Page 58 of To Love and to Loathe
Lady Helen snorted, the sound the least delicate Diana had yet heard from her. “I should be offended, truly I should. As if I would be so foolhardy as to sacrifice my virtue to one of the—doubtless incompetent—gentlemen at this house party.”
“But sacrificing your virtue to aladyis acceptable?” Diana asked incredulously; she had no objection to this practice, but would have thought that Lady Helen—or at least the Lady Helen she thought she had known—would.
Lady Helen smirked slightly; the smirk had a rather saucy edge to it, one that Diana would never have thought to see on the face of Lady Helen Courtenay. “In the interest of strict accuracy, I would like to note that my virtue is entirely intact. It is an advantage of being a sapphist, you see.”
Choosing not to follow the conversational direction her curious mind so desperately wished to pursue—surely one of Violet’s beloved poets had something to say on the matter; Diana would inquire later—Diana instead said, “What are you about, then, flinging yourself after Jer—Willingham, if you have no interest in marrying?”
Lady Helen’s smile widened. “It’s all part of my plan, you see.Merely the latest chapter in what has been a lengthy, yearslong strategy.”
Diana was beginning to get the sense that she was in the presence of a mind far more devious than her own, and the feeling was simultaneously alarming and intriguing. “Explain.”
Lady Helen settled herself back upon the bench. “If a lady does not wish to wed,” she explained, “and she is fair of face and from a respectable, moneyed background, she is confronted with a bit of a challenge. However, she has several options open to her. The most obvious option is to ruin herself. This itself is a bit risky—there is every chance her parents will force her into matrimony with the man she selects for her ruination, so if a lady chooses this path, she must only do so if she knows her parents sufficiently well to feel confident that they won’t force her hand.
“For many ladies, however, this option is too risky. Another possibility is to transform oneself into a bluestocking—spectacles, ink-stained fingers, dull pedantries at every social event she attends. This often does the trick, but this, too, has its attendant risk—what if her parents decide to find her a dull sort of younger son? A vicar, or a scholar, someone who finds her academic nature appealing? One could find oneself shipped off to a vicarage in Shropshire before one even realizes what is happening. Again, risky.
“Naturally, I considered both of these choices as I was approaching my own come-out,” Lady Helen added. “I had known for some years that I was not attracted to men, but for a while I assumed I would merely make a go of it, marry some aristocratic gentleman I did not love, and hope that he took up with a mistress in short order. My mother hired Sutton for me when I was sixteen, however, and… well, once we came to an understanding, I knew that there was nopossibility of my marrying. Even if we could manage to conceal our feelings from my husband, even if we could carry on under his nose with him none the wiser, the thought of living such a lie for the rest of my life was too appalling to be bearable. It was then that I began to plot how to evade this trap.”
“And what did you land on, then?” Diana asked, fascinated despite herself. Lady Helen’s plight rather cast her own woes in her debut Season in the shade.
“A more cunning line of deception,” Lady Helen said with some degree of self-satisfaction—probably entirely earned, Diana thought. “I would play society’s game, give them every appearance of a lady desperate for marriage. I am an observant person, Lady Templeton—I have watched ladies and gentlemen perform the courting ritual and I’ve noticed the ladies who aretoodesperate, who make themselves unattractive in the wanting.” Her voice took on a slightly bitter edge. “Because of course, they have been told their entire lives that matrimony to the most eligible gentleman possible is their raison d’être, and yet if they want it too badly—if they get the slightest bit desperate to achieve this thing that they have been told is the only thing they should ever desire—well… howpathetic.”
Diana’s mouth actuallywasagape by this point. This entire conversation gave her the feeling of being in the company of a creature one had assumed was a rather unintelligent lapdog who turned out, in fact, to be a wolf.
“It wasn’t too difficult to turn myself into the sort of lady that no gentleman actually wants to marry. One who laughs too shrilly, who clutches a gentleman’s arm too tightly, who praises too lavishly—and, for the record, you’veno ideahow excessive one’s praise of a titled gentleman must be before he finally thinks you’ve taken it too far.” Sheallowed herself an eye roll. “It was a delicate endeavor—I couldn’t be too obvious about it, or my mother and brother would have realized what I was doing. I had to give the impression of a lady being slowly worn down by the marriage mart, of becoming a lady so desperate to wed that she no longer even resembled her former self.”
She paused for a moment, her gaze fixed on her lap. “I am fond of my brother, and my only regret regarding this deception is that I am certain it has altered his opinion of me. If I could but trust him to never force me to wed, I would let him in on my secret, but I fear my mother’s influence would wear him down eventually, even if he were sympathetic to my plight.”
“So Willingham was all part of this scheme?” Diana asked, feeling a guilty twinge at the role she had played in this entire saga.
“It was too good an opportunity to pass up,” Lady Helen explained. “I thought if I flung myself at amarquess, of all people, and were rebuffed, gossip might start to spread. I’m getting older, but I’m not on the shelf yet, and I thought that whispers about my conduct here might hurry me down that path. It was all the easier when you began conspiring to trap me alone with him—for reasons I’m still not entirely certain I understand.”
“Willingham and I made a wager about him being married within a year,” Diana said, feeling a bit sheepish.
Lady Helen frowned. “But surely you couldn’t have thought Lord Willingham would want to marry a lady like me? Or rather, the Lady Helen Courtenay he thinks he knows?”
“No,” Diana admitted, “but I was hopeful that if I flung him together with you enough, it would make him reconsider some of the other ladies of his acquaintance—might make them appear more appealing prospects by comparison.”
“So you were essentially using me toscarehim into matrimony?” Lady Helen asked, arching a brow.
Diana was beginning to feel rather ashamed of herself. “Well… yes, I suppose that is the most succinct way to put it.”
Lady Helen burst out laughing, her real laugh, happy and unguarded, a far cry from the shrill giggles Diana had previously heard her emit. It had a transformative effect—her entire face softened, the cool, haughty look that she usually wore having completely vanished. “I really should thank you,” she said after a moment, still giggling. “If ever I needed confirmation that my efforts are working, you have just given it to me. Not only have I made myself an unappealing matrimonial prospect, I have in fact become so dreadful that the mere specter of marriage to me can be used to scare gentlemen into marrying others.”
“When you put it like that, I feel rather ashamed of myself,” Diana confessed. “I should offer you an apology.”
Lady Helen waved a hand dismissively. “Don’t bother with all that. What I’d like to know, however, is why it is that you are trying to get Lord Willingham married to someone else when it is obvious that you’re in love with him.”
Diana felt the blood drain from her face. “I’m certain I don’t know what you mean,” she said stiffly—and, she feared, entirely unconvincingly.
“Oh, come now, I thought we were being honest with each other,” Lady Helen said, fixing her with a beady-eyed stare. “It might not be obvious to everyone, but to me, at least—well, it’s quite the experience to have another lady conspiring to get you alone with a certain gentleman at every possible opportunity, and yet also glaring every time she succeeded.”
Diana sighed. “Willingham and I have a bit of an… arrangement,at the moment,” she said carefully. “However, it is entirely temporary, and I’ve no wish for another loveless marriage of convenience.”
“Love can exist without marriage, just as much as the opposite is true. I promise you, I’m quite certainly in love with Sutton, and we’ll never be married,” Lady Helen said. “It seems to me that there is a fair amount of feeling between you and Lord Willingham, even if you never marry.”
“I didn’t…” Diana hesitated, floundering. “Willingham and I have a casual arrangement.”
Lady Helen snorted, the sound yet another reminder—if Diana needed one—that the lady before her bore little resemblance to the one Diana had thought she’d known. “It doesn’t seem all that casual to me, judging by the way you look at each other.”
