Scandal's Virgin. Louise Allen

was hard to speak around the thickness in her throat, to find the words in the confusion of her mind. When they did spill out they seemed unstoppable. ‘She is six years old. I heard her cry, just once, before they took her away and then they told me she was dead. I heard her say one word today and you tell me her name, the name strangers told you. I should be so happy because she is alive and healthy and yet I feel as though I have lost her all over again. How could they do that?’

      How could her parents—the respected Lord and Lady Hartland—have told her the baby had died? How could they have secretly given the child—their granddaughter—away? Admittedly, their chosen recipients, the Brownes, were respectable tenant farmers on one of the earl’s distant estates, but even so...

      ‘They thought they were doing the right thing for you,’ Mab soothed. ‘You were only just eighteen. What they did meant you could have your come-out two months later and no one any the wiser.’

      ‘Really? What, I wonder, was I supposed to say to the nice young men they expected to propose to me? So sorry, my lord, but I’m not a virgin. In fact, I’ve given birth. I could hide the one—I gather there are shabby tricks, straight out of the brothel—but did they hope I’d find a complete innocent who wouldn’t notice something amiss?’ She knew she sounded angry and bitter and those weren’t nice things, either of them. But she did not care. Being angry and bitter had got her through five London Seasons as the most notorious débutante of them all.

      Scandal’s Virgin, they called her, which was an irony if ever she heard one. But Lady Laura Campion, daughter of the Earl of Hartland, had the reputation of being frivolous, flirtatious and outrageous. And, to the intense frustration of the men who pursued her and the chagrin of the matrons who decried her behaviour, no one was ever able to say she had taken that one fatal step to ruin.

      Yes, she would drink champagne on the terrace at a ball. Yes, she would slip away into the shrubbery and allow kisses and caresses no innocent should allow. And, yes, she would wear gowns more suitable to a fast young matron, ride with careless abandon and dance four times in an evening with the same man, if the fancy took her.

      Any other young woman after five Seasons would be considered to be on the shelf, unmarriageable, the subject of pity. But... No gentleman could ever claim she had given herself to him, despite the wagers in the betting books of every club in St James’s. No one had ever managed to catch her doing more than kissing a rake behind the rosebushes. And no one could deny that she was beautiful, amusing, loyal to her friends and the daughter of one of the richest and most influential of peers. Despite the nickname and the shocked glances from the chaperons’ corner, Scandal’s Virgin continued her apparently heedless way though the social whirl and no one guessed that her heart had shattered at the death of a lover and the loss of his child.

      ‘If the man loved you, he might not care,’ Mab ventured.

      Laura snorted. She had hoped that, once. But observation soon taught her that men were hypocrites. That theoretical lovelorn suitor would care, for certain.

      In January of 1815, just as she was preparing for yet another Season full of distractions to stop her thinking of the hollowness inside, her parents succumbed to the influenza. It was sudden, shocking and completely unexpected, but within ten days of the first fever they were gone. Laura, draped in black veils, retreated to Hartland Castle and the virtual solitude of mourning, interrupted by the occasional descent of Mr Bigelow, the lawyer, and letters from Cousin James, the new earl, apprising her of his efforts to sell out of the army and return home.

      He was grateful, he wrote, that Cousin Laura continued to oversee things at the Castle and urged her to call upon whatever resources from the estate she saw fit to transform the Dower House into her new home.

      Eventually she made herself order the work, advertised for a lady companion, failed to find one she liked, shrugged and decided to do without for the present. Mab was all the company she needed. Finally, a year after their deaths, she gritted her teeth and started to go through her parents’ personal possessions, the things that were not entailed with the estate.

      Mab had fallen silent while she sat lost in memories. Now Laura was vaguely aware of her gathering together the tea things and stoking up the fire. ‘Why do you think Mama kept them?’ she asked abruptly.

      ‘The letters?’ Mab stirred a pot and shrugged. ‘No one thinks they are going to die suddenly and that someone else will go through their possessions, do they? And they had to do with her granddaughter, after all.’

      The box had been inside a locked trunk under a stack of old accounts, dog-eared notebooks of recipes, bundles of bills for gowns going back years. Laura had almost ordered the whole thing taken down and burned unsorted and then she had seen a few sheets of music, so she dragged those out and put them aside.

      Once her father had allowed an antiquarian to excavate an ancient mound on the estate and Laura thought of him as she dug her way down through paper layers of history, rescuing the music, smiling over a recipe for restoring greyed hair to a perfect state of natural glory and finally breaking a nail on the hard, iron-bound surface of a smaller chest.

      It was locked, but she found the key on the chatelaine her mother had always kept about her. When the lid creaked open it revealed a neat bundle of letters. She began to set them aside for the fire unread, thinking they must be old love letters and recoiling from the ghosts of someone else’s old romance. She had enough spectres of her own. Then something about the handwriting caught her eye.

      Muddy brown ink, a hand that was not so much untutored as unpractised, and poor quality paper. These could not be billets-doux or family letters. Puzzled, Laura drew them out and began to read. Even now, knowing the truth, it was hard to withstand the emotional impact of what was revealed. Laura stood, left the kitchen for the back parlour of the little rented house and paced over the old Turkey carpet until her stomach stopped its roiling.

      First, the joyful shock of discovering that her baby had not died. Then the monthly letters, three of them, from the farm in the Derbyshire Dales. The child was thriving, the money was arriving, the Brownes, who had just lost a newborn, were very grateful for a healthy babe to raise as their own and for his lordship’s generosity. And then, May the fifteenth 1810, the news that she had caught some fever, they knew not how, and had sickened rapidly. The little mite passed on peacefully in the early hours this morning, Mrs Browne wrote in her spiky hand. We will see her decently buried in the churchyard.

      It had taken a day and a sleepless night to recover from the shock of hope snatched away just minutes after it had been given. The next morning, still stunned into a strange calm, Laura had ordered her bags packed and a carriage prepared. At least there would be a grave to visit, not the vague assurance that her child had been discreetly secreted amongst the coffins in the family vault, unnamed, unacknowledged.

      When she and Mab had arrived at the solid little greystone farmhouse she simply walked straight in, her carefully rehearsed words all lost in the urgency of what she had to say.

      ‘I am Lady Laura Campion and I know the truth. Where is she?’ she had demanded of the thin, nervous woman who had backed away from her until she simply collapsed onto a chair and buried her face in her apron.

      Her husband moved to stand between Laura and his sobbing wife. ‘He said no one would ever know. He said he was her cousin so it was only right she was with him.’

      ‘What?’ This made no sense. They had written that the child was dead...

      ‘He said no one would ever find out if we said she had died and we just kept our mouths shut.’ Browne shook his head, shocked and shamefaced. ‘I knew we never ought to have done it, but he offered so much money...’

      ‘She is not dead.’ It was a statement, not a question. Laura had stared at him, trying to make sense of it all. He? Cousin? ‘Tell me everything.’

      A gentleman calling himself Lord Wykeham had come to the farm unannounced. He had known everything—who the baby’s mother was, who was paying them to look after her. He had shown them his card, they saw his carriage with the coat of arms on the door, they were convinced he was the earl he said he was. He