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decision she made, a scheme. What Elizabeth suspected was that by having Beecher join the Bingley family fold, her ladyship had another foothold within the Darcy family as well.
    These were machinations worthy of Shakespeare.
    Another invitation was extended with even less cordiality than to Bingley’s sisters. It was fraught with implications quite of another sort altogether.
    By virtue of his former ownership of the manor the Bingleys had purchased, decorum dictated that they invite Sir Henry Howgrave and his wife. It was an honour Elizabeth would have thought nothing of except
    for one small bother.
    Darcy and Howgrave’s wife had once been lovers.
 
    Chapter 8
    For Better or for Worse
 
 
    It is said that time is a creeping thief.
    Juliette delicately patted her plump, honey-coloured locks. Turning her head first one way then the other, she appraised herself in her looking-glass. She was inordinately happy with what she saw. Her nightly ablutions (potions, pomades, rouges, tinctures, rose powder, eye lotion, lemon ointment, and gillyflower water) had kept her in the bloom of youth. Most women her age would need to augment their coiffure with hair pieces. Her hair was still luxuriant—a sure sign of youth. She had a check-book with a formidable balance and a fine footman to follow her.
    Her once dwindling finances now replenished through marriage, her life was once again one of opulence and admiration.
    ———
 
 
    For all of her years in England, Juliette Clisson had only lately been in want of status. She was, after all, a daughter of a French Viscount. She would have been there yet had not politics of a dégoûtant nature interfered with their exquisite existence, usurping their land and chattels. Her mother died of shame and her father turned to drink. When they died of their weaknesses, they were mourned as victims of the revolution as surely as if they had been beheaded with Louis himself.
    Juliette had been left to fend for herself as best she could. Convent raised, she was chaste, but not naïve. Cast out into lesser society, she landed on her feet with all the facility of a brindled cat. As her golden hair and creamy skin were highly desirable, in no time she found a well-fed Marquis to keep her in the style to which she was accustomed. Indeed, he put her in an elegant house around the corner from his wife. Unfortunately, the political winds soon shifted against all nobility and her temporary inamorato was arrested. A trial was only a formality and it came to pass that she stood next to him in the tumbrel as they were carted off for a hasty execution. She escaped by a hairsbreadth, but it was a nasty business all-round. The episode influenced her to betake her charms to a less volatile climate.
    When she first observed the pasty-faced Englishmen traipsing up to St. James Palace, she deduced that her fellow Parisians had been quite correct. London was a backwater hamlet full of self-satisfied shopkeepers. Her opinion of London and its tiresome citizens was much improved by reason of one spectacular point. In London it was very unlikely that she would hear the singularly disturbing words, “Off with her head!”
    Indeed, the good people of England looked evermore lively as they came to honour her noble status and admire her voluptuous figure. Her patrician beauty brought her the proper patronage a fortnight of her arrival. Ere long she was the toast of the ton, universally admired as London’s most accomplished courtesan.
    It pleased her no end to have the ladies of the court looking upon her with a confusion of loathing and envy. Their husbands (oblivious or uncaring of their wives particular dislike) crowded about her, begging for her attention. Pressing their cards into her hand, they gazed upon her lasciviously whilst whispering indecent suggestions in her ear. It was uproarious fun!
    She despised them all of course. Had she not, she still would have never allowed an emotional entanglement. They were