Page 6 of Letters to a Wallflower
So was his brother. “Don’t be obtuse. The letters, Ben. They are bound to come up again, now that you are home and insist on going about.” Bernard shrugged. “But there’s nothing for it, I say. It will flare up. You will just have to ride it out. Nothing to be done. And soon enough, the gossips will move on.”
“Letters? What letters?” Ben thought back and felt a moment’s panic. “Did I disclose something I should not have, in writing home? Did I give something away? Our strength? Our strategy? I swear, I never meant to!” He frowned. “I was given laudanum for a time, after the injury. Perhaps?—”
“Ben! No. I meant the Crawford girl’s letters, of course.”
“Crawford girl? Ben frowned. “Do you mean Helen Crawford? Will Crawford’s sister? I never wrote her any letters.”
Bernard stopped and took his arm. “Ben, are you speaking the truth? I meant the letters she wrote to you. The ones you published?”
“Published?” Ben pulled away. “I have no idea what you speak of. Helen Crawford never wrote to me. Her father wouldn’t have allowed it, I’m sure.”
His brother gaped. “You truly don’t know? You didn’t send her letters to the papers before you left? Everyone assumed you did!”
“Tell me.” A bad feeling had begun to rise in his gut. “Tell me what happened.”
Bernard groaned. “It was perhaps a week after your regiment sailed—the first one appeared then. A letter, addressed to Dearest Ben was published in the London Town Prattler. It expressed her violent admiration, her deep and abiding feelings for you. How she felt both awkward and ecstatic when you called her Squirt.”
Squirt. It was a nickname he had given Helen Crawford. He’d been the best of friends with her brother Will and had spent a good amount of time in their home, at one time. He’d come across Helen with her younger brother Charles in the kitchens one day. They had been up to their elbows in a sink of soapy water and she had been showing the boy how to squeeze his palms together to make a squirt of water spout high.
“The newspapers held it up as an example of lapsed morals. Of the forwardness of a young lady allowed too much free reign.”
“And they were addressed to me?” Ben asked in a whisper.
“Dearest Ben. And signed Helen. She spoke of you being a friend of her older brother and Society worked out who it was, quickly enough.
“The first one, you said?”
“A series of them. The next one spoke of how tongue-tied she felt in your presence, how she hoped you could see the breadth of her feelings in her eyes, because she could never find the words. That one came accompanied with a stern treatise on what a modest young woman’s behavior should be.”
Great Caesar’s Ghost. “How many?”
“Letters and accompanying articles?” Bernard thought back. “Two or three more after that, I think.”
“What happened? To Helen?”
“She was . . . humiliated. Publicly censored. Shunned. She was sent home almost before the Season had begun.”
Damnation. “And Mother believes I sent those letters to the newspapers?”
“Everyone believes it.”
“But I didn’t!” Ben gripped his cane tightly. “I never saw any letters. This is the first I’ve heard of it.” He drew up short. “By God, I never understood why Will never answered my letters. I eventually stopped writing. What must he think of me? What must she?” He turned and started back towards home. “Where is she now? Helen?”
“That’s just it. She’s here. In London. She was admitted back into Society, but only as her grandmother’s companion. Many still don’t speak to her. She’s become a quiet mouse of a girl, hiding behind the dowagers, keeping to the shadows. A wallflower.”
“No!” Ignoring the pain in his thigh, Ben walked faster.
“What are you going to do?”
“I don’t know,” he called back. “But I have to do something!”
“A triumph. It can be called nothing else,” Grandmama crowed again.
Helen bit back a grin. Last night had been her first night in Society after what her grandmother called The Great Transformation—and it truly had felt like a triumph.
The first big event of the Season had taken place at Lady Stockard’s ball. Grandmama had timed it carefully, arriving early enough so that the family still stood in a receiving line, but late enough so that there were plenty of witnesses as they made an entrance.
Helen had never felt more beautiful. She’d finally given in and allowed her grandmother to hire a lady’s maid for her. Carruthers could sew, thank goodness, and she knew a fair few tricks with powder and face paint, but she was a genius with hair. She had pulled back Helen’s blonde hair, leaving curls at her temples, but fashioning the rest into a glorious, loosely woven circlet at the back. It had been interesting and different and lovely and the maid had tucked tiny pink rosebuds in at the crown of her head, to match Helen’s gown.
