But when she did come to a ball, she was never ignored. After her miserable first year, she gathered a circle of gentlemen about her who applauded her wit. If they secretly admired her lovely curves, they quickly learned to keep silent. Even the most innocent of compliments, say a comparison of Lady Charlotte’s eyes to stars, was met by a calm but freezing withdrawal.

“I can’t understand it,” the Earl of Slaslow gloomily told a friend, leaning in the corner of Almack’s and watching Charlotte gracefully circle the floor. “I didn’t even think that much of her in the beginning, but she …”

“I know,” said David Marlowe, a mere younger son of a squire, destined for the clergy. “I know: She ignored your compliments, and piqued your curiosity, and now you are caught. Women!” David was disgusted. Clearly the little baggage was playing Slaslow like a fisherman with a trout.

No one would honestly refuse the Earl of Slaslow’s attention. Why, Braddon was the best catch on the market this year, if one discounted the enormously wealthy, but terribly old, Duke of Siskind. And Siskind was just looking for a nurse to take care of his eight children, everyone knew that.

But here was Braddon, as glum as a trout on the river-bank, and this Charlotte had turned him down for a second dance, that was a fact. At this very moment, she was circling the floor for the second time with that old gossip Sylvester Bredbeck. And chortling with laughter at a story Sylvester was telling her.

“Why don’t you write her a poem or something?” David suggested, nudging his friend.

“I did,” Braddon said dismally. “It wasn’t bad either. I pretty much stole it out of one of the old books lying around my library; you know.”

David did. Not that he’d read any of those books, of course, but he’d had many a smoky game of piquet in Braddon’s walnut-paneled library.

“It wasn’t bad,” Braddon insisted. “I said that her hair had pearls threaded on each strand, something like that, and that her eyes were suns and her teeth were crystals.”

“Pearls—threaded on each strand,” David repeated dubiously. “I don’t know, Braddon. What’d she say?”

“She laughed.” The earl crossed his arms over his chest. “She just laughed, and she said thank you, and then later she accidentally sat on the poem.” He looked mutinous at David’s snort of laughter.

“Wilkins had copied the whole thing out, on parchment, mind you, and he tied it with a ribbon and a flower. But she got up to greet someone, and then sat on it later and crumpled the whole thing, and she did not look sorry.”

David looked at Charlotte with greater curiosity. A woman who crumpled the Earl of Slaslow’s literary efforts (no matter how poor) really was quite different from the run-of-the-mill young miss.