“Heavens! Who does the girl think she is . . . Sulis Minerva?” drawled a dandy whose horizontal-striped silk waistcoat and vertical-striped surcoat made him resemble nothing less festive than a large piece of Christmas ribbon candy. He withdrew a pristine lace-edged handkerchief from his sleeve and dabbed a mirthful tear from his jaundiced eye.
“I think she’d do Sue Em proud,” giggled his companion, referring to Miss Welles’s current resemblance to the hybrid deity to whom Bath was consecrated—the Celtic Sulis, goddess of the spring from which the healing waters came, and her Roman counterpart, Minerva, goddess of healing as well as of wisdom.
“Bless me, she’s making quite a spectacle of herself!” remarked a shocked Mrs. Fairfax, a bit too loudly, to her two daughters, who fought over their mother’s quizzing glass, eagerly awaiting whatever the eccentric Miss Welles might think to do next.
“You haven’t seen anything yet,” C.J. shot back to the gossipy old windbag. She approached the orchestra, and crooking her finger at its leader—who was all too happy to bend down to speak to her, as it afforded a better gander at her spectacular figure—she requested a polka.
The musicians, pleased to depart from the expected stately and, frankly, rather boring minuet, and sensing that something quite out of the ordinary was happening, struck up a lively tune in three-quarter time.
“Now, your lordship,” C.J. began, approaching a nonplussed Darlington, who had remained standing like a condemned man in the middle of the room. “Shall we dance?”
The confounded nobleman, not wishing to offend Miss Welles, although her own rather stunningly offensive comportment of the past few minutes had discredited her quite enough, proceeded to arrange his arms in the proper form for the polka.
C.J. felt a perverse thrill take hold of her senses. Knowing full well that the ballroom of inbred aristocrats would not learn the dance for nearly a dozen years, she rearranged Darlington’s arms in the configuration that she had been taught back in her own century at one of her dance workshops.
With their hips nearly touching, their left arms meeting overhead in a balletic arch, while their right arms clasped one another about the waist, C.J. talked her partner through the simple boxlike step of an early waltz. The proximity of their bodies, combined with the intense gazing into each other’s eyes—as the form of the dance figure left nowhere else to look—generated the gasps of outrage that future historians would chronicle when the daring Countess Lieven was credited with introducing the waltz to London society in 1812.
The ladies who did not faint, or pretend to, so as to distract their respective male companions from the spectacle at the center of the room, fanned themselves furiously and sought to shield their virgin daughters’ eyes from the view of the sopping wet Miss Welles dancing virtually hip to hip with the apparently mesmerized Earl of Darlington. He, too, should be scandalized, thought many of his peers, who—if pressed—would have admitted their envy of the nobleman’s present position.
Lord Digby was growing more florid than usual. His wife was unsuccessful in trying to put a good face on her morbid embarrassment. Lady Charlotte, on the other hand, found herself somewhere between mildly jealous, awkwardly uncomfortable, and inexplicably fascinated. Part of her wished to tear her betrothed from the siren in his arms; another part wished the siren to teach her the figures.
Darlington regained his senses, after several lilting turns about the floor, when the aghast faces around him finally swirled into focus. “Miss Welles, you must cease this childish behavior,” he reprimanded in a tone that he himself realized was an unfamiliar one. “I will accept the responsibility for my own mortification under the circumstances, but can you not see the irreparable damage you are bringing to your character?” He tried to keep his voice low but had to speak louder than he had planned in order to be heard above the music.
“Your lordship, I am not the one to blame for the destruction of my reputation,” C.J. retorted, her voice rising in pitch. “You are quite concerned for my character when it conveniently suits, but what does your precious society say about the character of a nobleman who encourages a young woman to share his bed, makes assurances that lead her and her esteemed aunt to believe his intentions of matrimony, and then suddenly abandons her—with neither warning nor apology—and immediately becomes betrothed to a woman of means, little knowing—or perhaps caring—that his seduced and abandoned lover now bears his child?”
She had been so focused on her admonishment of the earl that she failed to note that the polka had ended, and that the shocked musicians sat, bows poised in midair, eagerly awaiting Darlington’s reaction.
Upon the horrific realization that her revelation had been heard by all and sundry, owing to the deafening silence—and suddenly mindful of the way Lady Rose and Lord Featherstone had been treated by their so-called equals—C.J. elbowed her way through the crowd and bolted from the ballroom.
The collective gasp upon Miss Welles’s stunning exit sounded like the sudden deflation of one of the Montgolfier brothers’ hot-air balloons.
Following a shocked silence, the room soon became atwitter with wagging tongues. “What else would you expect from a poor relation? A churchmouse?” And Lady Oliver sniffed, “No doubt encouraged by her aunt to behave with such hoydenish abandon.”
Never before had Lady Dalrymple wished that Beau Nash had sanctioned the wearing of weapons in the Assembly Rooms. Were the ironclad rule not strictly enforced, the
