Her fingers tightened on her glass as she scanned the ballroom. Tonight she was looking for her new friends, Beatrix and Poppy.
They’d managed to meet, the three of them. They’d each taken a maid and told their mothers they were going shopping, when they’d really gathered at the circulating library for the inaugural meeting of the Society For Resourceful Young Ladies Who’ve Had Quite Enough.
Bea, as prime minister, decided that their first order of business should be to rename their Society. She felt strongly the new title should be both shorter and more powerful.
They’d spent a better part of an hour discussing a variety of names before Bea had snapped her fingers and said, “I’ve got it! The Wallflowers’ Revolution.”
“Ooh, that’s quite good,” Georgie had offered. “What about ‘The Wallflowers’ Revolt’?”
“Even better!” Bea agreed.
Poppy’s bright blue eyes had gone wide as she shook her head. “There is only one problem with that name,” she’d insisted.
“Which is?” Georgie asked, truly perplexed.
“Bea here is hardly a wallflower,” Poppy continued. “She’s the diamond of every Season.”
“Ooh, you’re quite right,” Georgie replied, biting her lip and frowning.
“Perhaps,” Bea interjected, “but I aspire to be a wallflower and that is what matters, if you ask me. I’ve told my father that as long as he insists upon me marrying Nicholas Archer, I intend to remain a spinster.”
“And he listens to you?” Georgie asked, bewildered. “I wish my father would listen to my wishes,” Georgie said with a sigh.
“He doesn’t have much of a choice,” Bea replied with a sly grin.
“Why?” Poppy wanted to know, leaning forward to listen.
Georgie was on tenterhooks as well.
“Because I told him if he forces me to marry, I shall cause the biggest scandal London’s ever seen. I’d run away if I had to.”
“Really,” came Georgie’s breathless reply. Her heart was beating like a rabbit’s foot in her chest. She had never met another young lady who had the same outrageous plan.
For the first time in her life, she felt as if she truly had someone she could talk to. Someone—two someones!—she could share her deepest secrets with.
And share them she did. For another hour, the three of them spoke in hushed whispers about Georgie’s plan to escape from her wedding to the Marquess of Henderville.
“Why, we shall help you, that’s all there is to it,” Bea had declared with a fiercely determined look in her eye. “In fact, it shall be the first order of business for The Wallflowers’ Revolt.”
“You would do that?” Georgie asked, her heart clenching with gratitude.
“Of course we would,” Poppy assured her. “After all, I’m not afraid of a little scandal. My mother is scandal personified.”
“And I know how to avoid it,” Bea added with a wink.
They’d left then, setting their next meeting for the following week at Bea’s town house. “Honestly it will be such a lark to have the meetings directly under Father’s nose,” she’d assured them.
Georgie hadn’t seen her friends since Tuesday. Now it was Friday, and she continued to scan the Cranberrys’ crowded ballroom for them.
Fortunately, she quickly found them.
Bea stood several paces away, next to her glamorous mother, the Duchess of Winston. Georgie had already come to recognize Bea’s imperious poise and biting wit. Both were on full display this evening as she seemed quite in her element jesting with a group of London’s finest. Though, she noted with a bit of amusement, Nicholas Archer was not among them.
There, just beyond Bea’s group, standing with the other unwanted young ladies along the wall, was Poppy, her red curls pinned too tightly and her blue eyes darting nervously, as though she expected her mother to come swinging from the chandelier at any moment.
Georgie felt a faint smile tug at her lips. It had only been two hours together this week, along with the time they’d spent tucked away in the Willoughbys’ retiring room last Friday, but already she felt as though she knew her two new friends better than anyone in her life.
The Wallflowers’ Revolt.
