Of course, the prince had taken himself away while the news was still spreading through the ballroom. He had walked out the door with his cronies without a backward glance at her . . . and after that every face in the ballroom turned away from her. Apparently they were only waiting to see what his reaction was to being told she was carrying a child.
Yet he, if anyone, knew it to be a taradiddle. At least, he knew the child wasn’t his. Maybe that was why he threw her over so abruptly. Perhaps he too believed the stories and thought she was pregnant by another man.
The cut direct from an entire ballroom. It had to be a first.
The caller wasn’t Prince Augustus, but Linnet’s aunt, Lady Etheridge, known to her intimates as Zenobia. She had chosen that name for herself, realizing as a young girl that Hortense didn’t suit her personality.
“I knew this would come to grief,” she announced, stopping just inside the door and dropping her gloves to the floor rather than handing them to the footman to her right.
Zenobia relished a good drama, and when inebriated was prone to informing a whole dinner table that she could have played Lady Macbeth better than Sarah Siddons. “I told you once, if I told you a hundred times, Cornelius, that girl is too pretty for her own good. And I was right. Here she is, enceinte, and all of London party to the news except for me.”
“I’m not—” Linnet said.
But she was drowned out by her father, who chose to avoid the question at hand and go on the attack. “It’s not my daughter’s fault that she takes after her mother.”
“My sister was as pure as the driven snow,” Zenobia bellowed back.
The battle was properly engaged now, and there would be no stopping it.
“My wife may have been snowy—and God knows I’m the one to speak to that—but she was certainly warm enough when she cared to be. We all know how fast the Ice Maiden could warm up, particularly when she was around royalty, now I think of it!”
“Rosalyn deserved a king,” Zenobia screamed. She strode into the room and planted herself as if she were about to shoot an arrow. Linnet recognized the stance: it was just what Mrs. Siddons had done the week before on the Covent Garden stage, when her Desdemona repudiated Othello’s cruel accusations of unfaithfulness.
Poor Papa was hardly a warrior like Othello, though. The fact was that her dearest mama had been rampantly unfaithful to him, and he knew it. And so did Aunt Zenobia, though she was choosing to play ignorant.
“I really don’t see that the question is relevant,” Linnet put in. “Mama died some years ago now, and her fondness for royalty is neither here nor there.”
Her aunt threw her a swooning look. “I will always defend your mother, though she lies in the cold, cold grave.”
Linnet slumped back in her corner. True, her mother was in the grave. And frankly, she thought she missed her mother more than Zenobia did, given that the sisters had fought bitterly every time they met. Mostly over men, it had to be admitted. Though to her credit, her aunt wasn’t nearly as trollopy as her mama had been.
“It’s the beauty,” her father was saying. “It’s gone to Linnet’s head, just as it went to Rosalyn’s. My wife thought beauty gave her license to do whatever she liked—”
“Rosalyn never did anything untoward!” Zenobia interrupted.
“She skirted respectability for years,” Lord Sundon continued, raising his voice. “And now her daughter has followed in her footsteps, and Linnet is ruined. Ruined!”
Zenobia opened her mouth—and then snapped it shut. There was a pause. “Rosalyn is hardly the question here,” she said finally, patting her hair. “We must concentrate on dear Linnet now. Stand up, dear.”
Linnet stood up.
“Five months, I’d say,” Zenobia stated. “How on earth you managed to hide that from me, I don’t know. Why, I was as shocked as anyone last night. The Countess of Derby was quite sharp with me, thinking I’d been concealing it. I had to admit that I knew nothing of it, and I’m not entirely sure she believed me.”
“I am not carrying a child,” Linnet said, enunciating the words slowly.
“She said the same last night,” her father confirmed. “And earlier this morning, she didn’t look it.” But he peered at her waist. “Now she does.”
Linnet pushed down the cloth that billowed out just under her breasts. “See, I’m not enceinte. There’s nothing there but cloth.”
“My dear, you’ll have to tell us sometime,” Zenobia said, taking out a tiny mirror and peering at herself. “It’s not as if it’s going anywhere. At this rate, you’ll be bigger than a house in a matter of a few months. I myself retired to the country as soon as my waistline expanded even a trifle.”
“What are we going to do with her?” her father moaned, collapsing into a chair as suddenly as a puppet with cut strings.
“Nothing you can do,” Zenobia said, powdering her nose. “No one wants a cuckoo in the nest. You’ll have to send her abroad and see if she can catch someone there, after all this unpleasantness is over, of course. You’d better double her dowry. Thankfully, she’s an heiress. Someone will take her on.”
She put down her powder puff and shook her finger at Linnet. “Your mother would be very disappointed, my dear. Didn’t she teach you anything?”
“I suppose you mean that Rosalyn should have trained her in the arts of being as dissipated as she herself was,” her father retorted. But he was still drooping in his seat, and had obviously lost his fire.
“I did not sleep with the prince,” Linnet said, as clearly and as loudly as she could. “I might have done so, obviously. Perhaps if I had, he would have felt constrained to marry me now. But I chose not to.”
Her father groaned and dropped his head onto the back of his chair.
“I didn’t hear that,” Zenobia said, narrowing her eyes. “At least royalty is some sort of excuse. If this child is the result of anything less than ducal blood, I don’t want to hear a word about it.”
“I didn’t—” Linnet tried.
Her aunt cut her off with a sharp gesture. “I just realized, Cornelius, that this might be the saving of you.” She turned to Linnet. “Tell us who fathered that child, and your father will demand marriage. No one below a prince would dare to refuse him.”
Without pausing for breath, she swung back to her brother-in-law. “You might have to fight a duel, Cornelius. I suppose you have pistols somewhere in this house, don’t you? Didn’t you threaten to fight one with Lord Billetsford years ago?”
“After finding him in bed with Rosalyn,” Linnet’s father said. He didn’t even sound mournful, just matter-of-fact. “New bed; we’d had it only a week or two.”
“My sister had many passions,” Zenobia said fondly.
“I thought you just said she was white as snow!” the viscount snapped back.
“None of them touched her soul! She died in a state of grace.”
No one was inclined to argue with this, so Zenobia continued. “At any rate, you’d better pull out those pistols, Cornelius, and see if they still work. You might have to threaten to kill the man. Though in my experience if you double the dowry, it’ll all come around quickly enough.”