“He’s told Medmenham the same about you.” Penelope rolled her eyes in frustration. “He left you, Lottie. He ran off without saying good-bye.”

Charlotte stiffened at the sound of the old nursery nickname. “He sent me a note.”

“Not much of one.” Penelope grabbed both of her hands. Charlotte could feel the crush of her fingers through both their pairs of gloves. “I just don’t want to see you make a mistake out of — romantic blindness! You can have him if you like, but don’t have him thinking that he’s something he isn’t.”

“He isn’t. I mean, I don’t.” Yanking her hands free of Penelope’s, Charlotte seized on a simpler point. “What were you doing upstairs?”

“The same thing you were,” said Penelope with a bluntness that made the color creep into Charlotte’s cheeks. She hadn’t thought of it in quite those terms before. It made her feel oddly unclean.

“Upstairs?” said Henrietta despairingly. To go off into alcoves was one thing, bedrooms quite another.

It gave Charlotte a slightly squirmy feeling in the pit of her stomach to realize how carelessly she had been dicing with her own reputation. If she and Robert had been discovered upstairs . . . No wonder Robert had blurted out whatever he had to Medmenham.

Penelope looked off across the room, over the long row of couples circling in unison as they performed the final figure of the dance. In profile, her expression was carefully blank.

“The alcoves were all occupied, so we went upstairs instead.”

The violinist drew his bow across the strings one final time. Throughout the room, gentlemen bowed and ladies curtsied to signify the end of the dance. With her back to the dance floor, Penelope failed to notice.

“I was with Freddy Staines,” finished Penelope, in a tone deliberately designed to provoke. “In his room.”

The words echoed with unnatural loudness down the suddenly silent room.

Henrietta’s face went ashen.

Like an animal scenting fire, Penelope’s eyes darted from side to side. Beneath Penelope’s still, straight posture, Charlotte could sense the panic coming off her in waves, the frozen panic of a trapped animal that knows it has nowhere left to run.

“You mean Fanny’s room?” Charlotte said very loudly. “Fanny Stillworth?”

There was no such person as Fanny Stillworth, but it was the best she could think of under the circumstances.

As if realizing their gaffe, the musicians struck up again, plunging into a rather frenetic quadrille, but almost no one was dancing. They were all too busy watching the dreadful drama unfolding at the far end of the gallery, where one of their own had just willfully flung herself outside the bounds of polite society. Halfway down the room, Penelope’s mother looked ready to imitate some of the less attractive sorts of Greek gods and devour her own young.

“You heard what I said.” Penelope’s face was a tragic mask, like the bust of Medea in the library, carved into lines of bitter satisfaction. She looked like a queen on the scaffold, staring down the peasantry. “Everyone heard what I said.”

Without another word, she turned on her heel and strode out of the gallery, her flaming head held high.

“Pen — ” Casting an anguished glance over her shoulder at Charlotte, Henrietta hurried out after her.

Charlotte made to follow but she was yanked to a stop by a hand on her arm. Mrs. Ponsonby’s pudgy fingers tightened around her sleeve with surprising force.

“No!” declared Mrs. Ponsonby, in ringing tones that carried clear over the efforts of the sweating musicians and the dancing couples, her fingers digging painfully into Charlotte’s arm. “Do not go after her! We do not know her now.”

Mrs. Ponsonby’s bosom swelled with self-righteous zeal and not a little bit of selfish satisfaction. She had had her eye on Lord Frederick for her own daughter, Lucy, and everyone knew it.

She was not the only mother who had disliked Penelope on those grounds. They all clustered in now, like savages for the kill, ready to grind their spears into whatever vulnerable flesh they could find.

The murderous haze in the air made Charlotte’s stomach turn in a way that had nothing to do with Mrs. Ponsonby’s poor choice of perfume.

“Perhaps you don’t,” said Charlotte, shaking off Mrs. Ponsonby’s clinging grasp, and followed after her friends.

“You can’t touch pitch without being tarred!” Mrs. Ponsonby called shrilly, if inaccurately, after her.

Hastening after friends, Charlotte refused to give her the satisfaction of looking back.

Mrs. Ponsonby was wrong. She might be naïve, but she knew enough of the world to know that it took a great deal of pitch to blacken a duke’s daughter. Not like poor Penelope, who didn’t even have an “Honorable” in front of her name to scrub her reputation clean.

Charlotte’s heart wrenched for her friend. It was so like Penelope to try to protect her and land herself in a stew because of it. So generous and yet so entirely wrong-headed. Because, among other things, she didn’t need protection from Robert. Whatever he might have said to Sir Francis, whatever his reasons for leaving, his intentions towards her were honorable.

She was sure of it.

Chapter Eleven

As the boat drew him across the River Styx, Robert knew he was truly in hell.

It had been four days since he had left Girdings, four days since he had stood on the roof with Charlotte, four days since he had struck his own Mephistophelean bargain in the hallway outside Charlotte’s chambers. It felt more like four years. The descent from the roof of Girdings to the subterranean caverns of West Wycombe had to be measured in more than miles. The distance between the Dovedale domains and those of Medmenham felt as vast as that between paradise and inferno. Once one began the descent, one didn’t go back.

At the time, it had seemed like a logical enough decision. An offer of immediate initiation into Medmenham’s Hellfire Club meant that he could find Wrothan that much faster. The faster he found Wrothan, the faster he could return to Girdings. Quick, clean, over.

Fast, however, didn’t seem to be in it. Whatever the way to hell was, it wasn’t speedy. They had been three days on the road from Girdings to West Wycombe. Once at Wycombe, notices needed to be sent out and preparations made. Robert fervently hoped those preparations included summoning Wrothan from whatever rathole he was currently occupying. It wasn’t until a day later that the whole party had donned their ceremonial vestments and processed, torchbearers to the fore, from the confines of Wycombe Abbey to the vast Gothic folly Medmenham’s cousin had built to mark the entrance to his subterranean caves, home of homegrown Eleusian mysteries and the devil only knew what else.

Upon entering the caves, the others had gone off to prepare, leaving Robert cooling his heels in an upper cavern. He had been instructed to contemplate his sins with the aid of a course of “religious readings.” These turned out, upon inspection, to be nothing more than a folio of expensive French pornography, done up at the edges with gold leaf and illuminated capitals in a mockery of medieval devotional literature.

As Lord Henry had promised, nothing but the best for their orgies.

Like the mock Book of Hours, the ceremonial garb he had been given to put on was also a survival from the club’s earlier incarnation as the Monks of Medmenham. It was a replica of a monk’s habit, cut out of rough brown wool, supplied with a belt of thin and flexible leather with curious metal tips. The belt was, in fact, a whip. Robert preferred not to think too closely about that, although he supposed it might come in handy if he had to fight his way out of the caves.

In addition to being drafty, the robe was extremely itchy. Robert knew that his sojourn in the cell was meant to fill him with prickles of anticipation, but instead he just felt prickly. By the time his guide arrived, to conduct him down to the nether regions for his initiation, Robert was strongly wondering whether it was all worth it. There surely had to be other ways to find Wrothan. Ways that did not involve absurd excursions into subterranean amateur theatricals.

The figure gestured to Robert to put up his hood. When Robert would have spoken, he drew a finger sharply across his lips — or the area where Robert presumed his lips must be — indicating silence.

Feeling as though he had stumbled unwittingly into one of Horace Walpole’s gothic novels, Robert followed his guide down into the catacombs. The path sloped steeply downwards, winding this way and that like a drunkard trying to find his way home. Lanterns cased in red glass hung from the ceiling, casting jagged bursts of flame along the chalk walls and turning the ground beneath their feet an unpleasant reddish brown. Crudely carved horned gods leered at them from the walls as they passed.

The path meandered downwards with no apparent direction. Off to the sides, grilles shielded private alcoves, rounded rooms reminiscent of monks’ cells, carved out of the earth. In the uncertain light, Robert received only a fleeting impression of lurid wall paintings and jumbled bedclothes. In one, he glimpsed paired skulls, perched like memento mori on the bedposts. The skulls’ soundless laughter pursued them as they passed.

Robert made a mental note never to consult Medmenham on matters of interior decoration.

They had, he reckoned, covered roughly a quarter of a mile by the time the path broadened, opening into a vast, vaulted chamber, banded on one side by a shallow stream. In a small boat on the near bank, a boatman waited.