Page 45 of Innocent in the Prince's Bed

The girls around her made small talk, chatting about dresses and fabrics and their favourite gentlemen. Dove wished she felt that carefree. The girls chatted as if they didn’t know what waited for them: marriage to the highest bidder. Or perhaps they did know. If so, how could they be so glib about being treated like prettily dressed cattle? Worse, how could they celebrate that? Was she the only one who saw the injustice of it? The limitation?

‘Did anyone read the society pages this morning?’ Eliza Brantley, a debutante out for her second Season, leaned forward, catching the girls’ attention with a sly look. She pulled a folded sheet of newsprint from her bodice and spread it out, mischief in her eye. ‘He’s published a new poem.’

‘Who?’ A girl dressed in pink leaned forward, breathless at the anticipation of gossip.

‘The Prince of Poems, who else? Don’t you know anything, Sally?’ Eliza scolded with a laugh.

The Prince of Poems? Is that what they were calling him these days? Dove set aside the second bigne.

‘This one is called “Jealousy”,’ Eliza said in hushed tones not meant to be overheard by the mamas gathered at the other table. ‘It’s so romantic. It’s about men competing for a woman’s affection,’ Eliza prefaced with a wicked smile and began to read. ‘“She can belong to only one…”’

Eliza finished reading to an applause of sighs. ‘I wish Mr Adamson and Mr Gilbert felt that way about me,’ Sally said wistfully. ‘Sometimes I think they do and other times, I think they’re more concerned about pleasing my father.’

‘How lovely to think the gentlemen feel the same way as we do, after all,’ another girl gushed. ‘We feel we have to compete for their attentions, while all the time they are competing for ours.’

‘Why do we have to compete at all?’ Dove broke in, unable to stand it any longer.

Sally stared at her, uncomprehending. ‘Whatever do you mean?’

‘I mean, why force a marriage?’ Dove explained. ‘Why not marry someone of our choosing instead of our parents’? For that matter, why marry now? Why not demand a Grand Tour like your brothers? Why not see the world before settling down?’ She was warming to the subject, but her audience was all horrified confusion. The girls looked back at her with blank expressions.

Eliza Brantley’s shrewd gaze knew precisely what she meant, though, but there was no help from that quarter. She wanted to talk about the Prince. ‘I wonder who the Prince wrote this about? Does anyone care to speculate, ladies?’

‘Do you think it’s about the Countess of Somersby?’ Sally Rinehart whispered, eyes round. ‘I would be melting for him if he would look my way even once!’ That was all it took to open a floodgate all the girls could involve with. Sally’s comment was followed by a chorus of, ‘He’s so handsome.’

‘I love his hair. Those eyes!’

‘Those shoulders!’

‘My cousin danced with him once and she said he waltzes like a god. She felt so dainty in his arms, like a real pocket Venus.’ The girls oohed and aahed over the description, more than one pair of eyes going hazy with the image.

‘Lady Dove has danced with him.’ Eliza smiled coyly. ‘Maybe she’d tell us what it’s like.’

Dove panicked. For a moment only the dance beneath the stars came to mind, a secret dance. Eliza couldn’t possibly know about that. She must mean the dance at the debut ball. Eliza had been there.

‘He’s arrogant,’ Dove said. ‘His conversation is…different.’ Even saying that much felt like telling a secret. She didn’t want to share Illarion with them. He was hers. It was a silly notion, nearly as silly as these moonstruck girls gasping about his shoulders as if a man’s shoulders defined him.

‘His accent is so attractive. The way he says his r’s makes me faint,’ a girl in lavender put in eagerly. Dove wanted to scream that it wasn’t his accent that made him attractive. It was his topics, his choice of words, the way he thought about the world, his way of framing the discussion to call out and expose one’s opinions, one’s self, that made conversation different. His conversations had meaning. These girls wouldn’t understand that.

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