The Louise Allen Collection: The Viscount's Betrothal / The Society Catch. Louise Allen
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off, remembering the supple, yielding figure in his arms, those wide hazel eyes that seemed to look trustingly into his soul, his instinct to find and hurt the man who had so obviously hurt her.
They discussed the matter a little more, speculating on the spurned suitor to no purpose and, after a while, left Hebe to rest.
Giles went up to his usual room. While Alex’s valet unpacked for him he paced restlessly, fighting the urge to drive straight back home to see how his father was. To distract himself from his cantankerous parent, he thought about Joanna Fulgrave. To his surprise he found he was dwelling pleasurably on the memory. He frowned, trying to convince himself that he was merely intrigued by what had turned a previously biddable débutante into a fast young lady. But there was more than that, something that lay behind the desperate hurt in those lovely eyes, something which seemed to speak directly to him.
He shifted in the comfortable wing chair where he had finally come to rest. His body was responding to thoughts of Miss Fulgrave in a quite inappropriate way.
It was two months since he had parted from his Portuguese mistress. There were, of course, the ladies of negotiable virtue who flourished in town. They had not featured on his mother’s list of dissipated activities that she had suggested to him. ‘Cards, dearest, drink—I know you have a hard head for both, so they are safe. Be seen in all the most notorious places. Perhaps buy a racehorse? Flirt, of course, but no young débutantes, that goes without saying… Do you know any fast matrons?’
‘Only you, Mama,’ he had retorted, smiling into her amused grey eyes.
After an hour, Hebe, thoroughly bored with resting, summoned both men back to her salon, announcing that she had not the slightest idea what she could do to assist her aunt.
‘Send Giles to listen sympathetically,’ Alex was suggesting idly when there was the sound of the knocker. ‘Who can that be?’
Starling appeared in the doorway. ‘Mrs Fulgrave, my lady.’ He flattened himself against the door frame as Emily Fulgrave almost ran into the room, ‘Oh, Hebe, my dear, Alex… Oh!’ Both her niece and the Earl regarded her with consternation from the chaise where Alex was sitting beside Hebe who, he had insisted, was to stay lying down for at least another hour. Mrs Fulgrave burst into tears.
It took quite five minutes and a dose of sal volatile before she could command herself again. Giles, his escape cut off by a flurry of hastily summoned maid-servants and general feminine bustle, retreated to the far side of the room, hoping that his presence would not be marked. Hysterical matrons, he felt, were even less his style than fast ones.
Finally Hebe managed to ask what was wrong. Her aunt regarded her over her handkerchief and managed to gasp, ‘Joanna has run away.’
Eventually the whole story was extracted. Joanna had vanished from her room, but was not missed until it was time for luncheon because she was assumed to be hiding herself away until her unwanted suitor was due that afternoon and Mr Fulgrave was not in a mood to be conciliatory and seek to encourage her to emerge.
When her mama had finally opened her bedchamber door she was gone, with only a brief note to say she was going ‘where she could think.’
After several hours of sending carefully worded messages to her friends in town, all of which drew a blank, her parents were at their wits’ end. Mr Fulgrave was prostrate with gout, dear Alex had seemed their only resort.
Alex shot one look at Hebe’s white, shocked face and said firmly, ‘I am sorry, Aunt Fulgrave, but I simply cannot leave Hebe now.’
‘I know, of course, you cannot,’ Emily Fulgrave said despairingly. ‘I should have thought. It will have to be the Bow Street Runners, but we will have lost a day…’
‘I will find her,’ Giles said, standing up and causing all of them to start in surprise.
‘Oh, Giles, thank you,’ Hebe said warmly. ‘I had quite forgot you were there. Aunt Emily, Giles is staying with us. What could be more fortunate?’
Giles wondered if Mrs Fulgrave would consider that the family scandal coming to the ears of someone else, however close a friend, to be a fortunate matter. ‘You may trust my absolute discretion, ma’am, but you must tell me everything you know about what is wrong and where she may have gone,’ he began briskly, only to stagger back as the distraught matron cast herself upon his chest and began to sob on his shoulder. ‘Ma’am…’
Eventually Mrs Fulgrave was calm, sitting looking at him with desperate faith in his ability to find her daughter. Giles was already bitterly regretting his offer.
Damn it, what else can I do? he thought grimly. Alex and Hebe would fret themselves into flinders otherwise, and the Fulgraves had welcomed him into their family. And the thought of the girl with the pain in her hazel eyes tugged at him, awakening echoes of his own hurt.
On the thirtieth of June, two days after Mrs Fulgrave had arrived distraught at the Tasboroughs’ house, her errant daughter sat up in bed in the best chamber in the White Hart inn at Stilton and decided that, just possibly, she was not going to die after all.
It had been the meat pie she had so incautiously eaten at Biggleswade that had been her downfall. She had known almost at once that it had been a mistake, but she had been so hungry that when the stage had stopped she had eagerly paid for the pie and a glass of small ale.
Up until then the entire undertaking had seemed miraculously easy. She had packed a carefully selected valise of essentials and had donned the most demure walking dress and pelisse in her wardrobe. Her hair was arranged severely back into a tight knot, she had removed all her jewellery and her finished appearance, as she had intended, was that of a superior governess. And governesses were invisible; young women who could travel unregarded on the public stage without the slightest comment.
Finding the right inn from which to depart had taken a little more initiative, but careful study of the London map in her father’s study showed her which area the Lincoln stage was likely to leave from, and a shy governess enquiring at six in the morning for the right departure point for Lincoln was apparently an unremarkable event.
In fact, she had felt remarkably pleased with herself and her tactics. Giles would have been proud of her, she caught herself thinking before that fancy was ruthlessly suppressed. Her only worry was how to get from Peterborough to Wisbech and Georgy, but that would doubtless become apparent once she had reached Peterborough.
Joanna pressed her arm against her side, feeling the reassuring bulge of the purse tied to her belt under her pelisse. She had only just received her quarter’s allowance and still had, quite unspent, her birthday present from her generous godmother. Of all her worries, how to pay for her journey was the least of them.
Then she had eaten that wretched pie. Goodness knows what it had been made from, or how long it had been sitting in a warm kitchen before she had eaten it. By St Neots she was feeling queasy, past Eaton Socon she knew that at any moment she was going to be violently sick.
The stage had drawn up at the White Hart and she had staggered off, just finding enough voice to request the coachman to throw down her valise before she dived behind the shelter of a barn and was hideously ill. When she emerged shakily some time later the coach was gone, but thankfully the landlady proved motherly and kind to the white-faced young governess who explained that she was travelling back to her employer in Lincoln and had been taken ill.
‘I am sure it is something I have eaten,’ Joanna explained weakly, ‘but I cannot travel like this. Fortunately Lady Brown does not expect me for another week so she will not worry. Is there any possibility of a room?’
The landlady was impressed by the genteel appearance and cultured accents of the young woman before her, and even more reassured by the sight of her guinea-purse. Such a pity that a young lady like that had to demean herself as little more than a superior upper servant.
‘You