“Charlotte, my dear, what is the meaning of this?” Aunt Davinia addressed the Queen, who gazed upon her with open delight. “Bess writes me that your minister”—she glared at this offending personage—“wants to put my grand-niece in jail? That takes a nerve! Some people don’t know their place.”
“We are endeavoring to ascertain,” Pitt said crisply, “whether the points made by Miss Wardley-Hines on behalf of the Minerva Society were slanders or claims of treason against His Majesty the King.”
“Fustian,” Davinia barked, banging her stick on the floor. “No Wardley was ever a traitor. We’ve been Royalists since the time of Charles I. By my eyes.” She lifted a pair of spectacles attached to her bodice by a golden chain, and her stern, strong-featured face softened as she considered Henrietta from head to toe. “She looks our Polly to the life, don’t she, Jasper?”
Jasper cleared his throat. “Yes,” he said stiffly, and his wife laid a hand on his arm. “Yes, she resembles her mother very much.”
“Clarinda, you ought to sit or that child is going to fall right out of you,” Davinia said. “Warrefield, your new wife too good for taking the waters with the rest of us?” She glared at the earl, who glowered back. “Now, which of my grand-nieces is Mr. Pitt pestering? Both of them? Come here, you pretty thing,” she said to Marsibel, who curtsied and blushed. “I approve of Mr. Bales for you. Pinochle would never have done, as I told you, Althea.”
Lady Pomeroy clenched her jaw. Her elder sister Apollonia had outshone her in everything, including their aunt’s affections, and now her daughter was marrying higher than Althea had ever hoped for Marsibel. It must be galling, Henrietta thought.
“Medora!” Davinia addressed the Duchess of Highcastle. “You’re in straits, darling. We need to have a good long coze, you and Charlotte and I.”
The duchess nodded, looking near tears.
“Miss Wardley,” Pitt began.
“You may address me as the Dowager Duchess of Cumberland if you’re going to read me a lecture too.” Davinia leaned on Charley’s arm as he led her to where the monarchs presided.
“You dare! In this chamber,” the King roared, sitting up.
“It was a marriage, whether you recognize it or not, George,” Davinia said tartly. She gave the sovereigns a curtsy as majestic as it was correct, then plumped herself down in a chair that a guard scrambled to put beside the Queen. There she sat as if she were accustomed to the honor, which, as a former favorite lady-in-waiting, she was.
“Now, then. Langford!” Davinia barked, and the marquess snapped to attention, his eyes wide with alarm. “What did you dangle before Jasper to get Hetty for your hey-go-mad son?”
“Twenty thousand pounds on her, and ten for each of their children,” the marquess confessed.
Davinia hooted with laughter, her stout frame vibrating from the feathers in her remarkable headdress to the flounces at the hem of her elaborate overskirt. “Hoy, Jasper, you are a shrewd negotiator! Told George it was time you got some honors, though I suggested a barony. Knew you were worthy of our name.”
“Thank you, Aunt Davinia,” Sir Jasper said.
“And you.” Her eyes scanned Darien. “We’ll see some better behavior from you in future?”
Darien swept her a deep bow. “I understand where you learned your managing ways,” he murmured to Henrietta.
She smiled at him. “Aunt Davinia raised me, along with Miss Gregoire. I owe my good fortune to my father, but I owe everything I am to the example these women set for me.”
And now, Aunt Davinia had bestirred herself from Bath on Henrietta’s behalf. Or perhaps she had come instead to protectthe Wardley name. Like Thomas Hardy at her debate, her aunt’s powerful personality would dominate the room, and Henrietta would be pushed into the scenery once again.
Davinia held out a hand to Sir Pelton, who bowed over it. “Pell, I don’t know what you’re about here, but let’s tie it up, shall we? I want to see the gardens that my dear Charlotte is planning.” She patted her old friend on the knee.
The Queen’s eyes lit with enthusiasm. “Yes, indeed! We’re almost done here, aren’t we, milord?”
The King stared at Davinia as if she were a beautiful and poisonous snake. Davinia eyed the prime minister as one would a weevil in the kitchen flour. “Tell me, sir, what madness is your Pittsy about now?”
The chamber echoed with an appalled silence around that forbidden word “mad.”
Pitt drew himself up. He had not become the youngest prime minister in the history of Great Britain for lack of wisdom or merit. “Miss Wardley-Hines,” he said doggedly, “it seems to me that you and Miss Wollstonecraft are calling for outright revolution. Is this true?”
Henrietta straightened her back as every eye in the room skewered her. “Yes,” she said.
A gasp ran around the chamber. Several people stepped back as if officers would descend on Henrietta at once and whisk her away. Aunt Davinia folded her hands on her cane with a small, curious smile.
Henrietta caught the expression, and a thrill of surprise ran through her. Aunt Davinia had not come to preempt her interview but to insist that she was given a fair hearing.
The knowledge gave her the courage to speak into the affronted silence.
“Miss Wollstonecraft insists that if women are inferior, it is expectation and lack of education that have made them so. Butthese are defects that can and ought to be remedied. If you continue from the passage you last quoted, Mr. Pitt, I believe you will find she says this: ‘It is time to effect a revolution in female manners—time to restore them to their lost dignity, make them part of the human species, and by laboring to reform themselves, reform the world.’”
