Her aunt sat beside the fireplace, her head close to Abassi’s as he bent over the back of her couch. Across from them Natalya and Princess, relaxed in morning gowns and undressed hair, passed a set of fashion plates back and forth. On the other side of the room, among the second group of furniture, Sorcha, Melike, and Darci gathered around a young woman Harriette recognized, feeding her cakes and tea.
Harriette gasped, seared by the betrayal. She pointed at the lovely if incredibly nosy young woman she had last seen as Lady Cranbury’s companion during her visit to the Marylebone Pleasure Gardens. “What isshedoing here?”
“Harriette,Liebelein!” Her aunt faced Harriette with surprise. “I am glad you returned so quickly. We have much to discuss. This is Chima. She?—”
“She was the one writing the gossip paragraphs about me, wasn’t she?”
The pieces fell into place. Why she’d seen this girl, watching from the sidelines, at every party and society gathering she’d attended. “She identified me as the maker of the prints of the Graf von Hardenburg. She said things about us that—that?—”
She had pushed Harriette to the fringes of Polite Society and, moreover, hinted at disreputable doings among the Calenberg household. She had made Harriette so desperate she climbed a tree to throw herself through Ren’s window and beg for his patronage. “She called us the Catherine Club,” Harriette finished weakly.
Chima lifted her chin with pride. “I did write those things.” She had a soft accent, bearing the trace of the African homeland where she, or her parents, had been kidnapped and forcibly removed. “I cannot say I am sorry.”
Darci intervened. “She used the money she gained from writing the gossip paragraphs to get free of Lady Cranbury and come here.”
“Why would she want to come to us? After what she said about our household, how we are eccentric, and—and—” Harriette sputtered to a halt, at a loss to fully catalogue the girl’s crimes.
Sorcha stepped before the other girl as if she meant to protect her. “Because she knew we’d take her in, and that we will.” Sorcha wiped her hands on her apron, streaked with flour and what might be jam, and planted her hands on her hips.
Harriette’s stomach rumbled. Her own breakfast felt very far away. “Aunt! You condone this?”
Her aunt lifted her charcoal-darkened brows. “Why shouldn’t I?”
“Because! She called me a…she said that I…” Again words failed her. Harriette sensed she was misplacing her outrage, but that all her friends should make light of her betrayal… It was like she was gone already. They had written her from the household books the moment she left for Shepton Mallet. It hurt.
“You have larger problems, darling.” Natalya set aside a colored plate of a Parisian gown.
“Ren.” Harriette’s stomach tightened with fear. “Aunt, you said my cousin has threatened to kill him. Why?”
Melike, always the peacemaker, rose and crossed the room to give Harriette a hug. Harriette sagged gratefully into her embrace. Then Melike handed her a print, and Harriette stared.
For a moment Harriette couldn’t comprehend what she was seeing. They’d been alone in Shepton Mallet; no one but she had seen Ren nude in bed, his broad chest sculpted by the firelight, one leg propped carelessly on the mattress while his damaged leg was curled beneath the sheet draped over his groin, where asimple, single line on the paper hinted at the bulge of manhood beneath. How had anyone reproduced him like this?
Then she recalled the last sketch she’d done of him in her studio, what felt like ages ago. These weren’t the charcoal lines she had drawn, but the inked incision of a print. The printer’s mark was not Mrs. Darly’s, who would never allow something so scandalous on her copper sheets. But plenty of more grasping salesmen would print these and worse.
“How did these get in print?” Her chest and face burned. With embarrassment, perhaps—Ren, naked! And these prints were circulating about London? Ren in bed was the single most sensual, most outrageously gorgeous thing she had ever seen. No one else had any business seeing him like this. “Someone had to have taken them from my table.” Her eyes roamed about the room, looking for a culprit.
Princess shrugged one round, nonchalant shoulder. “We needed money.”
“But to expose him like this! These were sketches merely for me, for anatomical purposes.” Oh, what a lie. “Not meant to be shown, and to kindle fantasies among every woman in London?—”
“Noteverywoman,” Sorcha objected.
Harriette pinned an accusing stare on Princess, who looked not the least bit abashed. “You couldn’t come up with another way to find money? A way that wouldn’t make Franz Karl call for his blood?”
“What else was I to do?” Princess replied. “Turn Abassi in for the bounty on his head? I don’t think so.”
Abassi straightened, looking around, and Chima sucked in a sharp breath of fear. Sorcha clasped her hand.
“No one is going to make you go back, child,” the countess assured Chima. “The Somersett case, remember? You cannot be compelled to return. You are free now.”
“Of course not Abassi,” Harriette said. “But some other means?”
“Perhaps if we could have consulted you,” Princess said sharply. “But you were gone. And a peer, a very high and well-placed peer, threatened to bring a suit against us as a bawdy house. Because we are a house of women, and men come and go at various hours.Yourman, as was mentioned.”
Harriette gaped, astonishment warring with outrage. “Abrothel? We never?—”
She let the indignation die, for her aunt certainly carried on exactly as she wished, and it was no secret to anyone in London how Princess earned her jewels and furs. “Who would dare threaten such a ridiculous suit?”
