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She had listened with mounting hope as Nick proceeded to witter on about widow’s jointures and marriage settlements, slowly grasping the fact that her mother, at least, had not intended her to be left completely penniless. She had, in fact, bequeathed her only surviving child quite a tidy sum.
Though Nick had not been able to quite meet her eye as he explained that it was to have been hers when she reached her twenty-fifth birthday.
‘Unfortunately, my father somehow got access to it and made some rather unwise investments.’
From the look on Nick’s face, Imogen had gathered he had squandered the lot.
‘What must I do then, Nick?’ she had asked with a sinking feeling. ‘Seek employment?’ She would probably be able to get work in a school. One thing about growing up in the household of a man who devoted his life to studying antiquities was that there had never been any shortage of books. She could teach any number of subjects, she was quite sure, to boys as well as girls.
‘No, not as bad as that,’ Nick had assured her. ‘Your mother’s family have agreed to take you in and, once your period of mourning is over, to give you a Season. If you can make a match your uncle approves of, he will make up what you would have received from your mother upon your majority into a respectable dowry.’
And so, though the prospect of having to endure even a single Season had her shivering with dread, she had been packed off to live with Lord Callandar, her mother’s brother, and Lady Callandar, his wife.
At least it had not been like going to live with total strangers. Though she had never met them, Lord Callandar had written to his sister Amanda punctiliously on her birthday and Imogen’s, every year.
It had never crossed anyone’s mind to approach her real father’s family, not considering their obdurate attitude towards her mother. They had laid the blame for what her aunt termed the Dreadful Tragedy firmly at her door. Imogen had never had any contact with them at all.
‘Are you attending me, Imogen?’ her aunt snapped, rapping her wrist with her fan so smartly that it jerked her out of her reverie. ‘And sit up straight. Hands in your lap, not folded in that insolent manner!’
Imogen flinched to hear her aunt sounding so annoyed, and dutifully corrected her posture. She was truly sorry that she had turned out to be such a disappointment to her aunt and uncle, who had each shown her a great deal of kindness, in their own way. Her uncle had spent an extortionate amount of money trying to make up for what he saw as the deficiencies in her education. He had paid for deportment lessons and dancing lessons, and encouraged her aunt to buy her more clothes than she had believed it was possible for one girl to wear in a lifetime. And that had just been to cover her mourning. They had shopped all over again when she went into half mourning, and again when it was time for her to begin moving about in society a little.
And yet she had never felt at all happy in the Herriard household. It might have had something to do with the fact that she still had vague, shadowy memories of the short time she had lived there before, in the aftermath of the Dreadful Tragedy. Her grandfather seemed always to have been angry, her mother always weeping. And nobody would tell her where her big brother Stephen had gone. Her grandpapa had roared at her that she was a naughty girl for even mentioning him, and said that if she so much as spoke his name again, he would have her beaten. A feeling of utter isolation had frozen her to the spot on a part of the landing that she could still not pass without a shiver. For Stephen had always been the one to scoop her up when the grown-ups were fighting and take her away somewhere she could not hear the raised voices.
There was nobody to stand between her and this large, angry man, and it had terrified her. Even the nursery had been no refuge for the frightened little girl. Without Stephen, it had just become a bleak and empty prison cell. She had the impression of being left for days on end behind locked doors, although she was sure even her grandfather could not have been that cruel. He must have ensured she had at least a nursery maid bring her something to eat!
But no matter how hard she tried to resist them, those unhappy memories came swirling round her every time she crossed the threshold of the grand house in Mount Street.
It was not helped by the fact that once her mother had married Hugh Bredon, her life had undergone such a drastic change. Instead of incarceration and isolation, she had spent her first years at the Brambles learning to fish and shoot and ride, so that she could keep up with her magnificent new big brothers. She did not think she had run wild, precisely, over the ensuing nineteen years, though towards the end of her time there, she definitely had far more freedom than her aunt and uncle deemed appropriate for a young lady. She had thought nothing of saddling up her mare or harnessing the gig to go on errands or visit friends, entirely unaccompanied. And then, after her mother had died, she had taken over the running of Hugh’s household.
Her Uncle Herriard, she knew, would never have trusted a sixteen-year-old girl to run his household for him. Her stepfather might never have shown her much affection, but he had reposed a great deal of confidence in her abilities. Hugh had only checked the household accounts for the first few months she was in charge, and though he never praised her, he never complained about the way she ran things, either. All he wanted was to be left in peace to get on with his studies, and she had taken great pride in ensuring that he could do so.
But she had to face facts. When it came right down to it, Hugh Bredon had never quite thought of her as his own daughter. It was as though he was unable to forget that she was the result of his wife’s first disastrous marriage to Baron Framlingham.
Imogen’s shoulders slumped. ‘I am sorry to be such a disappointment to you, Aunt,’ she said dejectedly. ‘It is not that I am not trying to behave as you would wish…’
‘I know,’ her aunt agreed. ‘That is what is so particularly exasperating. It is so hard to discipline you for faults you just cannot help having! They are so deeply ingrained, that…’ She sighed. ‘If only you were as pretty as your mother,’ she said, for what seemed to Imogen like the thousandth time.
The very first time Lady Callandar had seen her, she had blanched and said, ‘Oh, dear! How very unfortunate!’
With her wildly curling hair and intelligent grey eyes, Imogen was, apparently, the very image of her father, Kit Hebden.
‘Knowing eyes,’ her uncle had said disparagingly. ‘That was the thing about Framlingham. Always looking at you as though he knew something you didn’t.’
‘Anyone who knew him will take one look at her,’ Lady Callandar had wailed, ‘and say she is bound to turn out exactly like him!’
‘Then you will just have to make sure,’ her uncle had said sternly, ‘that she never gives anyone cause to think it!’
‘Imogen, dear,’ her aunt had said sympathetically, once her uncle had stormed from the room, ‘you must not let your uncle’s manner upset you. You are—’ she had floundered for a moment, before her face lit up with inspiration ‘—-just like a lovely rose that has rambled in all the wrong directions. Your uncle may seem to be severe with you, but it is only because he wants to see you blossom.’
And from that day forward, her aunt had set about pruning her into shape.
‘If you could only learn to carry yourself with the poise of Penelope or Charlotte!’ her aunt had advised her, time after time. ‘People might gradually stop talking about the thorny issue of your mother’s Dreadful Disgrace!’
Although the shocking scandal in which her mother and father had been involved had happened over twenty years earlier, Imogen’s emergence into Society had reminded people of it.
Her mother had taken a lover. Not that there was anything unusual in that, in her circles. But feelings between William Wardale, Earl of Leybourne, and Baron Framlingham had apparently run high. They had got into a fist fight. And only weeks later, the earl had brutally stabbed Imogen’s father to death. As if that were not bad enough, it turned out that both men had been involved in some form of espionage. The Earl of Leybourne had been found guilty not only of murder, but treason. He had been stripped of land and titles, and hanged.
No wonder people stared at her and whispered behind their fans, whenever she walked into a room!
She was not pretty, she was not rich, she lacked poise and she had a scandal attached to her name. Mrs Leeming had been one of the very few Society matrons prepared to give her the benefit of the doubt. But Imogen had just ruined her chance to demonstrate she was nothing like either of her parents, by getting embroiled in that scene with Viscount Mildenhall.
The promises of invitations her aunt had managed to cajole, bribe or bully from her other intimates would probably dwindle away altogether now.
‘Perhaps,’ she ventured timidly, ‘we should abandon the attempt to find me a husband.’
She had already begun to suspect that she would be completely miserable married to the kind of man her uncle would approve of. The more she learned about fashionable Society, the more she understood her mother’s willingness to accept her banishment to the wilds of Staffordshire under the aegis of the somewhat reclusive Hugh Bredon. He may have had his faults, but he had never treated Amanda like a piece of topiary that needed constant clipping to maintain an artificially decorative shape.
Her aunt shot her a darkling look, but made no reply, for the carriage was slowing down.
If she ever did have any children, Imogen decided, mutinously, ignoring the footman’s outstretched hand and jumping down from the carriage, she would make sure each and every one of them knew they were loved exactly as they were, be they boys or girls. She would never try to stifle their personalities or make them feel they had to constantly strive for her approval.
Though, she thought despondently as she trailed up the front steps behind her aunt, it was not likely that she ever would have children of her own.
No man that Lord and Lady Callandar considered eligible would want to ally himself to a girl who could bring so little credit to his name. She only had to think of the disdain she had read in the viscount’s eyes, the mockery in those of his friends, to know she was never going to measure up.
‘In here, if you please,’ said her aunt, making her way across the hall to the sitting room. She waited in silence while a footman hastily lit some candles, banked up the fire, enquired if they wanted any refreshment and then withdrew.
‘Sit up straight,’ she then urged Imogen, who had slumped down on the sofa. ‘Just because you have suffered a little setback, there is no excuse for forgetting your posture!’
Imogen sat up straight, mentally bracing herself for yet another lecture about how young ladies ought to behave.
‘Now, Imogen, I have not taken you into my home and drilled you into the ways of Society, only to have you fall at the first hurdle! I do not despair of seeing you make a creditable alliance before the end of the Season.’
Imogen had a depressing vision of endless balls where she sat on the sidelines, watching the prettier, wealthier girls whirling round with their admiring partners. Or dancing with dutiful, bored men like Mr Dysart. Of picnics and breakfasts where she endured the spiteful comments of girls like Penelope and Charlotte, while the matrons whispered about her father’s terrible fate, and the bucks sniggered about her mother’s scandalous conduct. Of always having to rein herself in, lest she betray some sign that she took after either of her scandalous parents.
And then she looked at the determined jut of her aunt’s jaw. Her poor, beleaguered aunt, who had so determinedly taken up the cudgels on her behalf.
The last thing she wanted was to become a lifelong burden on her aunt and uncle. ‘If…if I have not received a proposal by the end of the Season, though, I could always go and teach in a school somewhere. For you surely cannot want me living with you indefinitely.’
‘That is for Lord Callandar to decide. Though I am sure it would make him most uncomfortable to think of a Herriard teaching in a school!’
‘But I am not a Herriard,’ Imogen pointed out. ‘I am a Hebden.’ It was why Hugh Bredon had not wished to adopt her, after all. Because she was the spawn of the notorious Kit Hebden.
‘Nobody will be in the least surprised that you could not make anything of me. Though I am sure everyone can see that you have done all you could to try and make me more…’ she waved her hands expansively, then frowned ‘…make me less…’
Her aunt sighed. ‘That is just the trouble, is it not? You are what you are, niece, and I am beginning to think no power on earth will ever make a jot of difference.’
‘I am sorry, Aunt.’ She bowed her head as she tugged off her evening gloves, one finger at a time. The backs were sticky with dried champagne. ‘I do not want you to be ashamed of me. I do not ever wish to cause you any trouble.’
‘I know that, dear,’ her aunt replied on yet another sigh. ‘But trouble seems to find you, nonetheless.’
Chapter Two
Imogen was in the sitting room, with her tambour on her lap, trying extremely hard to look as though she did not think decorative embroidery was the most pointless exercise ever foisted upon womankind.
Sitting indoors on a sunny day, embroidering silk flowers onto a scrap of linen, when real crocuses would be unfurling like jewelled fans in the park not two hundred yards from her door…just in case somebody chose to pay a visit! Not that anybody ever came to see her. Still, when her aunt was ‘at home’ a steady flow of callers made their way through this room. And her aunt insisted that they saw Imogen sitting quietly in her corner, applying herself to her embroidery, so that they could go away with a favourable impression of her.
Not that Imogen could see what was so praiseworthy about stitching away at something that was never going to be of any practical value.
‘Lady Verity Carlow,’ her aunt had explained, as though delivering a clincher, ‘sits for hours at a time plying her needle.’
Well, huffed Imogen, so had she, back in Staffordshire, when she had some useful sewing to do. She had made all her brothers’ shirts, hemmed miles of linen and darned thousands of socks. And she had not minded that at all. Particularly not when one of the boys came to read aloud to her while she did it.
Her mind flew back to the days when she and her mother would sit with the mending basket, by the fire in the cluttered little parlour of the Brambles. And just as she was recalling how the boys would lounge like so many overgrown puppies around their feet, her uncle’s butler, Bedworth, stunned her by opening the door and intoning, ‘Captain Alaric Bredon.’
While Imogen was still reeling from the coincidence of having the butler announcing a visitor with a name so like that of the boys she was thinking of, Bedworth opened the door a little wider, and she saw, just beyond his portly figure, in the scarlet jacket with the yellow reveres and cuffs of his regiment, his shako held under one arm, and a broad grin creasing his weather-beaten face, her oldest—and favourite—stepbrother.
‘Rick!’ she squealed, leaping to her feet, scattering her silks, tambour and pincushion in all directions.
Captain Bredon met her halfway across the room, dropping his shako as he spread his arms wide to sweep her into his embrace.
‘Midge!’ he laughed, lifting her off her feet and twirling her round as she flung her arms round his neck.
‘Oh, Rick, c-can it really be you?’ She was so happy to see him. It was absurd to find tears streaming down her face.
‘When did you get back to En-England?’ she hiccupped. He had missed his father’s funeral. The letter informing him of Hugh Bredon’s death had not caught up with him for several weeks. She had hoped he might have been permitted time to come home, but his commanding officer had thought pushing Bonaparte’s troops back into France had been far more important. ‘You have Nick there,’ he had written back to her. ‘Trust him to do what is best for you. After all, he is the legal brains of the family.’
And Nick had dealt with everything with extreme punctiliousness. But, oh, how she wished Rick had been there on that day when she had felt as though she had lost everything at a stroke!
Now that he was here, she found herself burying her face in his shoulder, letting go of all the grief she had bottled up for so long.
‘Rick, Rick,’ she sobbed. ‘I have m-missed you so much.’
‘Imogen!’ shrieked her aunt, preventing Rick from making any reply. ‘Have you lost all sense of decorum?’
‘But this is Rick, ma’am, Rick, my brother—’
‘I had gathered that,’ her aunt snapped. ‘But that is no excuse for indulging in such unseemly behaviour! And as for you, young man, I will thank you to put my niece down!’
Rick did so with alacrity. He had just tugged his jacket back into place and taken a breath as though to tender an apology for offending his hostess, when they all heard a carriage drawing up outside.
Lady Callandar flew to the window, said a rather unladylike word, then rounded on Imogen and Rick.
‘Up to your room, this instant!’ she barked at Imogen. ‘And as for you—’ she swooped on Captain Bredon’s shako and thrust it into his hands ‘—out! Now! No arguments!’
Imogen had caught a glimpse of the carriage when her aunt had twitched back the curtains, and she recognized Lord Keddinton’s crest on the door panel. The very last people she wished to face, in her present state, were Penelope and Charlotte Veryan. Hitching her skirts up in one hand, while dashing tears from her face with the other, she ran from the room and up the stairs.
She heard booted feet echo on the hall’s marbled tiles, then Rick’s bewildered cry of ‘Midge?’
She turned and looked down. Rick had one foot on the bottom step, as though he meant to follow her.
‘Oh, no you don’t!’ said her aunt, erupting from the drawing room in a froth of Brussels lace and righteous indignation. ‘This is a respectable household. I will not permit Imogen to have young men in her room.’
‘But I am her brother, ma’am,’ he protested.
‘No! You may think of yourself in those terms. But you are not related in the slightest.’
Somebody rapped on the front door, making them all freeze for a second. Rick took one last questioning look up at Imogen, who shook her head, silently begging him to understand. She could see him weighing up his options and in the end, choosing discretion. He removed his foot from the lower step, then made for the front door, his expression grim.
Torn between gratitude he was not making a stand and grief that he was retreating, Imogen backed noiselessly along the landing.
Bedworth, who had been biding his time beside the porter’s chair, opened the front door to permit Rick to leave and the visiting ladies to enter.
Imogen tiptoed to her room, where she sank onto her bed, guiltily aware that only her aunt’s quick thinking had saved her from becoming the subject of yet more gossip.
The next morning, when Imogen went down to breakfast, she found a carefully worded note from Rick beside her plate. With some trepidation, she passed it to her aunt.
‘He wishes to take you out for a drive in the park this afternoon?’ she said, squinting at the letter through her lorgnette. ‘Quite unexceptionable. You may send him back a note to the effect that you accept his invitation.’
Imogen felt faint with relief. She had spent the whole of the previous night in a state of sleepless agitation. What if her aunt had taken such exception to Rick’s lack of manners, she had reported the whole scene back to her uncle? He might forbid her stepbrother to call ever again! Even though Rick was an officer now, he was not exactly what Lord Callandar would call ‘top drawer.’ Her mother had, she learned soon after coming to live in Mount Street, married beneath what he expected of a Herriard on both occasions. First to an impecunious baron with an unsavoury reputation, and then to a mere ‘mister.’
Though at least it had shed some light on Nick’s apparent defection. He must have been astute enough to realize he would not receive a warm welcome in such an elevated household as Imogen now inhabited. That was why he had never called!
‘You will wear the dark blue carriage dress, with the silver frogging. And the shako-style bonnet with the cockade. It will make a charming picture, beside his own uniform.’
Imogen blinked at her aunt in surprise. She knew Lord Callandar disapproved of her stepbrothers, and had thought Lady Callandar shared his opinion. Whenever she mentioned them, it was as ‘those Bredon boys’ with her nose wrinkling up in distaste.
She gave Imogen a straight look. ‘I can see how fond of each other you are. I do not wish to make you unhappy, niece, by preventing you from seeing something of him during the short time I daresay he has on leave.’
‘Thank you, Aunt,’ said Imogen as meekly as her thundering heart would permit.
‘Besides,’ said her aunt, laying the note down next to her plate, ‘I cannot see how even you could manage to get into trouble, sitting beside a gentleman in his carriage. Do you happen to know what kind of carriage he has?’
Imogen was certain he had no carriage of any description. He would hire something. Her stomach turned over. She only hoped he had the funds to procure something that was not too run-down. Nor too dashing. It would have to strike just the right balance to satisfy her aunt’s notions of propriety.
‘And I hope,’ her aunt said with a hard gleam in her eye, ‘that now you are over the initial excitement of seeing him, you will manage to behave with the requisite decorum. You cannot go letting young men pick you up and swing you about in drawing rooms like a bell. Nor is it seemly to weep all over them. You know how very important it is that you do nothing to increase the speculation already rife about you!’
‘I won’t, I promise you,’ said Imogen, leaping to her feet and going to give her aunt a swift kiss on the cheek. Her poor, dear aunt was doing her utmost to protect her from malicious gossip. She fully accepted that Lady Callandar could have done nothing but send her to her room the day before and explain to the visitors that she was indisposed. And to get rid of Rick before he said or did something that would have provided those cats with ammunition to have used against her.
‘I shall be as prim and proper as…as Lady Verity Carlow!’
‘That I very much doubt,’ said her aunt tartly, her hand going to the spot on her cheek that Imogen had kissed. But there was a softening to her eye which told Imogen that though she might say a proper lady should not indulge in such unmannerly displays of affection over the breakfast cups, she was not unmoved by it.
It seemed to take forever before Bedworth was finally announcing the arrival of Captain Alaric Bredon and showing him into the sitting room.
He bowed stiffly to her aunt, his normally laughing brown eyes wary. Lady Callandar accorded him a regal nod. Imogen dipped a curtsy and managed to walk across the room to his side.
And then they were off.
