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Chapter One
London, December 20, 1835
Escaping from one’s room was more difficult in practice than it was in theory. Elisabeth Becket straddled the window-sill of her second storey chamber dressed in a purloined pair of trousers and gingerly felt for a foothold on the trellis just below. She lowered herself out of the window, but not without a healthy dose of trepidation. Her room was exceedingly farther from the ground at this vantage point than it had been that afternoon looking up from the garden. There was a reason people used doors.
But conventional exits wouldn’t help her tonight. Using a door would mean going downstairs to her mother’s dinner party and it would mean meeting the Earl of Heathridge’s heir, who was bound to be as stuffy and traditional as all the other eligible young men she had met in London. She might be the daughter of a politically ambitious viscount, but she was most definitely not traditional. Going out the window proved it.
The thought sustained her for the first third of the way down the trellis.
Her mother would be furious. That particular thought almost made her climb back up.
Elisabeth could practically hear her mother’s voice now: What was she doing sneaking off in the dark unchaperoned? London was too dangerous for any woman, but especially for Elisabeth with her head in the clouds. She was not cut out for the real world.
That was where her mother was wrong. She could handle herself if her parents would only give her a chance. She would show them she wasn’t all books and astronomical charts.
That thought kept her going the second third.
Thoughts of her mission kept her going the last third. She wasn’t stealing out of her window on a lark, or even for the simple exercising of her freedom. She had more sense than that. A girl didn’t risk her reputation on a whim. She was going to see a once-in-a-lifetime astronomical phenomenon. The comet was on a seventy-six-year orbit. There was no question of waiting. She’d be a hundred when it returned; far too old to be climbing out windows not to mention most likely dead.
Elisabeth took another backwards step on the trellis but didn’t complete it. Her foot met with nothing. She dangled it in the air searching for a hold or for the bottom. Was she there already? She hazarded a downward glance. But in the dark, she couldn’t be certain. Surely the ground was around here somewhere. In the daylight, the gap between the ground and the trellis had seemed minimal as if she could simply step off the trellis with a giant step.
There was nothing for it. She couldn’t just stay on the trellis. She’d have to drop.
It was official, Dashiell Steen concluded. He was going to go round the bend if he stayed in the viscount’s drawing room a moment longer. Since he was rather fond of his mind, he’d opted for a breath of fresh air in the garden regardless that it was dark and winter. There wouldn’t be anything to see that one usually expected to see in a garden, like plants.
Dashiell didn’t care if the garden turned out to be weed-choked. He only cared that it was an escape. It didn’t have to be an especially pretty escape at that. He’d only come tonight because his uncle had demanded it. In fact, his uncle had demanded quite a lot in the last few months since Dashiell had become his heir. Dashiell was tired of it and the hypocrisy that followed.
Six months ago, matchmaking mamas hadn’t exactly lined their daughters up to dance with him. His good looks and lack of personal fortune made him persona non grata in that department. Mamas were fearful he’d charm their daughters right into genteel poverty with him. Everyone knew his father was a second son with a mid-rate military career behind him.
But then his uncle had come along; heirless after twenty years of marriage, approaching sixty and finally facing facts. He suddenly had need of his nephew. Enough said.
Apparently the prospect of inheriting an earldom guaranteed a man a full dance card and respectability, while erasing a past littered with actresses and opera singers. It also guaranteed a life full of stolid dinner parties that threatened to stifle him. The price of respectability was uncommonly high.
The debacle going on inside Viscount Graybourne’s drawing room right this very moment was a case in point. No, ‘debacle’ wasn’t the right descriptor. It was a farce, a comedy of errors, or in his case, a comedy of heirs. His uncle had an heir to marry off in exchange for a dowry that would cover the earldom’s debt. Graybourne had a daughter who’d been on the marriage mart for four Seasons without success.
Dashiell had shown up to do his duty. The daughter hadn’t. At least not by the time Dashiell had left the room, although Lady Graybourne had assured him endlessly her daughter was looking forward to meeting him.
