Page 11 of The Society Catch
‘No, stay, please. You are one of the family, Giles, and besides, you are staying here, and will have to know what is going on.’ She started to re-read. ‘And it is not as though it is anything actually, er, indelicate.’
‘What, not an elopement with the apothecary or the unfortunate results of an amorous encounter with the footman?’ Alex enquired, earning a look of burning reproach from his wife.
‘I still think I had better leave,’ Giles persisted. ‘I can go to an hotel until my rooms are ready at Albany. Your aunt will want to call and discuss the problem, that is obvious, and she will not feel at ease if she knows I am staying here.’
‘Nonsense, Giles. We need you to help us get to the bottom of this puzzle. Aunt Emily says it all began at the Duchess of Bridlington’s ball. Joanna got drunk on champagne, flirted outrageously and then went on to commit just about every act in the list of things she could do to be labelled fast. And to cap it all she is wilfully refusing an offer from a highly eligible nobleman – discreetly unnamed.’
‘Joanna? Drunk on champagne?’ Alex looked incredulous. ‘That girl is a pattern-book of respectability and correct behaviour.’
‘The Duchess of Bridlington’s ball?’ Giles sat down again. ‘Oh lord.’ His friends looked at him incredulously. ‘Don’t look at me like that, I haven’t been seducing the girl. But I think I may have started her off on the wine.’ He broke off, his eyes unfocussed, thinking back into the past. ‘You know, she’d had a bad shock of some kind, that’s why I gave her a couple of glasses of champagne.’
He had forgotten about his encounters with Joanna, in the light of Mrs Fulgrave’s letter, things began to make sense. ‘At theball I found her sitting outside one of the retiring rooms looking shocked,’ he began.
‘You mean someone might have said somethingrisquéor unkind to her?’ Hebe ventured.
‘No, not that kind of shock.’ He remembered the blank look in those wide hazel eyes and suddenly realised what it reminded him of. ‘Alex, you know the effect their first battle had on some of the very young, very idealistic officers who came out to the Peninsula without any experience? The ones who thought that war was all glory and chivalry, bugles blowing and flags flying?’
‘And found it was blood and mud and slaughter. Men dying in something that resembled a butcher’s shambles, chaos and noise–’ Alex broke off. ‘Yes, I remember. What are you saying?’
‘Joanna had the same look in her eyes as those lads had after their first battle, as though an ideal had disintegrated before her and her world was in ruins. She was white, her hands were shaking. I asked her what was wrong, but she would not tell me. I assumed it was a man. We talked of neutral subjects for a while. After two glasses of champagne she was well enough to waltz, which helped, I think. Movement often does in cases of shock.’ He remembered the supple, yielding figure in his arms, those wide hazel eyes which 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 debutante 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 which she had suggested to him. ‘Cards, 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 debutantes, 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 summoned both men back to her salon, announcing that she was thoroughly bored with resting and 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 announced from the doorway, ‘Mrs Fulgrave, my lady.’ He flattened himself against the wall as Emily Fulgrave almost ran into the room, ‘Oh, Hebe, Alex…’ She burst into tears.
It took quite five minutes and a dose ofsal volatilebefore she could command herself again. Giles, his escape cut off by a flurry of hastily-summoned maidservants 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 hadvanished 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 somewhere, “Where I can 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 already.’
‘I will find her,’ Giles said, standing up.
‘Oh, Giles,thank you,’ Hebe said warmly. ‘I had quite forgotten 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, looking at him with desperate faith in his ability to find her daughter. Giles was already bitterly regretting his offer.
