The Society Catch. Louise Allen
need you to help us get to the bottom of this puzzle. Aunt Emily says it all began at the Duchess of Bridlington’s ball. Joanna got drunk on champagne, flirted outrageously and then went on to commit just about every act in the list of things she could do to be labelled fast. And, to cap it all, she is wilfully refusing an offer from a highly eligible nobleman—discreetly unnamed.’
‘Joanna? Drunk on champagne?’ Alex looked incredulous. ‘That girl is a pattern-book of respectability and correct behaviour.’
‘The Duchess of Bridlington’s ball?’ Giles sat down again. ‘Oh, lord.’ His friends looked at him incredulously. ‘Don’t look at me like that! I haven’t been seducing the girl! But I think I may have started her off on the wine—’ He broke off, his eyes unfocussed, looking back into the past. ‘You know, she had had a bad shock of some kind: that’s why I gave her a couple of glasses of champagne.’
He had forgotten about his encounters with Joanna in the face of his estrangement with his father, but, looking back in the light of Mrs Fulgrave’s letter, things began to make sense. ‘At the ball I found her sitting outside one of the retiring rooms looking shocked,’ he began.
‘You mean someone might have said something risqué or unkind to her?’ Hebe ventured.
‘No, not that kind of shock.’ He remembered the blank look in those wide hazel eyes and suddenly realised what it reminded him of. ‘Alex, you know the effect their first battle had on some of the very young, very idealistic officers who came out to the Peninsula without any experience? The ones who thought that war was all glory and chivalry, bugles blowing and flags flying?’
‘And found it was blood and mud and slaughter. Men dying in something that resembled a butcher’s shambles, chaos and noise—’ Alex broke off and Hebe could see they were both somewhere else, somewhere she could never follow. ‘Yes, I remember. What are you saying?’
‘Joanna had the same look in her eyes as those lads had after their first battle, as though an ideal had disintegrated before her and her world was in ruins. She was white, her hands were shaking. I asked her what was wrong, but she would not tell me. I assumed it was a man. We talked of neutral subjects for a while. After two glasses of champagne she was well enough to waltz, which helped, I think. Movement often does in cases of shock—’ He broke off, remembering the supple, yielding figure in his arms, those wide hazel eyes that seemed to look trustingly into his soul, his instinct to find and hurt the man who had so obviously hurt her.
They discussed the matter a little more, speculating on the spurned suitor to no purpose and, after a while, left Hebe to rest.
Giles went up to his usual room. While Alex’s valet unpacked for him he paced restlessly, fighting the urge to drive straight back home to see how his father was. To distract himself from his cantankerous parent, he thought about Joanna Fulgrave. To his surprise he found he was dwelling pleasurably on the memory. He frowned, trying to convince himself that he was merely intrigued by what had turned a previously biddable débutante into a fast young lady. But there was more than that, something that lay behind the desperate hurt in those lovely eyes, something which seemed to speak directly to him.
He shifted in the comfortable wing chair where he had finally come to rest. His body was responding to thoughts of Miss Fulgrave in a quite inappropriate way.
It was two months since he had parted from his Portuguese mistress. There were, of course, the ladies of negotiable virtue who flourished in town. They had not featured on his mother’s list of dissipated activities that she had suggested to him. ‘Cards, dearest, drink—I know you have a hard head for both, so they are safe. Be seen in all the most notorious places. Perhaps buy a racehorse? Flirt, of course, but no young débutantes, that goes without saying… Do you know any fast matrons?’
‘Only you, Mama,’ he had retorted, smiling into her amused grey eyes.
After an hour, Hebe, thoroughly bored with resting, summoned both men back to her salon, announcing that she had not the slightest idea what she could do to assist her aunt.
‘Send Giles to listen sympathetically,’ Alex was suggesting idly when there was the sound of the knocker. ‘Who can that be?’
Starling appeared in the doorway. ‘Mrs Fulgrave, my lady.’ He flattened himself against the door frame as Emily Fulgrave almost ran into the room, ‘Oh, Hebe, my dear, Alex… Oh!’ Both her niece and the Earl regarded her with consternation from the chaise where Alex was sitting beside Hebe who, he had insisted, was to stay lying down for at least another hour. Mrs Fulgrave burst into tears.
It took quite five minutes and a dose of sal volatile before she could command herself again. Giles, his escape cut off by a flurry of hastily summoned maid-servants and general feminine bustle, retreated to the far side of the room, hoping that his presence would not be marked. Hysterical matrons, he felt, were even less his style than fast ones.
Finally Hebe managed to ask what was wrong. Her aunt regarded her over her handkerchief and managed to gasp, ‘Joanna has run away.’
Eventually the whole story was extracted. Joanna had vanished from her room, but was not missed until it was time for luncheon because she was assumed to be hiding herself away until her unwanted suitor was due that afternoon and Mr Fulgrave was not in a mood to be conciliatory and seek to encourage her to emerge.
When her mama had finally opened her bedchamber door she was gone, with only a brief note to say she was going ‘where she could think.’
After several hours of sending carefully worded messages to her friends in town, all of which drew a blank, her parents were at their wits’ end. Mr Fulgrave was prostrate with gout, dear Alex had seemed their only resort.
Alex shot one look at Hebe’s white, shocked face and said firmly, ‘I am sorry, Aunt Fulgrave, but I simply cannot leave Hebe now.’
‘I know, of course, you cannot,’ Emily Fulgrave said despairingly. ‘I should have thought. It will have to be the Bow Street Runners, but we will have lost a day…’
‘I will find her,’ Giles said, standing up and causing all of them to start in surprise.
‘Oh, Giles, thank you,’ Hebe said warmly. ‘I had quite forgot you were there. Aunt Emily, Giles is staying with us. What could be more fortunate?’
Giles wondered if Mrs Fulgrave would consider that the family scandal coming to the ears of someone else, however close a friend, to be a fortunate matter. ‘You may trust my absolute discretion, ma’am, but you must tell me everything you know about what is wrong and where she may have gone,’ he began briskly, only to stagger back as the distraught matron cast herself upon his chest and began to sob on his shoulder. ‘Ma’am…’
Eventually Mrs Fulgrave was calm, sitting looking at him with desperate faith in his ability to find her daughter. Giles was already bitterly regretting his offer.
Damn it, what else can I do? he thought grimly. Alex and Hebe would fret themselves into flinders otherwise, and the Fulgraves had welcomed him into their family. And the thought of the girl with the pain in her hazel eyes tugged at him, awakening echoes of his own hurt.
On the thirtieth of June, two days after Mrs Fulgrave had arrived distraught at the Tasboroughs’ house, her errant daughter sat up in bed in the best chamber in the White Hart inn at Stilton and decided that, just possibly, she was not going to die after all.
It had been the meat pie she had so incautiously eaten at Biggleswade that had been her downfall. She had known almost at once that it had been a mistake, but she had been so hungry that when the stage had stopped she had eagerly paid for the pie and a glass of small ale.
Up until then the entire undertaking had seemed miraculously easy. She had packed a carefully selected valise of essentials and had donned the most demure walking dress and pelisse in her wardrobe. Her hair was arranged severely back into a tight knot,