The Viscount and the Virgin (2 page)

But she knew it would be point less to say a word against the Veryan girls. Her aunt was bound to simply point out that if
she
were not such an ill-disciplined, hurly-burly creature, who could be so easily goaded into waving her arms about like a windmill, the viscount's waist coat would have got away scot-free.

And her uncle, she huffed, folding her arms in exasperation, was even more blind where the sisters were concerned. He was always telling Imogen to observe their manners, and use the example of those ‘perfect' young ladies as her pattern. It was because they always listened to him with their heads tilted to one side, their eyes wide with admiration, whatever nonsense he spouted. And because they moved grace fully, dressed beautifully and had such polished manners. Oh, yes, they were exceptionally careful to conceal, from powerful men like Lord Callandar, their love of playing spiteful tricks on those less fortunate than them selves!

Well, if that was what it meant to be a young lady,
she was glad her new guardians thought she was not one! She would never sink to the kind of unkind, sneaky behaviour those cats indulged in!

‘And when I think of the lengths,' her aunt went on, ‘Mrs Leeming went to, to get him there at all! She will be furious with me! He has only recently come into his title, and is up in town for the express purpose of finding himself a bride with all due speed to ease the last days of his poor dear father, the Earl of Corfe. And Mrs Leeming has two daughters she particularly wished to bring to his notice.'

No wonder he was a bit conceited, thought Imogen, if he was the son of an earl on his deathbed. Especially if he was used to females flinging them selves at him because they all knew he was in town in search of a wife. But to bracket her in their company, just because she had waved her arm about… why, she had not even known he was standing behind her! What, did he think she had eyes in the back of her head?

He might be breath takingly handsome to look at, but if he could not tell a genuine accident from a deliberate ploy to attract his notice, he obviously had the brains of a peacock, as well as the strut ting gait of one!

‘What were you thinking?' her aunt continued. ‘No—' She closed her eyes, and held her hands up in a gesture of exasperation that had become all too familiar to Imogen over the past year. ‘On second thoughts, it is point less asking you that! Not after the constant stream of excuses you have come up with ever since Lord Callandar brought you into our home on the death of your step father.' She opened her eyes, eyes that were now filled with such sadness it brought a lump to Imogen's throat.

‘It is
such
a pity my husband did not remove you from—' she took a quick breath, and mouthed the words ‘That House,' before continuing in a normal tone ‘—much sooner. You should have come to us the moment your mother died. Or even a year or so later, when it was the proper time to bring you out.
Then
I might have been able to do some thing with you. You were young enough
then
, perhaps, to have had some of your faults ironed out.'

She heaved a sigh. ‘Of course, although one can sympathize with your poor dear mother, for she never really re covered from—' she pursed her lips and squeezed her eyes shut again ‘—that Dreadful Tragedy, nevertheless—' her eyes snapped open ‘—she should not have permitted you to run wild with those Bredon boys.'

‘My brothers,' Imogen could not help blurting. She knew that girls were not supposed to argue with their elders and betters. But some times she felt so strongly that she simply could not hold her tongue. Her uncle had informed her, less than one week after taking her in, that it was her most deplorable fault.

‘Properly reared young ladies,' he had said, the corners of his mouth pulling down in chagrin, ‘should never set their own ideas above that of
any
gentleman. In fact, they should not even have them!'

‘Not have ideas?' Imogen had been astounded enough to reply. ‘How can that be possible?' She and her brothers had been used to having the liveliest of conversations around the dining table when they were all home. Even her step father had enjoyed what he termed a stimulating debate from time to time. ‘
Step
brothers,' her aunt was firmly correcting her. ‘They are not blood relations.'

Imogen flinched. When Hugh Bredon—the scholarly man she had grown up to regard as her father—had died, his second son, Nicomedes, had done his utmost to disabuse her of the notion she had any legal claims on him.

‘My father never adopted you,' he said coldly. ‘In the eyes of the law, you are not my sister. And there fore it would be quite in appropriate for you to make your home with me now.'

Nick, who was training for the law, had already given her the devastating news that the Brambles—the house where she had grown up, the place she had thought of as her home—would have to be sold to pay off the debts Hugh had racked up in the latter years of his life.

‘What is left over is to be divided equally between myself, Alaric and Germanicus.'

She had felt as though Nick had struck her. ‘What about me?' she had asked in a scratchy voice.
How could he have left everything equally between the three sons who had left her to nurse their father through his last, protracted illness?
Not that she blamed any one of
them.
Nick was too busy with his law books. Alaric was away with his regiment, fighting in the Peninsula. And Germanicus was a naval lieu tenant serving with his squadron in the Caribbean.

No, it was Hugh's attitude she found hard to swallow.

She had listened with mounting hope as Nick proceeded to witter on about widow's jointures and marriage settlements, slowly grasping the fact that her mother, at least, had not intended her to be left completely penniless. She had, in fact, bequeathed her only surviving child quite a tidy sum.

Though Nick had not been able to quite meet her eye as he explained that it
was
to have been hers when she reached her twenty-fifth birthday.

‘Unfortunately, my father somehow got access to it and made some rather unwise investments.'

From the look on Nick's face, Imogen had gathered he had squandered the lot.

‘What must I do then, Nick?' she had asked with a sinking feeling. ‘Seek employment?' She would probably be able to get work in a school. One thing about growing up in the house hold of a man who devoted his life to studying antiquities was that there had never been any shortage of books. She could teach any number of subjects, she was quite sure, to boys as well as girls.

‘No, not as bad as that,' Nick had assured her. ‘Your mother's family have agreed to take you in and, once your period of mourning is over, to give you a Season. If you can make a match your uncle approves of, he will make up what you would have received from your mother upon your majority into a respectable dowry.'

And so, though the prospect of having to endure even a single Season had her shivering with dread, she had been packed off to live with Lord Callandar, her mother's brother, and Lady Callandar, his wife.

At least it had not been like going to live with total strangers. Though she had never met them, Lord Callandar had written to his sister Amanda punctiliously on her birthday and Imogen's, every year.

It had never crossed anyone's mind to approach her real father's family, not considering their obdurate attitude towards her mother. They had laid the blame for what her aunt termed the Dreadful Tragedy firmly at
her door. Imogen had never had any contact with them at all.

‘Are you attending me, Imogen?' her aunt snapped, rapping her wrist with her fan so smartly that it jerked her out of her reverie. ‘And sit up straight. Hands in your lap, not folded in that insolent manner!'

Imogen flinched to hear her aunt sounding so annoyed, and dutifully corrected her posture. She was truly sorry that she had turned out to be such a disappointment to her aunt and uncle, who had each shown her a great deal of kindness, in their own way. Her uncle had spent an extortionate amount of money trying to make up for what he saw as the deficiencies in her education. He had paid for deportment lessons and dancing lessons, and encouraged her aunt to buy her more clothes than she had believed it was possible for one girl to wear in a lifetime. And that had just been to cover her mourning. They had shopped all over again when she went into half mourning, and again when it was time for her to begin moving about in society a little.

And yet she had never felt at all happy in the Herriard house hold. It might have had some thing to do with the fact that she still had vague, shadowy memories of the short time she had lived there before, in the after math of the Dreadful Tragedy. Her grand father seemed always to have been angry, her mother always weeping. And nobody would tell her where her big brother Stephen had gone. Her grand papa had roared at her that she was a naughty girl for even mentioning him, and said that if she so much as spoke his name again, he would have her beaten. A feeling of utter isolation had frozen her to the spot on a part of the landing that she could still not pass without a shiver. For Stephen had always been the one
to scoop her up when the grown-ups were fighting and take her away some where she could not hear the raised voices.

There was nobody to stand between her and this large, angry man, and it had terrified her. Even the nursery had been no refuge for the frightened little girl. Without Stephen, it had just become a bleak and empty prison cell. She had the impression of being left for days on end behind locked doors, although she was sure even her grand father could not have been that cruel. He must have ensured she had at least a nursery maid bring her some thing to eat!

But no matter how hard she tried to resist them, those unhappy memories came swirling round her every time she crossed the thresh old of the grand house in Mount Street.

It was not helped by the fact that once her mother had married Hugh Bredon, her life had under gone such a drastic change. Instead of incarceration and isolation, she had spent her first years at the Brambles learning to fish and shoot and ride, so that she could keep up with her magnificent new big brothers. She did not think she had run wild, precisely, over the ensuing nineteen years, though towards the end of her time there, she definitely had far more freedom than her aunt and uncle deemed appropriate for a young lady. She had thought nothing of saddling up her mare or harnessing the gig to go on errands or visit friends, entirely unaccompanied. And then, after her mother had died, she had taken over the running of Hugh's house hold.

Her Uncle Herriard, she knew, would never have trusted a sixteen-year-old girl to run his house hold for him. Her step father might never have shown her much
affection, but he had reposed a great deal of confidence in her abilities. Hugh had only checked the house hold accounts for the first few months she was in charge, and though he never praised her, he never complained about the way she ran things, either. All he wanted was to be left in peace to get on with his studies, and she had taken great pride in ensuring that he could do so.

But she had to face facts. When it came right down to it, Hugh Bredon had never quite thought of her as his own daughter. It was as though he was unable to forget that she was the result of his wife's first disastrous marriage to Baron Framlingham.

Imogen's shoulders slumped. ‘I am sorry to be such a disappointment to you, Aunt,' she said dejectedly. ‘It is not that I am not
trying
to behave as you would wish…'

‘I know,' her aunt agreed. ‘That is what is so particularly exasperating. It is so hard to discipline you for faults you just cannot help having! They are so deeply in grained, that…' She sighed. ‘If only you were as pretty as your mother,' she said, for what seemed to Imogen like the thousandth time.

The very first time Lady Callandar had seen her, she had blanched and said, ‘Oh, dear! How very unfortunate!'

With her wildly curling hair and intelligent grey eyes, Imogen was, apparently, the very image of her father, Kit Hebden. ‘
Knowing
eyes,' her uncle had said disparagingly. ‘That was the thing about Framlingham. Always looking at you as though he knew some thing you didn't.'

‘Anyone who knew him will take one look at her,'
Lady Callandar had wailed, ‘and say she is bound to turn out exactly like him!'

‘Then you will just have to make sure,' her uncle had said sternly, ‘that she never gives anyone cause to think it!'

‘Imogen, dear,' her aunt had said sympathetically, once her uncle had stormed from the room, ‘you must not let your uncle's manner upset you. You are—' she had floundered for a moment, before her face lit up with inspiration ‘—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.