Mayne’s eyes narrowed and he was staring at her again. Josie would have straightened, except she couldn’t be any straighter than she was. She drank her champagne and then broke the silence. “I might as well say what I’m sure you’re thinking,” she said, putting her glass down on the table with a little click. “The only thing that gets me into this gown at all is my corset. It works miracles. I love it.” She finished the last sentence bravely.
Mayne wasn’t looking at her anymore; he was cutting the string around the cork of a bottle of champagne that Josie hadn’t seen before.
“Are we going to drink more?” she asked, with a little gasp.
He shrugged. “Why not? At this point, we’ve missed most of the party. I shouldn’t like to return you to Rafe’s until we are quite certain the crowds are gone and no one will see us. I don’t suppose you’ve drunk much champagne in the past?”
“I had a glass once before,” Josie said, looking lovingly at the bubbles in the bottle. “It’s much more interesting than I thought.”
“Don’t develop a passion for it,” he advised her. “Look at Rafe and how long it took him to become sober.”
“Oh, I won’t.”
He lifted his glass and held it up to hers. “To the future, Josie?”
“Why do you call me Josie, and I call you Mayne?” she asked, taking a deep draught of champagne. It was making her feel brave and reckless.
“You can call me whatever you like,” he said with a shrug.
“Then I’ll call you Garret. We are friends, after all, and I think that a gentleman who has the gall to question a lady about her undergarments should be on intimate terms with her, don’t you think?” A thought struck her and she plunged straight into another question. “Do all those women whom you slept with address you as Garret, or Mayne?”
He was grinning at her, a lazy, beautiful grin with a touch of the devil in it. He looked like nothing in the world so much as a slightly wicked Bacchus crafted by a master sculptor. It made her feel audacious. After all, it wasn’t Lady Lorkin in this chair. It was she, Josie, the most scorned debutante of the year. “I love champagne!” she added.
“I begin to think I should ring for a sobering cup of tea,” Mayne said. And then: “No, you little witch, I have never asked the women with whom I had affaires to address me by my first name. It isn’t done.”
“Why not? If I were going to—to unclothe myself in front of a person, I would certainly wish to be familiar enough to call him by his first name!”
He laughed at that. “There’s more intimacy involved than unclothing,” he pointed out. And then looked a bit appalled at himself. “I shouldn’t have said that.”
“We’re talking about bedding,” Josie said impatiently. “You can pretend I’m your younger brother, if you wish.”
He eyed her. “I don’t wish.”
“Well, my point is that if I were ever to take my clothing off before someone, I certainly wouldn’t do so in an atmosphere of such formality.”
Mayne was staring at the bubbles in his champagne, turning the glass so the golden wine caught the light. “Most ladies undress with the help of their maids and then slip under the covers.”
Josie thought about that. It sounded like a very good plan to her. That way one’s husband would never be unnerved by the sight of one’s flesh. “Where does the gentleman undress?”
“Of course, ladies and gentlemen never share a bedchamber,” he said, looking through his glass at her now. “No one could imagine such a thing; that sort of intimacy is left for the lower classes. No, the squire strides into his wife’s bedchamber, admirably covered in a striped dressing gown of sturdy linsey-woolsey. Then he drops his dressing gown…”
Josie had a sudden vivid image of what Mayne would look like without a dressing gown, or anything else.
“…but not before he turns down the lamp,” Mayne finished. “No promiscuous looking among the aristocracy. Absolutely not.”
“And she never uses his first name?” Josie said, wrenching her mind away from the gutter.
“Never. In fact, she says little, in my experience.” Mayne rested his head on the back of his chair and gazed at the ceiling. “And this is truly something you should never repeat to your intimates,” he said. “I should not tell you, but I will anyway. The truth is that I can’t imagine why women go to such lengths to anger their husbands by having affaires, when most of them don’t particularly enjoy the intimacies themselves.”
“Then you,” Josie said, thrilling with the daring of this desperately improper conversation, “must not be very good at bedding women. Perhaps Imogen had a lucky escape.” She grinned at the low growl that came from his throat. “Tess and Annabel gave Imogen a wedding night talk,” she told him. “And this time they finally allowed me to stay because I was supposed to be getting married this season.”
Mayne’s jaw clenched. “And they said something about me?” There was stark disbelief in his voice.
“Why on earth would they be interested in you? You should be careful that all this adoration from foolish women like Letitia Lorkin doesn’t go to your head.”
“Josie, you witch”—and it didn’t sound like an endearment anymore—“can you kindly inform me precisely how my name came up during this oh-so-delicate conversation?”
“As I said, you didn’t come up. But the fact that many men are unable to make women happy in bed did.”
“Don’t tell me your sisters were worried about Rafe.” He sounded horrified; it was likely a question of insult my friend, insult me.
“No. But—” Josie stopped. It was one thing to be indiscreet with Mayne, and it was another to reveal that Imogen’s first marriage had not been entirely satisfactory in that respect.
He didn’t say anything, just stared at his glass. “I seem to have no problem providing a suitable experience.”
Josie sipped her glass a bit more cautiously. She was feeling definitely tipsy. It was agreeable, but a native cautionary streak was advising her to stop drinking.
“Bravo for you,” she said.
He looked at her, and she felt the impact of his wild black eyes to the bottom of her toes. “’Twas I who found it unsatisfactory,” he said to her. “And I can’t tell you in what respect, because it’s not the kind of thing you talk about with virgins.” Saying the word seemed to startle him and he snatched up the bottle. “Damn it. I’m three sheets to the wind,” he growled. His voice had darkened to a champagne-drenched growl. Josie thought it was the most sensual thing she’d heard in her life.
“Why’d you keep doing it, then?” she asked, watching him through her lashes so he wouldn’t know how curious she was.
But he didn’t even glance at her. “I haven’t,” he said. “Haven’t had a woman, if you’ll excuse the vulgarity, since Lady Godwin, and—” He stopped.
Josie knew who Lady Godwin was. She was a brilliant musician who wrote waltzes with her husband. Lady Godwin had created that bewitching waltz that she had danced around and around Rafe’s ballroom, in the days before this horrible season started. Now Josie couldn’t dance a waltz because she didn’t want anyone putting a hand on her corset. A man could feel every spike through the thin silk of her gowns.
“You mean,” she said carefully, “the countess?” Was that misery in Mayne’s eyes?
“The very one. If you’ll believe the foolishness of this, I fancied myself in love with her. Hell, I was in love with her.”
“How dare she reject you?” Josie cried. “I shall never think well of her again.”
He grinned at that. “She stayed with her husband, you little witch. She loved him, more than she loved me, and since she didn’t love me even an iota, that was easily done.”
“Sylvie is far more beautiful,” Josie said stoutly.
“Yes.” And, after a while: “Sylvie is a painter, did I tell you that? Both of them artists.”
“I wish I had a talent for something like that.”
“What do you hav
e a talent for?”
Josie shrugged. “Nothing ladylike, nor artistic either. I can’t even embroider, and all I really like to do is read.”
“Reading is an estimable pursuit.”
“Not what I read,” Josie said with a burst of reckless honesty. “I like to read books published by the Minerva Press.”
He laughed at that.
“They’re really very good.”
“Adventures, escapes, damsels in peril—why Josie, I hardly know you! Aren’t you the one who’s afraid of riding, even though you love horses?”
“It’s impolite of you to mention it.”
“Well, I’m about to get even more impolite,” he said, with just the faintest slur in his words. “You need to take off that blasted corset. Don’t slay me, but you never looked like that before.”
“Like what before?”
“Now you sound like my mother,” he told her. “My mother could—”
“What did I not look like before?” she interrupted. “You might as well finish. I am ready for a grossly uncomplimentary remark.” She wasn’t, really, but it sounded courageous.
“When we were on the way to Scotland, I noticed several times that you had developed a really lovely figure,” he said, waving his glass in the air.
“Oh,” she said, taken aback.
“When I first met all four Essex sisters, you understand, you had a perfectly charming little figure for a girl of your age—damn it all, what is your age?”
“I was fifteen when you first met me,” Josie said with dignity.
“Bit lumpy, back then,” Mayne said, “but all girls are. On the way to Scotland, I remember telling myself several times that you were developing the kind of figure that was going to break men’s hearts and make them grovel in your wake. You didn’t quite have it yet, and you certainly didn’t know how to walk.”
“Then I got fatter.”
“No! Then you showed up wearing this contraption that makes you look—you look—well, you look stuffed.”
“Like a stuffed sausage.”
“Take the damned thing off.”
“What are you talking about?” Her blood was pounding through her veins.
“Take it off,” he said. He stood up, and to his credit, he wasn’t even unsteady. “I’ll help.”
“You must be drunk,” she said with horror. His face didn’t appear to have the cruel ravishing power of the heroes in her favorite novels, but how would she know? He was standing before her looking helpful and just slightly drunk.
“For God’s sake, Josie,” he roared, “I don’t want to seduce you! How can you think such a thing. I’m thirty-four, in God’s name. Thirty-five in two days. And you’re what? Eighteen?”
“Almost nineteen,” she said, tight-lipped.
“Well I am almost thirty-five. And in the course of my long and misspent life, I have never yet taken up cradle-robbing. Finally, as I think you are quite aware, I am in love with Sylvie!”
“Then what—what do you want?”
“If you won’t talk to Sylvie, and your own sisters colluded in stuffing you into this despicable garment, then I’ll have to show you myself.”
“Show me what?”
“Show you how to walk so that you make a man slaver at your feet, of course. Isn’t that what you want?”
“Of course that’s what I want!” she cried. “But I can’t—I can’t unclothe myself.”
“Not all the way,” he said, pained. “You just need to take off that cravat thing and put your gown back on.”
“It’s not a cravat, it’s a corset! And you’re drunk.”
“So are you,” he said, laughing a little now. “We are both drunk in the starlight room. That’s what my aunt used to call this: the starlight room. When she was very ill, toward the end of her life, she would lie on this couch all night and watch the stars on the ceiling, and the stars through the window. Sometimes my father would stay with her through the night.”
“It must have broken his heart when she died,” Josie whispered.
“He always said that without her, he wouldn’t have known how to love. My grandparents were as stiff as if they’d been carved from wood.”
Josie’s eyes filled with tears. “That’s so lovely. My sisters taught me how to love, because my mother died before I was born.”
His eyebrow shot up. “Before?”
“Well, on the same day. But she never even held me, so I think of it as if she was gone before I arrived.”
“I suspect that Lady Godwin taught me how to love,” Mayne said. “Damned annoying that is.”
“Annoying why?”
“Because she dismissed me without a second’s thought. But I couldn’t stop thinking of her.” He shrugged.
“You love your sister,” Josie pointed out.
“Of course I do. But I meant a truly passionate love.” He shook himself and suddenly his eyes snapped into focus, staring down at her, and before she knew what had happened, he’d pulled her to her feet and nimbly turned her about. Then he was unbuttoning her gown down the back.
Josie felt as if the champagne had dulled her responses. This particular impropriety had never been covered by her governess, Miss Flecknoe. Mayne didn’t want to seduce her. He thought she looked like a stuffed sausage. So did it matter that he was about to see her corset?
“God almighty,” he whispered as the dress fell open.
He’d seen her corset.
“What in the hell is this thing?” He sounded almost angry. “It looks like the underpinning of a ship.”
“It’s a special corset they sell in Paris for larger ladies,” Josie explained, feeling a burning flush rise up her neck. “Would you please button my gown back up?”
But he was pulling at the strings.
“You can’t just pull at me,” Josie said, breathless. “You have to unhook at the top and bottom. And then you can start to unlace, but you have to do it slowly. Very slowly.”
“Why?” he asked, and she heard the sound of a little hook being torn apart.
“Don’t do that!” she cried, agonized. And then: “Because I might faint if it opens too quickly.”
“Damn.” He said it flatly.
She didn’t faint, even though the pressure released so quickly that she swayed forward. He grabbed her, large hands holding her shoulders. He steadied her, and then pushed her gown forward over her arms. As it fell to the floor, the corset followed. Of course it didn’t fall with a gentle swish, the way her gown did. It clanked because the whalebones were capped with special little tips of lead, so they wouldn’t dig into her skin.
The tighter, the better, Madame Badeau had said, showing her how her maid should brace herself against the bed and force the lacings closed. And then she’d said the magic words: You won’t be able to eat while wearing this, of course.
In Josie’s mind, that had been the moment when The Corset, as she thought of it, moved to sacred status. The Corset would give her a successful season. The Corset would stop her from eating, and give her a slender, refined shape, and give her a husband.
It hadn’t worked out that way. And besides, Josie found herself perfectly able to eat while wearing it.
Mayne was staring at the ground, where the corset had fallen. “It looks like a bizarre kind of chrysalis that hatched a butterfly,” he said, picking it up by one of its many straps. “What in the devil were you wearing this for, Josie?”
He wasn’t even looking at her, but Josie slung her arms across her thin chemise and tried not to think about all her unbounded flesh. “It made me thinner,” she snapped.
“You don’t need to be thinner,” he said. Then he glanced at her. “Are you cold? Put your gown back on.”
There was a moment’s silence and then Josie said in a stern little voice, “I can’t, not without the corset. It won’t fit.” That was one of the gifts of The Corset. She was able to wear gowns that were almost—not quite—the same measurements as those worn by Imogen.
&nbs
p; Mayne tossed the corset to the side, where it fell with a dull clang and a tinkling of lead-covered tips. “I’ll get you something to put on,” he said. Before she knew what happened, he was out the door.
Josie spread her arms. It was…glorious to have the corset off. Glorious. She was wearing a chemise of the lightest lawn. It felt like air, billowing around her.
8
From The Earl of Hellgate, Chapter the Sixth
For some time my Hippolyta made me the happiest of men, and though her interest turned to another, I still dream of the luscious fruits of our friendship. I think I may say that we were both at the Countess of Y—’s garden party in ’07. You will recall the fashion for omelettes eaten in the garden that raged that year. Well…
Griselda’s first husband had been handed to her on a platter by her father. “I’ve had an offer for your hand in marriage,” he had said.
“Who?” she had gasped, thinking of Lord Cogley, with whom she’d danced the night before.
“Willoughby,” Papa had said, impatient as always. “I accepted him. Decent family, very nice settlement, you’re not likely to do better.”
“But—” she had cried. And cried.
It was over.
Ever since poor Willoughby had died, facedown in a plate of jellied fowl, Griselda had looked to men for an occasional, discreet amusement. Only twice, if the truth were known. And neither of those petites affaires lasted over one night. She considered those two a judicious distraction from the round of visits, balls, and events that made up her life.
One more flirtation…and then she would put her mind seriously to the question of matrimony. She was frightfully aged: almost thirty-three, although she would rather expire than admit it. And she didn’t look that age.
Finally she saw him. Darlington was on the other side of the room, talking to Mrs. Hotson and her daughter. Griselda paused thoughtfully for a moment. Mrs. Hotson was, of course, famed for the large amount of money her husband had made investing in some sort of machinery that produced lace, of a crude nature and fit only for undergarments. Not Griselda’s undergarments, naturally; she prided herself on wearing chemises as beautiful as her outerwear. Just because there was no one but a maid to see did not mean that a woman should relax into slobbery.