Chapter One
Miss Elizabeth Wainwrightdrew harsh gasps of fetid night air as she stumbled through the city’s shadows. Wind rushed through her ears. Her heartbeat clattered against needle-sharp ribs. Every breath felt like a stab. Still, she tore from patch to patch of pale moonlight, a wraith hell-bent on vengeance.
She refused to dwell on the narrowly circling, predatory dangers, both present and anticipated. Dangers as close as the gusts whipping aside her veil. She would think only of her destination. Her very specific destination.
Thank you, Mama. For once.
At least Eliza hoped she’d soon have reason to be grateful to the parent who’d been reduced to a ghost long before her death. She was gambling everything on a passage found in a hidden packet of letters sent to her mother from an anonymous female friend.
I understand your choice. Please understand mine. Should you or your girls ever find yourselves in need, go to the blue building at the terminus of Cleveland Row and ask for the owner. She will do what she can to help. Shehas made every effort to save my children. I’m certain she would do the same for yours.
Well, Eliza tonight found herself in need. In need of rescuing herself and her sisters from a lifetime of misery. At present, the address in the letter was her best—and only—option.
A mere three hours ago, taking flight into the night had been unimaginable. She’d been silently tapping one perfect, white slipper with a gloriously sparking buckle against the hallowed, wooden floor of Almack’s—Almack’s—the pinnacle of aspiration for every matrimonially minded miss.
Eliza had not been any more dazzled by the crowd of beturbaned, bejeweled matrons, lords and luminaries in expertly tailored breeches, and proper pastel-clad misses than she had been excited by the prospect of the husband hunt.
After a lifetime of bearing witness to her mother’s struggles, she remained skeptical of her godmother’s assertion that marriage had the magical power to cocoon her and her four younger sisters in perpetual security.
However, from the moment Eliza and her gentle twin sister Cassandra received their coveted vouchers to the vaunted assembly rooms, Cassandra’s eyes had been shining with her long-cherished dream of a love match. And as usual, whatever Cassandra felt leached silently into Eliza’s consciousness until she could not tell Cassandra’s sentiments apart from her own.
So, as both sisters stood beneath the glittering chandeliers earlier this evening, Cassandra’s brilliant matrimonial future had seemed as certain of fulfillment as the gilt columns holding up the decorated ceiling.
At that same moment, with nothing more than a “You’ll do,” spoken with exquisite precision in a grating voice thick with aristocratic ennui, Cassandra had been yanked from Eliza’s side.
Eliza’s hiss of fresh outrage mingled with the night air.
Unbelievable, but true—an arrogant, thoughtless, too-smug-for-his-stiffly-starched-collar duke (of all things) had broken with propriety and convention and swept Cassandra into a waltz.
A waltz the Patronesses of the establishment had not given her permission to dance.
Eliza had frozen in helpless fury as a cacophonous rush of gasps echoed from person to person throughout the room. Several gentlemen had raised their quizzing glasses and most of the ladies had turned their backs, sweeping aside their skirts as Eliza and a very red-faced Cassie, the latter struggling to hold back tears, were guided from the room.
Consequences had been as swift as they were imbalanced: Harbury had been sent home for the evening, while the elder Wainwright sisters had their vouchers permanently revoked, with no hope of the younger three ever having a chance to obtain one.
Cassandra’s dream had been dashed, and Eliza was now cold and damp with sweat beneath a stolen—no, borrowed—groomsman’s cloak. Her costly white shoes with buckle clips she’d commissioned were, well, no longer pristine.
Why had Harbury chosen Cassandra?
He hadn’t, he later explained. Cassie had paled when he’d announced he’d no interest at all in “the chit.” He’d only required a distraction.A distraction!
As if every woman in the wide world had been created solely for his entertainment.
She hated Harbury and his ilk.
Feral, he was. Recently come into his title with naught but an older sister to rein him in. He certainly couldn’t count his friend and “sworn brother,” the Marquess of Redver, to keep him in check. From what she’d seen, Redver was equally arrogant.
Hisname was only ever whispered—always with a knowing glance. And when, on rare occasion and always with Harbury, he showed his face in Society, he never even bothered to dance.
Was it better, like Redver, to believe oneself above dancing, or to make a weapon of the gentle pastime as Harbury had?
No matter.
Whether to turn a leg or not to turn a leg wasn’t the question. Her point held—both men had been given too much power. Power they irresponsibly abused. Unless brought to understand, they would continue stumbling through their plump, padded world, heedless of those they harmed.
Ugh.
The Duke of Harbury, Redver, his fellow feral, and every single one of Almack’s haughty Patronesses could go straight to the devil for all she cared, so long as she never had to see Cassandra as her sister had been when Eliza had left the house—face down and weeping uncontrollably into her pillow.
