Free Sheri Cobb South by In Milady's Chamber

Otherwise
     
    While Pickett interrogated her household staff, Lady Fieldhurst received yet another caller, this one far more welcome than her husband’s family had been. Lady Dunnington was almost ten years the viscountess’s senior; nevertheless, a firm if unlikely friendship had blossomed between the two very different women. And if the countess was said by some to be a trifle “fast,” certainly no one could find fault with the appearance of the lady who now swept into the room with the air of one accustomed to command. Her lilac muslin walking dress and gold-braided, purple pelisse were in the first stare of fashion, as was the matching bonnet that covered her dark tresses. The dyed ostrich plumes adorning this confection fluttered as she sailed across the room to seize her hostess’s hands.
    “My dear Julia, I was never so shocked!” she declared, kissing the air on either side of Lady Fieldhurst’s face. “How very obliging of Frederick, to be sure! Who would have thought it of him?”
    The viscountess acknowledged this sally with a weak smile. “Trust you to say something outrageous! But you cannot have heard the whole, Emily. Frederick’s death was no accident. He was murdered.”
    Lady Dunnington’s face paled at this pronouncement, and she sank onto the nearest chair, but she was a resilient creature, and quickly recovered her composure. “Is it as bad as that, then? Truth to tell, I scarcely believed it when I heard he was dead.”
    “Oh yes, it is quite true! There is a Bow Street Runner below stairs even as we speak, questioning the servants.”
    “My poor Julia, how dreadful for you! You must tell me about it at once!”
    Lady Fieldhurst was more than willing to unburden herself to a disinterested party, and one, moreover, who possessed neither the authority nor the inclination to clap her in irons and haul her off to Newgate. In one particular, at least, she could not have had a more sympathetic audience. Since Lady Dunnington’s estrangement from her husband and subsequent string of lovers were common knowledge among the beau monde, she expressed no shock, much less disapproval, at Lord Rupert Latham’s presence in her ladyship’s bedchamber.
    “And about time, too!” she declared roundly. “But how dreadful that it should end this way, before it even began! What will you do now?”
    “I daresay I shall do as you have been urging me, and set up my own establishment, for live in the Dower House with Mother Fieldhurst I will not! Nor do I have any particular desire to return to my father’s house. I do not know how it is, but I can never remain beneath Papa’s roof for five minutes without feeling as if I were still eight years old.”
    “You could always stay with me in Audley Street,” suggested Lady Dunnington. “Heaven knows I have plenty of room.”
    The viscountess arched a skeptical eyebrow. “Wouldn’t Mr. Blakeney-Hughes find my presence a bit de trop?”
    Lady Dunnington dismissed her latest lover with a wave of her hand. “Mr. Blakeney-Hughes and I are quite exploded. I gave him his congé these three days past.”
    “Indeed?” asked Lady Fieldhurst, her mind distracted, at least for a time, from her present difficulties. “But you seemed so taken with him!”
    “Indeed, I was—taken with him, and taken in by him! His wife was brought to bed of a son a fortnight ago, and the wretched infant looks just like him! If I am going to cuckold Dunnington for his sake, the least he can do is be faithful to me. And so I told him,” she added with a self-righteous sniff.
    “Really, Emily!” scolded Lady Fieldhurst, choking back a wholly inappropriate urge to giggle. “The things you say! I think you delight in shocking people.”
    “You are quite mistaken, my dear; I only delight in shocking you. In some ways, you are just as green as you were when you first came to London.”
    “And in some ways, I only wish I were,” said the viscountess with a sigh of unexpected