Lady Libertine

Lady Libertine

Kate Harper

Copyright Kate Harper 2011

www.kate-harper.com

Chapter One

‘Well!’

The word, ejected with all the force of a pistol shot, caused Lucy Landon to pause in the act of buttering her toast. Raising her eyes, she looked at her mother. As often happened when Lady Landon was displeased, she appeared to have swollen in size, as if her fury somehow puffed her up from the inside.

‘Well I
never
!’

A frisson of mingled anticipation and alarm rippled through the girl. ‘Why, whatever is the matter, Mama?’

‘I am never going to buy this… this rubbish again. I shall tell Deavers to have it canceled. Oh, I am utterly mortified!’

Lucy sighed inwardly. She was well used to her mother’s fits of fury, but, just occasionally, she wished that they would not happen at the breakfast table. Perhaps, Lucy thought hopefully, her mother would be so upset that she would be unable to remain at the table. On a good day (from Lucy’s point of view) Mama would retire to her room with hartshorn and her maid, taking to her bed and the comforts of medicinal brandy. Mentally, Lucy calculated what the chances were of her mother storming from the room, if she were provoked in just the right manner. It was worth a try; especially if she was going to have a hope of eating the rest of her breakfast in peace.

‘Has something in the paper upset you?’

Lady Landon turned her gimlet gaze upon her eldest, and least loved, daughter. ‘Of course something has upset me, you idiot! That absurd piece of rubbish has printed that
woman
again.’

Those two words, Lucy reflected, really ought to have been capitalized, such was the portent of her mother’s words – That Woman. ‘Lady Libertine?’

‘Lady Libertine!’ The loathing in Lady Landon’s voice was almost tangible. ‘A scurrilous, infuriating, perfidious liar! I am going to get Billingsworth to have that… that creature dismissed. I will make sure that she never writes another word again!’

Lucy looked at the paper thoughtfully, determined, at the first opportunity, to read whatever had enraged her mother so. Although she thought she might have a good idea already.

Lady Libertine had been publishing a – well, the term would probably be gossip column – for the past eight weeks in the
London Times
under the banner of
On Dit
. In it were thinly disguised reports of the
ton
, including the less public liaisons that happened when the hour advanced and people
made
advances. Not that names were actually disclosed; they did not have to be as the writer had a knack of describing the people involved. Nobody ever doubted the identity of anybody unfortunate enough to be targeted.

Of course, it had created a huge uproar and the paper had been petitioned to stop printing the column on numerous occasions. The editor, however, denied knowing the identity of the writer. As the circulation of his newspaper had gone up quite amazingly since the column's inception and he was flourishing, that was hardly surprising. Why kill off a gold mine? Nobody could resist buying – or reading – the
Times
these days. Not only was everybody desperate to know if they were mentioned, but the days when the column was
not
featured, everybody wrote in to protest about it how it
was
featured.

From the
London Times
point of view, it was all most satisfactory.

‘Surely it is all just gossip. Nobody actually believes anything she writes.’

Lady Landon looked at her daughter with incredulous fury. ‘What a complete ninny you are, Lucy. Of
course
everybody believes what she writes. How could they not when so much of it proves to be true? Which just means,’ her mother added viciously, ‘that whatever gross fabrications she mixes in are taken as gospel.’

‘But what is it she wrote that is so very bad?’

For a moment, Lady Landon hesitated. ‘It does not signify. Sufficient to say, it is complete nonsense.’

Before Lucy could reply to this (thereby exciting her mother even more), Phoebe, the youngest of the Landon girls, trailed into the room and smiled around vaguely. Exquisitely fair and with a face like an angel, she was her mother’s favorite child by far, with Judith, the second born, following on and Lucy herself trailing behind in a very considerable third place.

‘Hello, Mummy. Are you cross? I could hear you from the hallway.’

This artless utterance had the happy effect of immediately diminishing Lady Landon’s anger – although Lucy knew that it still simmered below the surface –and her face softened as she looked at the pretty vision that was her youngest child. ‘Good morning, darling. You have your new blue crepe on,’ her eyes swept the over the gown critically, ‘and yes, I think Madam Francine did a fair job. Not that she is worth the ridiculous amount she tries to charge, but it will do very well on you. The color is certainly becoming.’

Phoebe, Lucy reflected, would look delightful in a sack. Unlike herself, who looked sadly sallow in the wrong shades.

Phoebe smiled at Lucy, taking a chair. ‘Good morning, Mouse.’

‘Good morning, yourself.’ Only Phoebe still used the childhood name bestowed by their father. Her mother hated it, but never did she scold her daughter, other than to occasionally give a gentle reproof. Just as she remained silent about Phoebe coming late to the breakfast table every morning. If Lucy had been tardy, her mother would have given her a lecture about the importance of punctuality, but there were no lectures for Phoebe, even when Phoebe did not make it to the breakfast table at all.

‘She’s such a fragile little thing,’ Mama would croon. ‘It does not hurt to let her have a tray in her room.’

Such duality had been part of Lucy’s life for as long as she could remember. Not that Lucy minded, not really. It was hardly Phoebe’s fault that their mother had such decided partialities. And at least Phoebe’s presence distracted their mother on to other topics, for she was in the process of coming out and there was an endless amount of things that must be done, must be discussed, must be dissected at length. Lady Landon was determined to catch an excellent husband for her youngest child; Judith had married a baronet, but Phoebe, Lady Landon opined, would probably be able to manage a duke or at the very least, an earl.

Lucy thought that her mother was aiming rather high, but she did not argue. She would not dare! It was all rather tedious, really.

When she had finished her toast, she rose from the table and moved quietly from the room, collecting the newspaper on the way. There was a reason her father had named her mouse; she had a talent for slipping about the place unnoticed. That, along with her unremarkable brown hair and her quiet brown eyes made the name mouse seem very apt. Lucy carried the newspaper up to her bedchamber and went across to the desk in front of the window. Her mother had rumpled it, clenched hands scrunching the print, but Lucy smoothed it out, turned to page three, and started to read the column entitled
On Dit
.

A slow smile curved her lips.

Poor Mama; how
would
she face her morning callers? And there would be so many callers. Such scandalous allegations usually brought the gossipmongers out of the woodwork. Already, Lucy could feel a disturbance in the house as Deavers went to let the first of them in. Her mother would not dare to say that she was not receiving. That would look too odd, too suspicious.

Lucy read the words out loud, the very words that would prompt a flurry of callers to Smith Street at such an hour.

And who was the middle-aged matron who was caught in a
compromising position with a certain portly lord at Lady Jersey’s rout
on Saturday night? Naming no names, but nobody could say that color green was becoming, not on a woman of her years. And those feathers, trailing after her like a wounded bird! Were they ostrich or grouse? Not that our Lord B. seemed to care. Apparently the rumors are true; the Widow is planning on bagging another kind of bird. Good hunting, my lady…

It was, Lucy knew, dreadfully written and quite ridiculously salacious; no wonder her mother had been livid. For who else but Lady Landon had been wearing a rather virulent shade of green at the rout, along with some peculiar, trailing ostrich feathers in her headpiece? As for Lord B; well, the entire world knew Lord Billingsworth - who was decidedly portly – was dreadfully keen on Lady Landon.

Lady Libertine had struck again.

And, once again, her arrow had met its mark.

Lucius Ransom, the twelfth Earl of Hamersley (more commonly known as Rand, to friends and family) did not read the less well-regarded morning papers. He was strictly a
London Gazette
man when he bothered to read them at all. So it fell to his brother-in-law, Mr. Edward Challender, to come and tell him of the contents of
On Dit
at the unseasonable time – for the earl – of eleven in the morning. Julia, Edward’s wife, had asked him to go. She would have done it herself, for she did love to tease her elder sibling, but getting about in the mornings was a tedious thing, now that her confinement was advancing.

Hamersley had not been in bed for more than four hours, having enjoyed a rather wild night around the town. To make matters uncomfortable, from Edward’s point of view, he was not alone. His lordship’s valet, Chance, warned him that the earl had arrived home with a delightful little high stepper in tow and, to Chance’s knowledge, she had spent the night. Both his butler and his valet had suggested that Mr. Challender might like to wait in the library for his lordship, but he was having none of it.

He had better things to do than kick his heels, awaiting his brother-in-law’s pleasure.

So it was he walked straight into Hamersley’s bedroom. Crossing to the windows, he pulled open the curtains, allowing shafts of feeble sunlight into the room. Nothing moved in the bed. Edward raised an eyebrow when he saw the two figures in the enormous four-poster. It seemed that the earl’s nocturnal entertainment really had remained and he shook his head. At six and twenty, it might be expected that Hamersley would have grown up. There were responsibilities involved in his exalted title, but Rand managed to sidestep most of them neatly, focusing on the more pleasurable aspects of life. His lordship had hundreds of acres of lands in Sussex that were farmed extensively. He had dozens of tenants, no less than five houses, and a large granary, but did he oversee any of it? The hell he did.

Edward walked across to the bed and jabbed a finger into the earl’s ribs. Rand, twelfth Earl of Hamersley stirred, opening one eye to peer blearily at his brother-in-law. Apparently, the sight did not please him for he immediately closed it again and turned his face away. Undaunted, Edward dug the finger in again.

‘Wake up! We need to talk.’

Beside Rand, the girl raised her head and squinted at the person who was intent on causing mayhem. Sleep rumpled as she was, Edward could still see that she was extremely pretty and, as she rolled over to bury her face in the pillow, severely underdressed as she did not appear to have a stitch on. At least, not on any of the parts that he could see. He turned his eyes away hastily, thinking of his wife Julia. Not that Julia would object. She was a little too like her brother for that.

‘Rand,’ Edward said, striving for patience, ‘I am not going away so you might as well wake up and talk to me.’

The earl groaned and pushed himself up onto his elbows. Like the girl, he was naked, olive skin gleaming faintly in the morning light. ‘Edward, what a loathsome creature you are! Why the devil did my man allow you in here?’