“You staked him out as your property,” Tess said, smiling.
“Well, then you engaged yourself to him at the first opportunity,” Annabel retorted. “There was no respect for my prior claim.”
“One might say that almost all the Essex sisters tried to claim him in one way or another,” Imogen said, giggling.
“Least said about your efforts the better,” Tess put in.
“Well, there was nothing illicit between Mayne and myself,” Imogen said. “’Tis a tale quickly told. After sleeping with half the women in London, he refused to bed me, and that without a second thought.”
“My brother is a man of honor,” Griselda said. She raised her hand at the hoots of laughter around the table. “I know, I know…his reputation is not the best. But he has never deliberately injured anyone’s feelings, nor taken advantage of a woman in a vulnerable position. And you, Imogen, were in a vulnerable state of mind.”
“There’s always the possibility that he is simply burnt to the socket,” Josie said. “That’s what makes me think that Hellgate is Mayne. Yes, perhaps he has a vivid reputation, but it’s all due to the past. Your brother hasn’t had an affaire in years, Griselda.”
“Two years,” she said with dignity.
“You see? Apparently Hellgate talks of repentance, and I expect Mayne is indulging in the same sort of thinking. I wish you’d let me read the book, Griselda. I am certainly old enough.”
“I beg to differ,” Griselda stated, adding: “Mayne is in love, and we should allow his peccadillos to rest in the past.” She opened her book and began reading it again.
Annabel was frowning to herself and rocking Samuel. “Griselda’s right. While it’s vexing that Mayne somehow managed to slip by all four of us and marry a stranger—and I do wish to hear all about his exquisite Frenchwoman—the important person is you, Josie.”
Josie almost jested about refusing to marry if she couldn’t have Mayne, but she choked it off. Spinsterhood was too real a possibility to be spoken out loud.
“It’s all a matter of dressing,” Annabel announced. “You must go to that wonderful woman of Griselda’s.”
“I already have an entire new wardrobe, thanks to Rafe.”
“I took her to my modiste, Madame Badeau,” Imogen said a bit doubtfully, “but—”
“She gave me a marvelous corset,” Josie said. “At least when I’m wearing it I don’t feel as if I’m swelling in all directions like an unmoored balloon.”
“I don’t like that corset,” Tess said flatly.
“Unfortunately, neither do I,” Imogen said.
“Well, I’m not giving it up,” Josie said. “I can almost wear Imogen’s gowns when I’m in it; can you imagine, Annabel? If the ton laughs at me now, imagine what they would say if I wasn’t wearing the corset.” That’s how she thought of it: The Corset.
“What’s so miraculous about this particular corset?” Annabel asked. Samuel had woken up and was having a late night snack.
Josie looked away. It was bad enough that she, Josie, was saddled with breasts that she privately thought were far too large: like melons when oranges were the appropriate size. But Annabel had no compunction at all about feeding Samuel in front of them all, and her breasts were even larger.
“It’s a contraption made of whalebone and lord knows what else,” Tess told Annabel. “It goes from Josie’s collarbone all the way past her bottom.”
“How on earth do you sit down?” Annabel asked.
“It’s miraculously designed,” Josie told her. “There are let-in seams around the hips.”
“Is it comfortable?”
“Well, not particularly,” Josie said. “But ton parties are not precisely comfortable at the best of times, are they? I find them invariably tedious. I can’t dance well at all, and that seems to be the only pleasure one might take in them.”
“You danced more gracefully before you began wearing that object,” Tess pointed out.
Josie ignored her. “Madame Badeau designed a number of gowns that fit perfectly over the corset.”
“That’s just it,” Tess said, “they fit the corset, not you.”
“I like it,” Josie snapped. “And since I wouldn’t be caught at a ball without it on, you might as well stop insulting me.”
“We’re not insulting you,” Imogen said. “We just think you might be more comfortable with another sort of undergarment.”
“Never,” Josie said.
Griselda shut the book again. “I simply cannot imagine how Hellgate had time for anything other than dalliance. Why, I’m only on the seventh chapter and his behavior is beyond scandalous.”
“I think the true wonder is that Hellgate wasn’t compromised and forced into marriage,” Josie said. “Daisy Peckery’s mother allowed her to read it, and Daisy said that Hellgate bedded any number of young, unmarried women.”
“Another reason why a similarity between my brother and Hellgate should be dismissed at once,” Griselda pointed out. “Mayne has only slept with married women.”
“A wise decision on his part,” Josie said. “From the reading I’ve done, together with my observations of the ton in the last month, I would say that any man engaging in indelicate behavior around a young, unmarried woman is extremely imprudent. All sorts of marriages result from the most innocent, if foolish, kinds of dalliance.”
“I can attest to that,” Annabel put in. She had married her husband after a scandal broke in a gossip column.
“In fact,” Josie added, “by my estimation a woman who does not have a solid offer would be extremely foolish not to engage in a measured amount of imprudent behavior.”
Suddenly she realized they were all looking at her.
“No one has made the slightest approach to me,” she pointed out. “My remarks were intended to be purely theoretical.”
“I was remarkably fortunate to find myself paired with Ewan,” Annabel pointed out, frowning at Josie. “Other young women have not been so contented with a choice made rashly and under difficult circumstances.”
“I understand that,” Josie said. But inside she felt all the frustration of a theorist who has worked out a brilliant theory—and been given no material on which to practice. She could hardly create a scandal when men wouldn’t go anywhere near the Scottish Sausage.
And yet even sausages had to get married. More and more, she thought that she would have to obtain a husband in a less-than-honorable fashion. Of course, she didn’t mean to share that salient fact with her sisters.
Annabel turned to Tess and Imogen. “So how long have you two been aware that Josie was planning to create a scandal?”
Imogen popped a grape in her mouth. “I should think she came up with the idea about a year ago, didn’t you, Josie?”
“Actually,” Tess corrected her, “I would place Josie’s resolution about the time she first began reading all those novels printed by the Minerva Press.”
Josie gave a mental shrug. So her plans were known to the family—and now to Griselda, who was looking up from her book, rather startled.