Seduction in Regency Society. Sophia James

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       Chapter Four

      Beatrice tucked her hair behind her ears and surveyed her downstairs salon, bedecked with books on each available surface. Her weekly book discussions were becoming…fashionable, attended by people from every walk of life, a crush that was the talk of the town.

      How she loved London, loved its rush and bustle and the way the fabric of life here was so entwined with good debate and politics and culture. No one expected things of her or corrected her. If she wished to spend an evening reading in bed she could. If she wished to go out to a play she could. London with its diversity of intellectual pursuits set her free in a way that she had never been before and she relished such liberty.

      Her clothes were nothing at all like the ones she would have worn three months ago either, those shabby country garments that spoke of a life tempered by ill health and routine long gone, and the highly coloured velvets she had replaced them with as unusual as they were practical.

      Unconventional.

      Original.

      Incomparable.

      Words that were increasingly being used to describe her in the local papers and broadsheets.

      She liked the sound of them, the very choice such description engendered. No expectation or cloying pragmatic sensibleness that had been the hallmark of her years with Frankwell.

      She did not think of him now as the man who had hurt her, the image of an angry bully replaced by the child who had lingered longer. Hopeful and dependent.

      When he had died she had laid him in his coffin with an armful of Michaelmas daisies because they had been his favourite and the church had rung with the sounds of children’s songs, the same tunes that he himself had sung in his final moments of life on this earth.

      Sorrow had been leached though here in London, her life filling with new friends and new experiences. How fortunate she had been to have the Hardy sisters as neighbours, for within a week of arriving here their wide group of acquaintances had become her friends as well, their social standing making her own acceptance into society seamless. When they had taken her under their wing and encouraged her dream of having such a forum in her own salon she could barely believe the speed with which the whole idea had taken shape. Sometimes when she looked in the mirror and saw the way she smiled she could not remember the sombre woman who had fled Ipswich in a snowstorm.

      Breathing out, she tried to stop the name that would come to her mind next. No, she would not think of him, of that night, of the way that he had left without even once glancing back; when her friend Elspeth Hardy came into the room with another pile of papers in her hands, Bea was glad of the interruption.

      ‘We have nowhere at all to put those, Elspeth. Perhaps if you could take them back upstairs we may discuss the contents next week.’

      ‘But they talk of the habit of wife selling, a topic that has been raised before—I wondered if they might add to the discussion?’

      Bea screwed up her nose. ‘I have read many accounts of such a practice, and have become increasingly of the view that the intention of these bargains is a way in which a woman can move on with her life, both parties having agreed to the proceedings.’

      ‘ You are not against them? I cannot believe it of you!’

      Beatrice laughed. ‘Often the purchaser is a lover. Would you not countenance such a path, given the impossibly difficult and expensive alternative of filing for a separation through church or court?’

      ‘I do not know. Perhaps you might be right…’