Page 1 of The Scandalous Spinster

Chapter One

London, 1816

Lady Clara Prescott was invisible.

It was useful if a little demoralizing.

She could walk into a ballroom and half a dozen people looked right through her. As a debutante, it had been devastating.

As a spinster, it was expected.

After all, what good was a knife if you saw it coming? A sword might cut your head clean off, but it was also showy and dramatic. Two things that Clara had never been accused of in all of her twenty-nine years. A kitchen knife was…subtle. Unexpected.

Though the Spinster Society had plenty of swords at its disposal, it generally preferred kitchen knives. What better to defend the ladies of Mayfair, debutante to wealthy widow, than the unassuming, overlooked kitchen knife?

As such, Clara cut through the glittering crowd gathered to dance and flirt and fill the long, empty evenings. Not that different from their days, actually. She had arrived at the townhouse in Grosvenor Square, dressed in a gown that neither flashed nor drew notice with its obvious outdatedness. It was simple, modest. Bordering on prim.

Dull.

Like all of her dresses.

But it rendered her invisible, which was the point and had been the point long before she joined the Spinster Society. Tonight, it saw her through the door with barely a glance from the master of ceremonies and not a flicker of recognition from their host, whom she had met the day before.

Again, both useful and demoralizing.

She circled the room once but did not take a dance card. She never did.

Instead, she made her way upstairs. The ladies’ retiring room at these fancy balls was her battlefield. Whispers, warnings. Consequences.

The Spinster Society dealt in consequences.

Clara slipped into the retiring room while most of the other guests were occupied at supper. It was a large parlor modified for the use of ladies, furnished with looking glasses, baskets of sewing supplies for gown mishaps, smelling salts. And, in the houses run by ladies of a certain mettle: whiskey, wine, and snuff.

The common denominators in every house and at every event were privacy screens hiding a row of chamber pots. It was customary for the Spinsters to leave warnings of cruel or degenerate men looking for wives in such places. Others had begun to add their own notices until some privacy screens were as papered as Covent Garden. There, placard men advertised lilac soaps and brooms and bonnet boxes. Behind the ladies’ retiring room screen, information of a certain kind was distributed instead. Vital information usually kept from women.

Such as lists of gentlemen who did not mean them well and the women who helped them.

Clara ducked behind the screen and pulled the rolled parchment from her reticule. A new list of names to add to the poster someone else had already put up before she arrived. Lady Priya Langdon, who had founded the Society, would be well pleased.

The men in question would not.

It was dangerous business, being a Spinster.

For the others. Clara’s invisibility suited her for the delivering of messages, the taking of notes.

Pity.

She emerged from the screens just as two ladies entered the retiring room, laughing together. They glanced at Clara, nodded.

“See, didn’t I tell you there would be notices here?” one of them said when she stepped behind the screens.

“Anyone new?” her friend asked. She lowered her voice. “There wasn’t much when I came in earlier. Do you think she’s the one who put them up?”

“Lady Clara Prescott?” was the reply, all derision and disdain. “I hardly think so. I once heard her publicly correct the Dowager Duchess of Whitby’s grammar. It did not go well.”

“I imagine not.”

Clara remembered that afternoon perfectly well.