It was as though Marchand had somehow infected her with a low fever. She had not ever considered herself an object purely of desire; more specifically, she had never considered herself anobject.
To think that she might have peacefully lived out her life without knowing that something so primitive aslust—because she knew that’s what all that heat and tingling was about—lived within her independent of sense and good breeding, like a dragon chained in a dungeon.
She closed her eyes and willed to mind the image of Francis’s admiring gaze. His shyly ardent compliments would be balm right now. If she’d had anything like a dowry, he might have already proposed, and she never would have met Marchand. But Francis was the third son of a duke, and his wealthy parents were baldly practical about money and family connections.
She could hardly fault them. Her own family’s budget had gripped her by the short hairs for the last eight years. It was often the first thing she thought of in the morning and the last thing at night. A family trust managed by her father’s solicitor helped a little with the estate upkeep and funded Hogarth’s education, and it would revert to her brother when he finally married. The rest of the money left by their parents—lessthan fifteen thousand pounds—had funded everything else over the last eight years, from household staff to food to clothing to animal feed to firewood.
And this was why the local butcher wandered freely through the Woodvilles’ library on Friday afternoons and read what he found there to his heart’s content, and why twice every month the best seamstress in the parish drove the Woodville curricle to visit her mother in a neighboring town, and why Hogarth’s Latin tutor was the proud owner of a French horn she’d found in the attic (none of the Woodvilles played, but the tutor did). All because their limited family funds inspired Ginny to acrobatic heights of ingenuity when it came to negotiating discounts.
Necessity was the mother of confidence, and reticence was a luxury she could not afford. She’d been shy and overwhelmed by her new responsibilities at first, but she’d eventually learned to relish the challenge.
But for the past two years—and she’d never confided this to a soul—her breath would go nauseatingly short every time she opened the budget ledger. It was like watching the sands dwindling in a tipped hourglass. And while her darling sisters—level-headed, undemanding girls—seemed particularly easy to fall in love with and plenty of local boys did just that, the kind of grand matches her mother had begged Ginny to arrange for all of them required dowries that were at the very least not insulting.
She imagined how she would need to begin her sisters’ marriage settlement negotiations now: “A funny thing about those dowries...”
What does your heart tell you, Ginny?That’s what her motherused to say, whenever Ginny struggled with a dilemma or a decision.
She absently worried the little heart-shaped stone she’d found this morning between her thumb and forefinger, resentful that she was unable to dismiss the several brutally unsentimental points Mr. Marchand had made. Specifically, that men did the choosing. Her father had chosen to drive the high-flyer too fast, and her brother had chosen to gamble. It was mainly because of men that she was in this predicament.
Her mother had implored Ginny toneverforget that she was a lady, with all that entailed regarding bearing and decorum, and to make sure her sisters never forgot it, either. The paradox was that the struggle to continue being a lady seemed to continually require Ginny to do things no lady would ever do, like visit gaming hells. She’d been able to travel to London in the company of a Sussex neighbor who was visiting relatives in Covent Garden. But apart from Mrs. Hardy and Mrs. Durand, she had no other chaperones in London and no plans to acquire any, and this was the sort of thing that would have given her mother vapors.
She buried her nose in the blossoms that were tucked into the little vase on her room’s writing desk, and contemplated the two lists she’d spent the last hour scrawling on half of a sheet of foolscap included free of charge with her room. One column featured every member of the peerage with whom her family was acquainted in even a glancing way; it was long. The other was every London tailor or modiste she knew about. This included only Madame Marceau and Weston.
She had only two clues about the person to whom Hogarth had lost their inheritance. Hogarth’s hysterical assertionabout satyrs jeering from waistcoat buttons might not even be a clue. More likely he’d seen his own drunk little face reflected in their shiny surfaces, the way she’d seen her own in Mr. Ogden’s buttons today, right before her encounter with the odious Mr. Marchand. But perhaps a tailor could tell her whether such a thing as satyr waistcoat buttons existed, and if they did, to whom they’d been sold.
Slightly more promising was the other clue:If you’d known who it was you would have understood, Ginny.This suggested to her that it was someone about whom she and Hogarth shared an opinion, and this unfortunately could be a number of people on her list. There was Lord Olyphant, for instance. A childhood friend of their mother’s had married him. Hogarth occasionally imitated the man’s excruciatingly slow, supercilious monotone to make Ginny laugh. Imaginechoosingto marry Lord Olyphant, Ginny had once thought.
Imagine a time when she was so blithely ignorant of the caprices of fate that might lead a woman to do exactly that.
Do pretty, penniless women exploit wealthy men when they marry for money?
She shrugged her shoulders irritably, as if Marchand himself were standing behind her and whispering this in her ear.
Then there was the Earl of Sydenham, who had given her father that frighteningly beautiful rifle. Sydenham liked to claim that her father had stolen her mother from him, a joke that no one really seemed to enjoy but that everyone seemed to laugh at anyway.
If necessary, she would visit every member of the peerage one by one and ask them directly whether they were a member of Lucifer’s Fall or whether they knew to whom Hogarth hadlost all that money that fateful evening.Oneof them might crack when confronted with her copper dress and rank desperation.
But unless she got very lucky early in the process, tracking them down and visiting them one at a time meant lots of hack fares and solo journeys, not to mention withstanding the scalding embarrassment of those sorts of confrontations. She had only a fortnight in which to do it, too, and a little less than five pounds and a few shillings in her reticule.
And suddenly it felt as though a vise was tightening in her chest.
She closed her eyes and pictured Felicity’s and Fiona’s devasted little faces if she failed in her mission.
Felicity’s fiancé was Lord Cambrough, an heir to a marquess. Fiona’s was Charles Tarreyton, the second son of another earl. Both were attractive, good-natured, and not stupid. They were also sincerely devoted to her sisters. Both would rightfully feel betrayed and deceived, not to mention heartbroken, if they learned the dowries they’d anticipated had evaporated. The Woodville reputation would be destroyed, not to mention Ginny’s own marriage opportunities. And poor Hogarth would never be able to forgive himself. He would be a shattered man.
Ginny knew she would sufferanything, do anything, to make this right for all of them.
I’ll call off your brother’s debt to the house if you spend a night in my bed.
She flinched away from Marchand’s voice in her head again.
Almostanything.
She glanced uneasily behind her at the soft bed, piled in blankets, draped in a pink knitted coverlet, and crowned withtwo cloudlike pillows, and pulled in a shivering breath, as if Marchand was waiting for her there.
Suddenly an absurd wave of homesickness for her siblings swept through her. She’d been away for only a few days but she craved the reassurance of people who loved her. A reminder of why she was doing all of this.
A cheerful word with Dot over tea might make her feel a little better. She’d last heard the downstairs clock chime half past ten, and the boardinghouse rules allowed guests to ask for a cup of tea as late as eleven.
