkempt reflection stared back at her from an endless line of mirrors for sale, the scent of beeswax in her nostrils, the gleam of the wood dazzling her… Someone caught her as she was about to trip on the pavement outside, but even as the panic grabbed her she realized it was not Nat but another gentleman, raising his hat, an appreciative gleam in his eyes. She could see Nat pushing through the crowd. Would he never give up?

She grabbed a hansom cab. “Fortune Hall, quickly!”

The coachman whipped up the horse and they were away before Nat could haul himself up into the cab beside her. Lizzie saw his furious expression as they pulled away. It was twice as expensive to take a hansom these days because Sir Montague taxed half of the drivers’ charges. Well, her brother could pay his own taxes this time, Lizzie thought. Her purse was empty anyway and she had dropped the bolt of blue spotted muslin somewhere in the street. She would not go back for it. She was not really sure why she had bought it in the first place.

The important thing was that she had outrun Nat again. She did not look back.

CHAPTER FOUR

DAMN THE WOMAN! He had chased her through every back street and alley of Fortune’s Folly. He had had to pay the china merchant and soothe the outraged coachman and calm some skittish horses, and he was sick and tired of acting as Lizzie’s conscience and wallet. She was spoiled and headstrong and she never faced up to her responsibilities. She had been running away for as long as he had known her.

She was running away from him now.

Nat smoothed his hair, calmed his breath and watched the hansom cab disappear over the cobbles with a clatter of wheels and a cloud of summer dust. Lizzie did not look back. The tilt of her head, even the back of her spring straw bonnet, looked defiant. But he had seen her eyes and they had looked terrified.

He bent to retrieve the parcel of blue muslin that was resting in the gutter. Goodness only knew why Lizzie had bought it. She was the least accomplished woman in the world with a needle and had always scorned embroidery and dressmaking.

Nat felt a pang somewhere deep in his chest. He knew Lizzie so well. They had been friends for years. He cared for her. It hurt that she used to run to him for help when she was in trouble and now she was running from him. He did not even understand why she was running though he imagined that it must be because she was so shocked and scared and mortified by what had happened that she simply could not face him. But he could put all to rights if only she would let him. The first step was taken. He was free of the engagement to Flora, free to marry Lizzie instead. He could give her the protection of his name and he could claim her fortune in place of the one he had lost.

If only he could make her stay still long enough to hear his proposal.

If only she accepted it.

With Lizzie one never knew.

He twisted the brown paper parcel in his hands and heard the covering rip. He could deliver it to Fortune Hall in person and demand that Lizzie see him. Except that she would probably climb over the roof and run away into the woods again sooner than speak with him.

For a moment he toyed with the idea of going to one of Lizzie’s friends, to Laura Anstruther or Alice Vickery, and asking for their help. He rejected the idea reluctantly, for that would involve some sort of explanation and his friends were already curious about the canceled wedding. He had received notes from both Dexter and Miles, his groomsmen, demanding to know what the hell was going on. If he asked their wives to intercede with Lizzie on his behalf the speculation would explode and although none of them would ever spread gossip or scandal, he could not expose Lizzie to such conjecture. No, he would have to sort this out unaided. That was appropriate since the disaster was of his creation. If only he had been stronger, had more self-control, more restraint. If only he had not found Lizzie so damnably physically attractive, if only he did not still ache for her with a devouring carnal need that was as shocking as it was misplaced. But again, if he married her that desire would no longer be inappropriate-or unfulfilled. He could make love to her every night and all day if he wished, as much as he wanted, sating his unexpected lust in the respectable marriage bed.

Fortune Street at midday on a Saturday was an inappropriate place to be sporting a huge erection. Nat moved the muslin parcel to provide strategic cover. He had to stop thinking about bedding Lizzie until he had secured her hand in marriage. He had to do everything properly. Better late than never.

AFTER MRS. MINCHIN HAD finished having hysterics and Mr. Minchin had finished raging, Flora had summoned the hall boy, the footman and as many of the maids as could be spared, and sent them out with notes for all the wedding guests telling them that the nuptials were canceled and she deeply regretted the inconvenience. She then informed her parents that she was going out for a walk, alone, and such was their stupor at what had happened that they did not oppose her. It was the first time in Flora’s life that she had made them angry and she could tell that they were baffled as well because until now she had never given them a moment’s cause for concern, yet suddenly she had turned into a stranger to them.

She went out of the house and turned away from the village toward the moors. She did not walk with any particular destination in mind, but simply followed where her feet were taking her. She noticed that it was a beautiful early summer day, perfect for a wedding. The skylarks were calling overhead, their song fading as they rose higher and higher into the blue. The wildflowers bobbed on the verge beside the track. Presently she found herself up on the hill, high above the village. Fortune’s Folly was spread out beneath her with the church spire piercing the sky and the lazy curl of the river and the old abbey ruins and the bridge, and Fortune Row where people strolled and gossiped in the sun. She was beyond the reach of them all, even if they were all talking scandal about her canceled wedding.

She looked down. Her shoes were ruined. It was so stupid of her to have come out without putting on stout boots for even in summer the tracks were dirty and rutted. She supposed that she could at least afford another pair, or a hundred pairs, since she wasn’t giving all her money away to Nat Waterhouse anymore. She tried to examine her feelings. She was not sorry that the wedding was canceled. She would have married Nat, of course, and she would have made him a good wife because that was what she had been brought up to believe in. It was what she had thought she was going to do with her life. Yet it was odd, because all along she had known that there had to be if not something more, then something different. A dutiful marriage was one path, true- the path that society in general and her mother in particular had decreed for her and she had not struggled against it. But now…Well, suddenly she felt free and it felt rather strange.

She sat down on the wall. The sharp corners of the stone dug into her bottom and thighs and she wriggled to try to get comfortable. She was out of breath. The morning was hot and the sun was climbing high in the sky and she had come out without a bonnet or parasol as well as in her flimsy shoes.

There were men working the fields away to her right. She recognized one of them as Lowell Lister, Lady Vickery’s brother. She had seen him escorting his mother and sister to assemblies in Fortune’s Folly before Alice was wed. He had never asked her to dance, of course. He was a farmer and she was a lady and it would not have been suitable, despite the fact that his sister had inherited a fortune and gone on to marry a lord.

Flora watched idly as Lowell and his men worked the field, cutting the hay. Lowell was as fair as Alice, and deeply tanned from so much time spent in the outdoors. There was a fluid strength about the movement of his body, a supple smoothness in the way that he bent and used the scythe. Flora could see the muscles in his arms