Ambrose, I insist you find your sisters at once. They told me they were going shopping for new bonnets, when in fact Lady Sybil has just arrived to take tea and told me that horrid Miss Wilson is opening her shameful club today! I forbade them to attend, and yet cannot be sure they will obey.
“I know they won’t,” Ambrose muttered.
His sisters varied greatly. The married one, whosehusband’s more progressive views meant he wouldn’t object, could attend the opening if she desired, but the other two, still unwed, faced potential reputational damage. Although one was engaged so he hoped she would no longer be his concern in the not too distant future.
You must bring them home if they are there with minimal fuss, and for heaven’s sake, do not alert anyone to the fact they are there—if they are. Make haste, Ambrose.
Your mother.
The pounding behind his eyes intensified. She would never ask her husband to retrieve his daughters. It was always Ambrose. He opened the hatch above his head and gave Patrick new directions.
He watched the scenery pass as they headed toward Miss Wilson’s new ladies-only club.
The opening was planned for three months ago, but it did not happen. Ambrose had not asked why, and no one had volunteered the information. All he knew was that when Lord Haskell, the previous owner of the building, had passed, his wife had no wish to keep it and continue paying the lease and so had been happy to offer it to Miss Matilda Wilson, the bane of his existence.
The roads were a chaotic press of vehicles, even on such a miserable day. A hansom cab overtook his carriage and then weaved aggressively between a coal wagon and a gentleman on horseback. There would be horse dung and mud forming rivers on the roads and a fine brown spray covering anyone who got close enough to the wheels of carriages.
London,Ambrose thought. He both loved and loathed this place, but he, unlike many, lived a privileged life. Outside his windows were flower girls huddled in doorways and costermongers pushing barrows about. They didn’t have the luxury of a carriage, or indeed the ability, like Ambrose had,to decide to stay inside should he wish it—or more importantly, should his mother allow it.
The roar of a man had him wiping the glass to see who was yelling. He saw the driver of a carriage raise a fist as a young boy darted in front of his horses.
“London,” Ambrose muttered aloud this time. It was always a cacophony of noise and sights. If a person wanted solitude or silence, walking about its streets was not the place to achieve either.
When the carriage finally stopped, he opened the door and stepped down.
“Head home now, Patrick. I will make my way there when I am done.”
His driver frowned down at him. “If you’re sure, my lord?”
“I am, thank you.”
Ambrose raised his collars and slapped his hat on top of his head. He then headed up the street that his own club sat on. After he found his sisters, he would throw them all into a hansom cab and send them home before heading to his meeting.
Making his way past the elegant facade of his club, he nodded to the doorman, who had been standing there for as long as Ambrose had been entering the male domain, and made for the building next door. Of his sisters, there was no sign, which was a good and bad thing. Good because it meant they were likely shopping as they’d told their mother, and bad that they could possibly already be inside the women’s only club, which meant it would be harder to get them out.
He’d known about it, of course, and had debated the matter furiously with the woman behind it, who happened to be his youngest sister’s best friend.
Ambrose wasn’t entirely sure he objected to his sisters gathering there. If they were inside and hidden fromscrutiny, perhaps it was harmless enough. What troubled him was the ridicule, the cruelty that might follow simply because they had chosen to establish a place of their own. They lived in a man’s world—right or wrong, that was the way of things—and there were those who loathed change above all else. A women’s sanctuary sitting directly beside a gentlemen’s establishment was exactly the kind of affront that drew out the worst in people.
“It’s preposterous, I tell you!”
Those words pulled his gaze toward two men and a woman standing only a few feet from The Iris, as the new club had been christened. One of the men was Lord Hardacre, someone who frequented the building next door.
“You should be at home, or—or doing the things a lady ought to do!” Sir Peter Crabtree, the other man, yelled at the woman standing on the step above him. “Stitching, painting watercolors, and pursuing musical entertainments,” he continued. “How dare you open a women’s only club next to our men’s one!”
Ambrose winced. He knew this woman well enough to understand how she would receive those words. It would not be pretty.
Miss Matilda Wilson was the best friend of his sister, Violet. Opinionated, determined, and, in his eyes, a bad influence on Violet, and since the first day they’d met, she had been annoying him far more than she should.
He’d tried to persuade his sister to find another friend. She’d of course ignored him.
Considering he was a rule follower, two of his sisters—and possibly the third, but she was sneakier about it—definitely were not. His mother did not know half of what they got up to.
Matilda, or Tilly, as she was known to her friends, of which he was most definitely not one, had always disturbedAmbrose, and he loathed his reaction to her. Her beauty reached out and hit him hard every time he was within a few feet of her, and he knew his annoyance stemmed from that awareness more than the fact that she led his sister astray.
Her hair was the color of honey—not quite blond but not brown either—and it was thick. A rogue curl usually hung down her back, and he’d itched to touch it many times. Then there was her face, which was always moving. Whether frowning, smiling, or glaring, those lush lips drew his eyes and had given him far too many erotic dreams, to say nothing of her pale, soft skin and startling green eyes that tended to judge him when they were together.
And that was another thing: Her continual dismissal of him stung. He was a lord, goddamn it, and she treated him like he was a chimney sweep.
