LITMIR.BIZ

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‘—just like a lovely rose that has rambled in all the wrong directions. Your uncle may seem to be severe with you, but it is only because he wants to see you blossom.’

      And from that day forward, her aunt had set about pruning her into shape.

      ‘If you could only learn to carry yourself with the poise of Penelope or Charlotte!’ her aunt had advised her, time after time. ‘People might gradually stop talking about the thorny issue of your mother’s Dreadful Disgrace!’

      Although the shocking scandal in which her mother and father had been involved had happened over twenty years earlier, Imogen’s emergence into Society had reminded people of it.

      Her mother had taken a lover. Not that there was anything unusual in that, in her circles. But feelings between William Wardale, Earl of Leybourne, and Baron Framlingham had apparently run high. They had got into a fist fight. And only weeks later, the earl had brutally stabbed Imogen’s father to death. As if that were not bad enough, it turned out that both men had been involved in some form of espionage. The Earl of Leybourne had been found guilty not only of murder, but treason. He had been stripped of land and titles, and hanged.

      No wonder people stared at her and whispered behind their fans, whenever she walked into a room!

      She was not pretty, she was not rich, she lacked poise and she had a scandal attached to her name. Mrs Leeming had been one of the very few Society matrons prepared to give her the benefit of the doubt. But Imogen had just ruined her chance to demonstrate she was nothing like either of her parents, by getting embroiled in that scene with Viscount Mildenhall.

      The promises of invitations her aunt had managed to cajole, bribe or bully from her other intimates would probably dwindle away altogether now.

      ‘Perhaps,’ she ventured timidly, ‘we should abandon the attempt to find me a husband.’

      She had already begun to suspect that she would be completely miserable married to the kind of man her uncle would approve of. The more she learned about fashionable Society, the more she understood her mother’s willingness to accept her banishment to the wilds of Staffordshire under the aegis of the somewhat reclusive Hugh Bredon. He may have had his faults, but he had never treated Amanda like a piece of topiary that needed constant clipping to maintain an artificially decorative shape.

      Her aunt shot her a darkling look, but made no reply, for the carriage was slowing down.

      If she ever did have any children, Imogen decided, mutinously, ignoring the footman’s outstretched hand and jumping down from the carriage, she would make sure each and every one of them knew they were loved exactly as they were, be they boys or girls. She would never try to stifle their personalities or make them feel they had to constantly strive for her approval.

      Though, she thought despondently as she trailed up the front steps behind her aunt, it was not likely that she ever would have children of her own.

      No man that Lord and Lady Callandar considered eligible would want to ally himself to a girl who could bring so little credit to his name. She only had to think of the disdain she had read in the viscount’s eyes, the mockery in those of his friends, to know she was never going to measure up.

      ‘In here, if you please,’ said her aunt, making her way across the hall to the sitting room. She waited in silence while a footman hastily lit some candles, banked up the fire, enquired if they wanted any refreshment and then withdrew.

      ‘Sit up straight,’ she then urged Imogen, who had slumped down on the sofa. ‘Just because you have suffered a little setback, there is no excuse for forgetting your posture!’

      Imogen sat up straight, mentally bracing herself for yet another lecture about how young ladies ought to behave.

      ‘Now, Imogen, I have not taken you into my home and drilled you into the ways of Society, only to have you fall at the first hurdle! I do not despair of seeing you make a creditable alliance before the end of the Season.’

      Imogen had a depressing vision of endless balls where she sat on the sidelines, watching the prettier, wealthier girls whirling round with their admiring partners. Or dancing with dutiful, bored men like Mr Dysart. Of picnics and breakfasts where she endured the spiteful comments of girls like Penelope and Charlotte, while the matrons whispered about her father’s terrible fate, and the bucks sniggered about her mother’s scandalous conduct. Of always having to rein herself in, lest she betray some sign that she took after either of her scandalous parents.

      And then she looked at the determined jut of her aunt’s jaw. Her poor, beleaguered aunt, who had so determinedly taken up the cudgels on her behalf.

      The last thing she wanted was to become a lifelong burden on her aunt and uncle. ‘If…if I have not received a proposal by the end of the Season, though, I could always go and teach in a school somewhere. For you surely cannot want me living with you indefinitely.’

      ‘That is for Lord Callandar to decide. Though I am sure it would make him most uncomfortable to think of a Herriard teaching in a school!’

      ‘But I am not a Herriard,’ Imogen pointed out. ‘I am a Hebden.’ It was why Hugh Bredon had not wished to adopt her, after all. Because she was the spawn of the notorious Kit Hebden.

      ‘Nobody will be in the least surprised that you could not make anything of me. Though I am sure everyone can see that you have done all you could to try and make me more…’ she waved her hands expansively, then frowned ‘…make me less…’

      Her aunt sighed. ‘That is just the trouble, is it not? You are what you are, niece, and I am beginning to think no power on earth will ever make a jot of difference.’

      ‘I am sorry, Aunt.’ She bowed her head as she tugged off her evening gloves, one finger at a time. The backs were sticky with dried champagne. ‘I do not want you to be ashamed of me. I do not ever wish to cause you any trouble.’

      ‘I know that, dear,’ her aunt replied on yet another sigh. ‘But trouble seems to find you, nonetheless.’

      Chapter Two

      Imogen was in the sitting room, with her tambour on her lap, trying extremely hard to look as though she did not think decorative embroidery was the most pointless exercise ever foisted upon woman-kind.

      Sitting indoors on a sunny day, embroidering silk flowers onto a scrap of linen, when real crocuses would be unfurling like jewelled fans in the park not two hundred yards from her door…just in case somebody chose to pay a visit! Not that anybody ever came to see her. Still, when her aunt was ‘at home’ a steady flow of callers made their way through this room. And her aunt insisted that they saw Imogen sitting quietly in her corner, applying herself to her embroidery, so that they could go away with a favourable impression of her.

      Not that Imogen could see what was so praiseworthy about stitching away at something that was never going to be of any practical value.

      ‘Lady Verity Carlow,’ her aunt had explained, as though delivering a clincher, ‘sits for hours at a time plying her needle.’

      Well, huffed Imogen, so had she, back in Staffordshire, when she had some useful sewing to do. She had made all her brothers’ shirts, hemmed miles of linen and darned thousands of socks. And she had not minded that at all. Particularly not when one of the boys came to read aloud to her while she did it.

      Her mind flew back to the days when she and her mother would sit with the mending basket, by the fire in the cluttered little parlour of the Brambles. And just as she was recalling how the boys would lounge like so many overgrown puppies around their feet, her uncle’s butler, Bedworth, stunned her by opening the door and intoning, ‘Captain Alaric Bredon.’

      While Imogen was still reeling from the coincidence of having the butler announcing a visitor with a name so like that of the boys she was thinking of, Bedworth opened the door a little wider, and she saw, just beyond his portly figure, in the scarlet jacket with the yellow reveres and cuffs of his regiment, his shako held under one arm, and a broad grin creasing his

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