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gown have failed her.”
    “Them dem Frenchie modistes!” The dowager exclaimed, blustering her way to Betsy’s side. “It’s their revenge for Boney, I swear it is!”
    The clatter of hooves announcing the arrival of the Clymore carriage drew Charles’s attention from her ladyship’s clucking and fussing to the splendid grays drawing the shiny barouche to a halt beneath the portico. The coachman, an unlit pipe clamped in his teeth, cast a baleful eye on Charles as a broad-limbed footman swung down from the rear to open the door and place the steps.
    “George!” Lady Clymore commanded. “Fetch our wraps!”
    “Yes, m’lady,” the footman replied, shooting Charles a less than respectful glance as he passed him on the steps.
    These servants are as brazen as their mistress, Charles marveled, noting that the coachman had wrapped one hand in readiness about his whip. He noticed, too, that Lady Elizabeth, her nose in the air and pointedly ignoring him, was gathering what was left of her skirts and preparing to mount the carriage steps behind her grandmother.
    “Not so fast, my lady.” Charles moved quickly to intercept her. “I would have your answer.”
    He offered his arm to assist her as was polite, but Lady Elizabeth refused it. Instead, she faced him with a defiantly lifted chin and a barely civil curtsey.
    “I am flattered, Your Grace, that you think me such a threat,” she said in a scathing tone. “And my answer is that both you and your brother can go to the devil!”
    Then she snatched her skirt panel away from him, stomped up the steps into the carriage, and slammed the door in his face.
     

Chapter Seven
     
    "Why was I born female?” Betsy fumed for at least the hundredth time since breakfast, as she paced the apple green and cherry pink morning room. “If I were a man I could have called him out for such an insult!”
    On the rug by the hearth, where a fire burned against the autumn chill, Boru raised his head hopefully and thumped his tail as his mistress stalked past him. That, too, for at least the hundredth time.
    “No gentleman,” Lady Clymore replied, without looking up from her embroidery, “would credit such a challenge.”
    “And why not?” Betsy demanded, halting near the windows to glare at her grandmother. The sun had nearly melted the rime of frost from the glass and shot her golden hair with silver highlights.
    “If you were a man,” the countess replied, peering over the spectacles she wore to ease the strain of needlework, “would you be able to keep a sober face if summoned to the field of honor by a young hothead named Elizabeth?”
    “If I were a man,” Betsy returned, her hands thrust on her hips, “I would not be Elizabeth. I would be Edward after Father and Grandfather.”
    “And well on your way to rack and ruin,” Lady Clymore retorted, then added lightly, hoping to jolly Betsy out of her foul temper, “And you would look monstrous silly in green-sprigged muslin.”
    “This is not a subject for jest, Granmama. That odious man insulted me!”
    “That odious man is a duke I will remind you for the last time. And he did no more than state the truth. You have in fact come to town to find a husband.”
    “Because I am female!” Betsy declared, throwing her arms wide. “Do you not see the injustice?”
    “I see it, but am powerless to change it.” Lady Clymore laid her embroidery aside, removed her spectacles, and saw that Betsy in her beseeching, sunlit pose looked like a grievously maligned and very angry angel. “I also see by the clock that it is nearly time for morning calls, and advise you to come down from the boughs lest you give the gentlemen whose bouquets fill the Blue Saloon a disgust of you.”
    “And that is another thing!” Betsy snatched up a handful of cards and notes that had come with the floral tributes. “I haven’t the dimmest notion who any of these gentlemen are! How am I to find a companionable husband among my dancing partners