Wallflower (Old Maids' Club, Book 1)

Wallflower

Catherine Gayle

The characters and events portrayed in this
book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or
dead, is purely coincidental and not intended by the author.

Wallflower

Copyright © 2011 by Catherine Gayle

Cover Design by Adrienne Thorne

Published by Night Shift Publishing at
Smashwords

All rights reserved. No part of this book may
be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical
means—except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical
articles or reviews—without written permission.

For more information:
[email protected]

Dedication

To Mom, for teaching me to read, and to Dad,
for telling me so many stories—over and over and over again.

Prologue

Summer, 1798

Ainsworth Court, Cotehill,
Cumberland

“
Aunt Rosaline is smoking
a cheroot,” Bethanne said from her perch by the window, carefully
hidden from outside view by the draperies. From a few feet away,
Tabitha saw her cousin as plain as day, as could anyone walking
past them in the corridor. Bethanne’s big, green eyes—eyes almost
too large for her face—somehow widened further than normal as she
rounded on her two cousins. “A cheroot!”

“
Aunt Rosaline smoking a
cheroot hardly signifies as newsworthy, Bethie,” Jo scoffed,
sending her blonde curls flying. She always shortened everyone’s
name, whether they wanted their name shortened or not. It was a
long ingrained habit—one Tabitha doubted Jo would ever be broken
of. “I’ve caught her doing far worse than that on more occasions
than I can count.”

Tabitha had to laugh at
Jo’s assessment. Then she laughed again at Bethanne’s dejected huff
of defeat, though she at least took care to conceal her snicker
behind a hand. Bethanne would
not
appreciate the humor of the situation,
particularly since it came at her expense.

The youngest of the three cousins at
the ancient age of eleven, Bethanne Shelton never quite managed to
win at anything against the much longer in the tooth, much wiser,
much more indomitable thirteen-year-old Josephine Faulkner. Jo’s
father, Viscount Hazelwood, might occasionally choose to describe
his daughter as determined, or perhaps as merely
stubborn-to-a-fault if he felt generous on the particular day one
asked. Tabitha knew better: Jo was as obstinate as a mule. This was
one of the reasons Tabitha loved her so.

Jo could always best Tabitha too,
particularly if a talent such as playing the pianoforte were
involved or anything else requiring one to take center stage. At
twelve years old and precisely in the middle of her two dearest
cousins, Lady Tabitha Shelton despised having a room full of people
staring at her for any reason at all. It always made her think they
were disgusted by her, that they were staring down their haughty,
aristocratic noses upon her because she had never managed to lose
the chubbiness generally acceptable at infancy, yet perpetually
frowned upon once a child no longer wore nappies. Already at this
early age, her hips had begun to widen and her bosom had started to
round itself out, and she tended to attract far more attention than
she should ever have liked.

Quite perplexing, that. If she did not
already believe herself destined for a lifetime spent alone, the
sheer girth of her frame would convince her of it in the
infinitesimal span of a moment. What gentleman, after all, would be
attracted to a girl who appeared more like a rounded, pink pig than
an elegant and refined lady?

“
Such as?” Bethanne
demanded, startling Tabitha out of her ruminations. The youngest
girl plopped down onto the sofa in the front parlor, sending a
whoosh of air over Tabitha. “What on earth could she possibly have
done that is worse than smoking cheroots?”

“
Well, perhaps
worse
is not strictly
the correct term,” Jo mused. “Certainly more
scandalous
, though.”

Tabitha merely raised an eyebrow in
question. Jo could not possibly think to hold back on them now. Not
after raising their mutual curiosity in such a manner.

Indeed, their elder cousin
did not keep them in suspense for longer than a trifling moment.
“Well, to start, I saw her riding over the hill the other
day.
Astride
.”

“
No!” Bethanne responded.
“But her skirts would be all bunched about her legs. She couldn’t
possibly have done that. I don’t believe it for one
second.”

Tabitha held her tongue. Jo had left
something out as surely as the sky was blue—a rather important
something, it would seem. Tabitha wanted every detail before
forming her own assessment.

“
Yes, she did,” Jo said.
“But her skirts were hardly a concern, seeing as how she wasn’t
wearing any. Aunt Rosaline wore breeches.”

And there was the rub.

“
Josephine Faulkner, if
your father knew you were telling such a fudge...” Bethanne’s scold
trailed off as a herd of their brothers and the boys’ friends
tromped past them down the corridor. She followed them with her
eyes before returning to her diatribe. “He’d banish you to the
outer bailey for a year.”

Jo’s family lived in King Water
Castle, an old fortress everyone thought to be haunted that was
situated only a few miles from Tabitha’s ancestral home of
Ainsworth Court. The outer bailey seemed to have more spirits than
the rest of the castle combined, at least as far as the
imaginations of the three girls were concerned.

“
He would not, because it
isn’t a story. It’s the truth.” Jo readjusted on the mauve settee,
settling her skirts about her legs again, and then looked over her
shoulder to the hallway before continuing in a conspiratorial tone.
“Do you want to know something else that’s the truth? The next day,
I caught her kissing a gardener behind Uncle Drake’s mews when I
was on my way over for a visit. She looked at me for a moment with
a rather triumphant grin, I must say, and then shooed me away,
telling me to mind my own affairs and stay out of hers.”

One of
Father’s
gardeners? Surely not.
Drake Shelton, the Earl of Newcastle, would never stand for such an
impropriety. He had indulged his sister in many ways over the
years—as had the entire family, truth be told—but he would never
allow her ruin at the hands of a member of his own
staff.

Tabitha simply couldn’t believe such a
thing.

“
How positively sinful,”
sputtered Bethanne.

“
I’d say more delicious
than sinful,” Jo countered after a thoughtful moment. “But
certainly scandalous.”

Indeed, everything about
Aunt Rosaline seemed to scream out
scandal
. Perhaps in all capital
letters.
SCANDAL!
With an exclamation mark. The added emphasis was a
must.

Yet despite how the
townspeople rushed their children along, so as to avoid the
influence of ‘That Bluestocking, Lady Rosaline Shelton,’ despite
the whispers in corners about her being an
Old Maid
(according to Tabitha’s
mother, the worst thing that could be said of a lady, save perhaps
for being a lightskirt)
,
and despite the
on-dit
Tabitha had read in the
gossip rags that Jo’s older sister, Lavinia, always managed to
secure from London, Aunt Rosaline did not seem to care one
iota.

Instead, she almost rejoiced in the
negative attentions.

Be
yourself
,
Tabitha, no matter who is watching
,
had become Aunt Rosaline’s nearly constant refrain in recent years.
In fact, she’d even written it to her in a piece of correspondence
only a few months previously. It had come as part of a birthday
letter, sent after Tabitha had despaired of Father and her
brothers’ continued disparaging remarks
—
about her unrelenting state of plumpness and how she would
never find a suitable match if she did not make drastic changes,
and soon.
The beauty you have on the
inside is ten times more luminous than the world could handle
seeing on the outside. We’d all be blind in an instant.

Tabitha had merely set the letter
aside. Be herself? Who else could she be? She wasn’t altogether
sure she understood what her aunt had meant. Certainly, Aunt
Rosaline had not intended to encourage Tabitha to be overweight by
half, nor plain and boring to boot. Yet that, as far as Tabitha
could tell when she had received the letter, was the sum total of
all that she was.

But now, as she slipped off the sofa
and moved over to take a peek out the window for herself (and yes,
Aunt Rosaline was, indeed, smoking a cheroot), perhaps she had a
better understanding. Maybe Aunt Rosaline simply meant to do what
was right for her, and not to worry about the consequences. Or at
least not overmuch. Still, how could one do that and still have a
chance at being accepted by society?

“
What would it be like not
to care what people thought?” Tabitha mused aloud, not truthfully
expecting an answer. Indeed, her voice had been so soft she hoped
perhaps no one else heard her.

“
Precisely as it ought to
be, Tabby,” Jo replied with a cluck of her tongue, within half a
breath of the question. Her tone held an air of adamancy, as
usual.

Yes, perhaps that was how things
should be. Not wondering what the world thought of her excessive,
unwanted curves. Not worried about whether she spoke rather more
than was appropriate or quite less than was acceptable.

“
Blissful,” Bethanne
breathed. “I think it might be a little slice of
heaven.”

Blissful. Heavenly. That it would
certainly be, also.

But for Tabitha, there was something
more. Something weightier. Something far more profound. “It would
be freeing,” she whispered. She hurriedly dashed the tear that had
escaped aside, not wanting either cousin to see her
distress.

Jo came up alongside Tabitha, taking
her free hand into her own with a gentle squeeze, one that brooked
no bosh. If she saw the tears, she mercifully ignored them. “Then
the three of us must make a pact,” she said.

Tabitha wanted to laugh. She could
never be free, despite any pact, despite any desire on her cousins’
parts, despite any need on her own. No matter how desperate. She
must do everything in her power to become an agreeable lady as
suited her station. The only daughter of the eighth Earl of
Newcastle must somehow find a gentleman who would offer for her,
despite the fact that no gentleman her father found acceptable
would ever think of her as beautiful—and certainly not worthy of
the grotesquely large dowry he intended to settle upon her, in
order to offset this rather lamentable circumstance.

Tabitha would never be considered a
diamond of the first water, not in her present state. The thought
was utterly ridiculous.

“
A pact?” Bethanne cut in
with obvious glee as she darted across to join them by the window.
“What sort of pact? I do
so
love secrets. Might we form a secret
pact?”

“
Yes, I think it must be a
secret,” Jo continued. “We’ll each strive to become just like Aunt
Rosaline. We must do what we want, what is right for us, even if it
is not what others think is right for us. We must become old maids.
Together.”

Tabitha slowly but deliberately pulled
her hand away. Her cousin clearly had no earthly idea what she was
suggesting. Jo ought to have a better understanding of things. Her
father was a viscount—a position not all that alien from an earl,
after all. Jo had the same expectations upon her shoulders as
Tabitha did, aside from the fact that Jo had another sister with
whom to share the burden of securing an acceptable
marriage.

Jo frowned at her. “Hear me out before
you refuse. Bethie has excellent connections, but her father
certainly has limited funds for a dowry. That will undoubtedly make
it more difficult for her to marry.”