Town might be quiet at the moment, but the Beau Monde Mirror will endeavor to keep our readership abreast of all the latest tonnish on-dits.
If there’s a scandal brewing—an illicit affair, an elopement, or anyone high in the instep puts a foot wrong—you can be sure we’ll let the proverbial cat out of the bag first.
The Beau Monde Mirror: The Society Page
16 Grosvenor Square, Mayfair
September 14, 1818
If it weren’t for Lady Charlotte Hastings’s troublesome tortoiseshell cat, Olivia de Vere would not be in such a mortifying predicament right now.
Of course, if Charlie were actually here at this very moment (as opposed to being miles away at her father’s country estate in Gloucestershire), she would surely tell Olivia that her current situation—straddling the six-foot-high, ivy-clad wall adjoining the Marquess of Sleat’s back garden as she made a futile attempt to coax said cat from the branches of a towering beech tree—was an “opportunity,” not a disaster waiting to happen.
Olivia shot a quick glance at the back of her guardians’ rather grand town house. Or, to be more precise, her town house, considering the rent was drawn from her very own inheritance money, currently held “in trust.” When she ascertained no one was watching her, she permitted herself a tiny sigh of relief. If Uncle Reginald or Aunt Edith caught her committing such an indecorous act, or her cousins Prudence and Patience, or, even worse, her warden-cum-lady’s-maid, Bagshaw . . . Olivia shuddered. There would be the devil to pay, that much was certain.
Ever since she’d been expelled from Mrs. Rathbone’s Academy for Young Ladies of Good Character three years ago for decidedly unladylike conduct—along with the other three members of the Society for Enlightened Young Women, Sophie, Arabella, and Charlie—she’d been mired in disgrace and labeled a social pariah. A “disreputable debutante,” according to scurrilous gossip rags like the Beau Monde Mirror.
She really couldn’t afford to court disaster again.
But it seemed that was exactly what she was doing.
Her gaze flitted to Lord Sleat’s town house. Now, if the forbidding yet altogether fascinating marquess happened to discover what she was up to . . . Olivia shivered again. While she longed to make the man’s acquaintance, this was not a prudent way to go about it by any means.
As Lord Sleat was a good friend of Lord Malverne—Sophie’s husband and Charlie’s older brother—Olivia had it on good authority that the Scottish marquess was considered to be a very eligible bachelor indeed. Of course, Lord Sleat also had a well-earned reputation for being one of London’s worst rakehells. A serial seducer of women.
However, Olivia was certain the marquess wouldn’t even spare her a passing glance at this particular moment in time. With her skirts and petticoats rucked up about her knees, her silk stockings torn and smeared with something mucky and green—moss, perhaps—she looked an absolute fright. Not only that, but what she was doing certainly bordered on trespassing.
If Lord Sleat did see her, he’d be well within his rights to summon the Bow Street Runners.
But what could she do? She absolutely had to rescue her dear friend’s beloved pet. If Peridot fell or escaped into the mews . . . Visions of the cat darting between carriages and horses’ hooves or being stalked by a lascivious tomcat filled Olivia’s mind’s eye, and her whole body trembled like the dark green leaves above her head.
Despite Olivia’s edict to the servants that Peridot should not be let out unless accompanied, the cat had somehow slipped into the garden on her own. When Olivia looked up from the pages of Northanger Abbey—she’d been reading in her bedchamber after dinner—and spied Peridot leaping from the wall into the tree, her heart had taken flight like a panicked bird.
And now here she was, her heart fluttering wildly, her belly tumbling with fear, and her head spinning with dizziness whenever she looked down. How inconvenient that she’d belatedly discovered she was terrified of heights. Olivia huffed out a breath to blow a stray lock of hair away from her face. She daren’t let go of the brick wall lest she fall. She’d already lost one of her shoes; in the process of clambering onto her precarious perch, her pink silk slipper slid off her foot and landed in a dense, rather prickly looking bank of rosebushes guarding the perimeter of Lord Sleat’s garden.
On her side of the wall, the stone bench she’d climbed upon looked far away indeed. And part of the ivy-choked latticework she’d used as