“Very good,” said Mrs. Tavertine, changing course. “Can I trouble you to follow me to a sitting room, Miss Ivy?” She plucked the dog from her lap.
“Do not worry, Miss Trelayne,” called Ivy as she tromped away. “Imogene makes friends wherever she goes. No one was more outraged than Reverend Sagg, but even he was powerless to stop her.”
Chapter Thirteen
Drewsmina Trelayne’s Rule of Style and Comportment #5: A young woman may never steal away alone, out of sight and unaccounted for, with a man. Not once. Not even for a moment. The ramifications of being discovered are not worth risking the strict inflexibility of this rule.
Drew asked Lachlan to ride outside the carriage for the journey home. Perhaps he could hear and perhaps he could not, but the conversation would be painful enough without Imogene enduring his strangely silent, plainly obvious outrage. He’d returned from his errand agitated and tense, and when he’d learned Drew’s very modest retelling of what had happened, his mood (naturally) became stormier still. The situation only wanted his tinderbox match touched off against Imogene’s simmering flame.
Drew sat with the girls inside the vehicle—it would not hurt for Ivy to hear, and she could hardly ride on the coachman’s box, too—and endeavored to speak with calmness and graciousness.
“Can you tell me, Imogene, about the rules at yourprevioushome?” she asked gently. “Were young ladies allowed to slip away, alone, in the company of men?”
The girl said nothing.
“T.O.E.? Did it allow this?”
Not for the first time, Drew wondered if this particular conversation would not be better held between the girls and their mother.
“You must engage with me, Imogene, you must. It’s too important to leave unsaid.”
No reaction.
“Unless,” Drew tried, “you’d prefer to discuss this with Lady Tribble?”
“My mother,” Imogene said finally, “does not care.”
“Shedoescare,” insisted Drew, hoping this was true.
“I’ve done nothing wrong,” insisted Imogene. “We walked into the street. We were talking. This diatribe is misplaced.”
“Perhaps you simply talked and perhaps you did not. Perhaps this is a diatribe and perhaps I’m telling you something that you already know. Regardless, it cannot be left unsaid: all interactions between young ladies and men of any age must happen within plain view of other adults. You cannot disappear together. You cannot be alone. You cannot go missing together, and you cannot be discovered alone together—by anyone. Even servants.”
“It’s a stupid rule,” said Imogene.
“Call it stupid if you like,” said Drew, “but it has endured for centuries. Of all the rules, it is among the most heavily guarded by the matriarchs and patriarchs who control society. And the mostregarded—by everyone. Your very future depends upon it. Girls discovered alone with men are considered unmarriageable. Their innocence is believed to be lost. Their friends turn away. They struggle, even, to find honest work.”
“Stupid,” repeated Imogene, turning away.
When Drew had burst through the rear door of the shop and stumbled into the street, her priority had been to check for bystanders. It mattered less what Imogene was doing and more who was watching. Thankfully, the little back street was deserted.
Following the sound of Imogene’s laughter, Drew rounded the corner to see Imogene flattened up against the bricks, and the boy leaning over her, one hand propped above her head. Her face was tipped up, his mouth was descending. No pose represented more yearnful, breathless,youthfullonging. Add in Imogene’s beauty and the young man’s boldness—he’d met her just ten minutes ago—and their pose was almost clichéd.
Thankfully, Imogene had not put up a fight when Drew had called to her. She ignored her—twice she refused to acknowledge Drew calling her name—but when Drew circled close enough to take her by the wrist and tug her away, she’d come. The boy, also thankfully, had fled somewhere between the first request and the extraction.
“How can myentire lifehinge on kissing a boy behind the dressmaker’s shop?”
A loudthumprattled the carriage. The sound, Drew thought, of Lachlan’s head hitting the back of the coachman’s bench. Hedidhear.
“Innocence, as I’m sure you know, is valued most of all in any lady, Imogene,” Drew recited.
“More than cleverness?”
“Yes.”
“What of spirit? What of courage?”
“If lost innocence comes first, these are not even considered, I’m afraid. Not by society at large.”
