Chapter One
London, June 1820
Lady Beatrix Winslow knew two things for certain.
One: the corner of Cheapside and Gutter Lane was no place for the daughter of a duke.And two: that was precisely why she had come.
Clutching the worn hem of her maid’s cloak and hunching her shoulders, Bea darted around the corner and pressed herself against the brick wall of a bakery, ignoring the smell of yeast and desperation wafting from within.Her breath came fast.Not from exertion, but from the delightful, illicit thrill of anonymity.No one recognized her.No one bowed.No one tried to foist a dance card or an eligible Tory suitor upon her.
It was glorious.
Her father’s coach would have been instantly identifiable, all gleaming black lacquer and gilt trim, utterly antithetical to stealth.That’s why she’d paid for a hack today.That, and because the printshop’s apprentice had told her—somewhat nervously, as if fearing divine retribution—that a certain Bow Street Runner had inquired afterB.Adroit’slatest submission.
They were sniffing.
Well, let them sniff.
Let them comb every ball, every club, every gentleman’s study for the elusive cartoonist.Let them scrutinize waistcoats for ink stains and examine gloves for charcoal smudges.
Let them look for a man.
Because everyone knew—positivelyknew—that B.Adroit must be a man.Only a man could have the insider knowledge.Only a man could wield such scathing wit and invent such devastating caricatures.Only a man would dare.
Bea smiled to herself as she slipped through the back door of the printing press.The truth?B.Adroit was two and twenty, tall, blond, decidedly female, and hidden directly under all of their noses.And when she wasn’t excoriating half of Parliament, she could be found standing dutifully beside her mama at the latesttonball, nursing watered-down ratafia and refusing every dance with the determination of a nun guarding her virtue.
A wallflower.
By choice.
No one knew exactly why the proclaimed Diamond of every Season refused to take a husband.She was too particular, went the rumor.Outrageously so.
How deliciously wrong they all were.
Bea made her debut five Seasons ago, endured the tedium of required flirtation, and gamely danced with the endless queue of suitors her father paraded in front of her.Then, somewhere between being partnered with the Honorable Harold Twitworth (who belched the entire length of the quadrille) and the Viscount Snodgrass (whose greatest conversational skill involved pheasants), her father, the esteemed Duke of Winston, made it clear that she was to marry hisprotégé, Lord Nicholas Archer, the Marquess of Vanover.
That was when Bea had promptly realized something: she would rather rot on the shelf forever than marry Nicholas Archer.A more pompous, full-of-himself, far-too-certain-he-was-always-right bag of wind did not exist.
Thankfully, Mama was reasonable.She had refused to allow her only daughter to be forced into a marriage she didn’t want.And so, Bea had gone all these Seasons without a marriage.She was infinitely proud of it.Oh, it would make any other girl an immediate wallflower.Like her friend, Georgiana Chadwick, who, without a dowry, had been a wallflower all this time, until she quite literally was swept off her feet by the Earl of Pembroke earlier this Season while attempting to flee her own wedding to an entirely different man.
Then there was her other friend, poor Poppy Montford.The only child of the scandal-ridden widow of the Viscount of Montague, the colorful Lady Viva.While Georgie had been a wallflower because her debt-ridden father had spent her dowry, Poppy was a wallflower because of her mother’s scandalous reputation.
But Bea?Bea was something different altogether.A wallflower by choice.Practically unheard of in theton.Which only made the rumors more pointed.Particular, they called her.Selective was the word Mama liked to substitute.It was laughable, really.But Bea didn’t give a whit.They could call her whatever they wanted as long as she was able to continue to dodge the parson’s noose.For if Nicholas Archer was her father’s choice, Bea would remain a wallflower indefinitely.
But her outing today was not merely about preserving her anonymity.It was about momentum.
The reform bill would be debated again in a fortnight, and every Tory in London seemed determined to crush it beneath polished boots and pompous speeches.Restrictions on trade were the only way to protect the laborers whose backs bore the weight of the Empire, but men like her father and Nicholas Archer dismissed such concerns as “idealistic”—Bea’s least favorite word in the English language.
So she drew.Relentlessly.Strategically.Every cartoon she delivered was a stone thrown at the great, immovable wall of privilege.If she could make enough peers look foolish, if she could sway even a handful of votes, the bill might pass.
This wasn’t rebellion for amusement’s sake.This was her contribution to the only war she could fight.
Because she’d already decided long ago…she would write her own rules.If Society refused to hear her voice?She would draw it.
With ink.
With teeth.
And with a signature that made men in Parliament sweat through their cravats.
