laughter shook Dinah. ‘Why didn’t you, Mama? Stay with him, Faa, I mean?’
‘Oh, no, once Rainsborough refused to divorce me it would have ruined poor Louis if I had stayed with him. I had no money of my own to keep him. No, Louis and I had our fun, one splendid summer, and then he could go back to being an Oxford don, and I was only too happy to be Rainsborough’s exiled wife—much better than having to live with him.’
She fell silent, contemplating that long-ago year when she had had a passionate affair with the young man who had been brought to Borough Hall to tutor her indolent son before he went to Oxford.
No, she told herself firmly, no, I won’t think of the life Dinah and I might have had if Rainsborough hadn’t played dog in the manger, roaring at me that dreadful day, ‘By God, Charlotte, if I can’t have you, neither shall he. I’ll be damned if I divorce you, and if you still run to him I’ll see him ruined, and he shan’t have the child, either. He, she, it, will be mine, will take my name, and be damned to the pair of you!’
No, she couldn’t ruin Louis, so she had accepted her husband’s terms, and her daughter Dinah was now Lady Dinah, who might have been a nameless bastard otherwise. But Rainsborough had taken good care that everyone knew the child’s sad history. Both her half-brother, who was always called Rainey, and her half-sister Violet, now married to Lord Kenilworth, but also the latest mistress of Edward, Prince of Wales, were hardly subtle in their constant, unkind reminders that she was only one of them by grace and favour…
Dinah plumped down on her knees and gently took her mother’s hand in order to stroke it lovingly. ‘The grand passion which only lasted six months. Is that how long all grand passions last, Mama?’
‘Yes, if you like, Dinah.’ What else could she say?
‘But I lasted longer.’
‘To my pleasure, yes. And now I must give you up. And do forget all this nonsense about having no name. Too middle class! My husband acknowledged you. You are Lady Dinah Freville, and the world accepts you as that. You aren’t the only one, you know.’
‘Yes, I do know that, Mama. And it doesn’t comfort me. What would comfort me would be to go to Oxford, to live with Faa and be an undergraduate at Somerville College. But I can’t have that, can I?’
‘No, my darling, we’ve had this out again and again. It’s imperative that you go to live with Violet, make a good match and be settled in the world. You haven’t time to play at being a scholar.’
‘Faa says that I could do more than play at it, Mama. He says that I have a good mind.’
‘Don’t think about that, my dear. You know very well how little money Rainsborough has left—my late husband spent it all on high living—and so your brother can’t afford to let me have more than a pittance. You won’t even have much of a dowry, and without a reasonable marriage you will be penniless. Just thank God that you’re not like some—thrown out to starve—and me, too.’
Dinah began to prowl restlessly around the room, avoiding her own image in the mirror facing the windows. She was ready at last to say the unsayable, the stark truth which her mother always avoided, but which Violet was constantly throwing in her face.
‘Who in the world is ever going to offer for me, Mama? I’m not like you or Violet. I have no looks and no light conversation.’
She was only too well aware of her own limitations. She was neither blonde, nor pretty. She was dark and slender, with no bust, she told herself despairingly, and precious little in the way of hips. Nothing about her was at all like the voluptuous women pictured in fashion plates and in the picture postcards of society beauties sold in every newsagent’s shop.
‘The fashionable clothes of the day aren’t meant for me, either. They stifle me. They’re meant for buxom, blue-eyed girls with ringlets, not a thin brown girl with raven hair and dark eyes.
‘And since I shan’t have a decent dowry, either,’ she ended ruefully, ‘there’s no fear, at least, that anyone will want to marry me for my money!’
‘Dear, dear,’ yawned her mother. ‘We have had this conversation so many times before. Sing another song, darling.’
‘Oh, I know I never sing the right one—and certainly I shall never be able to sing one which will please Violet. Please God that now that she’s taken up with the Prince of Wales she won’t have any time for me.’
‘Naughty thing,’ said her mother, laughing.
She looked thoughtfully at her daughter. For a moment there when she had spoken of Violet and the Prince her face had become animated, had glowed, had suddenly revealed quite a different person, a person of character and passion. It was as though the Dinah of the future had been superimposed on the Dinah of the present before disappearing again.
If she could look like that more often, then perhaps the child might attract someone who could see beyond the obvious, beyond the fashion plates and the picture postcards of society beauties, might even recognise her bright spirit, free it, and allow it to soar into the heavens.
Charlotte Rainsborough shook herself. Goodness, what brought that on? She said prosaically to her daughter, ‘One last thing, my dear, you will be careful when Violet takes you into society. There are those who prey on young things like yourself.’
‘Oh, no need to worry about that,’ replied Dinah, her face alight with amusement. ‘I’m sure that I’m most unlikely to attract either predators or pussy cats. As well imagine I could seduce the Prince himself—or any other of her lovers—away from Violet, or attract any of the men around them. Besides, you’re always telling me that men don’t like women who argue with them, so I shall know how to put off anyone whom I dislike.’
That last statement ended their discussion. Her mother shook her head at her, tea came in, and visitors, and for a time Dinah was able to forget her future. A future in which she would be sent off, like a parcel, to Violet’s grand home, Moorings, to be groomed for the Season where she would be inspected, and almost certainly passed over, before she could retreat into private life again.
Chapter One
‘N o, really, Cobie, no one should look like you, it isn’t decent,’ exclaimed Susanna Winthrop, wife of the American Envoy in London, to her foster-brother Jacobus Grant, always called Cobie.
In reply he offered her his lazy smile over the breakfast table—which was sufficient to exasperate her all over again.
It wasn’t just the classical perfection of his handsome face, nor his athletic body, nor even the way in which he wore his clothes, or his arrogant air of be damned to everybody which all combined not only to fascinate and to charm, but also to arouse a certain fear, even in those who met him briefly, which was enraging her. No, it was the whole tout ensemble which did the damage, so many remarkable things combined together in one human male.
She was so fierce that he could not resist teasing her. He said provokingly, ‘Well, nor am I decent. So what of that?’
For a brief moment the sexual attraction between them, long dormant on Cobie’s part, had been revived.
‘That’s what I mean,’ she retorted, still fierce. ‘To answer me like you do! You’ve neither shame nor modesty—and you only believe in yourself.’
