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“I agree,” Gina said. “But I don’t think we have anything to gain by sorting through what insult he may or may not have suffered. We have to figure out what to do.”

“What are people saying?” Helene asked. “Don’t give me a watered down version, Esme. We’ve been friends too long for that.”

“You’re ruined,” Esme said, her eyes bleak. “I find it extremely unlikely that any woman of good reputation will receive you in her house ever again. Unless we do something.”

“Do something? Do something? There’s nothing to do.” Helene leaned back in her chair. She could feel her pulse beating in her throat in a way that threatened to make her stomach flip over. But she wasn’t hysterical. She, Helene, never became hysterical.

Gina was sitting bolt upright, lips pressed together. “There has to be some way out of this,” she said fiercely. “There simply has to be. What if we make our own calls, and maintain that Mayne is a liar?”

Esme shook her head. “No one will believe us.”

“What if Rees challenges Mayne to a duel?” Gina demanded.

“Duels are against the law,” Esme began.

But Helene cut in, “and I don’t want Rees fighting a duel. He’d never win against Mayne. I doubt he knows how to pick up a pistol.”

Esme looked at her in disbelief. “I thought you cared nothing for Rees. If the truth be known, none of us are to blame for this situation except for that bloody husband of yours. Why did he force you to come here, with his mistress in residence? What on earth did he hope to gain from it?”

“I don’t know,” Helene whispered. “I should never have consented to do it.”

No one wanted to agree with the obvious, so they just sat for a moment.

“Will you still receive me?” Helene asked, looking from one to the other. She was starting to feel a little shaky.

“Don’t be a fool!” Esme snapped. “We’re going to work this out, somehow. Maybe I’ll send Sebastian to duel with Mayne.”

“Or I’ll send Cam to simply beat him senseless,” Gina suggested. “Cam could tie him up and force him to recant. And break his nose in the process,” she added with a relish that belied her reputation for duchess-like behavior.

Helene managed a smile. “Rees can pummel Mayne just as well, if that’s needed. But no one would believe Mayne if he recanted now. The damage is done. I’m ruined.”

“Where is Rees?” Esme demanded.

Helene shook her head. “I want to know what I’m going to do, first.”

“Rees’s reputation was already in shreds,” Gina said with stinging emphasis. “Yet it never stopped him from attending a ton party, should he so wish.”

“There’s no use crying over the unfairness of life,” Esme said with equal sharpness. “We have to think of a way out of this. Think!”

Thirty-five

A Sibling in a Righteous Fury Is a Terrifying Sight

“Idon’t like it, Garret,” Lady Griselda Willoughby said, her voice as sharp as the edge of a knife. She was standing in his study, looking the very picture of enraged femininity in a gown of pale blue sarsanet, trimmed with white lace.

Mayne looked up from his writing desk and scowled at his sister. “No one likes it, Griselda,” he observed. “There’s something remarkably distasteful about the whole affair.”

She walked closer and then began pulling off her pale blue gloves, finger by finger. “That’s beside the point,” she said, slapping her first glove onto the table.

“I hardly think so,” he said dryly.

“If there’s anything distasteful here, it’s you,” his sister retorted. Her second glove slapped onto the polished mahogany of his writing desk.

Mayne’s features set into forbidding lines. He may have been thinking something of that sort himself, but he wouldn’t take the same from a younger sister. “I apologize if I offended you in any way,” he said with an air of chilling froideur.

“You behaved like a shabby cad,” Griselda cried, unconsciously echoing Gina’s indictment. “I’m ashamed of you. And I’m even ashamed of me, for being your sister!”

Mayne stood up. “For God’s sake, Grissie, don’t you think—”