Page 1 of The Wallflower Takes All

Chapter One

London, July 1820

Of all the mornings for the Montfort household to behave itself, it chose this one to stage a small insurrection before half past ten.

Miss Poppy Montfort knew this because someone was crying in the blue drawing room, someone was laughing in the front salon, someone had misplaced a peacock-feather fan of alarming proportions, and Freddie, the spaniel puppy, had just stolen a deviled egg from beneath a drunken countess’s very nose.

“Freddie!” Poppy called.

Freddie, who possessed the long ears of an angel and the conscience of a highwayman, darted beneath a gilt side table with the egg clamped triumphantly in his jaws.

“Oh, let him have it,” said Lady Stone from the sofa, already on her third glass of champagne and not yet noon. “He has such a soulful face.”

“He has yolk on the Aubusson,” Poppy pointed out.

“That too,” Lady Stone agreed with a small shrug.

Poppy bent, reached beneath the table, and narrowly avoided having her fingers nipped—not out of malice, merely enthusiasm. Freddie swallowed the egg in one heroic gulp, then wagged his entire body at her as if he had secured a victory for England.

From the adjoining room came Mama’s peal of laughter, rich and reckless and a shade too loud for respectable Society.

“Oh, do not be silly, darling,” Mama said. “If I had truly meant to insult Lord Tewksbury, I should have done it far more elegantly.”

A second burst of laughter followed, male this time, then the unmistakable clink of glass.

Poppy closed her eyes.

Just once in her life, she would like to wake to a quiet house, a balanced account book, and a mother who did not collect stray poets, improper widows, impoverished baronets, theatrical sopranos, and mysterious gentlemen from questionable lineage the way other women collected calling cards.

Instead, Lady Viva Montfort collected people, emptied wine bottles, and set drawing rooms ablaze with a sort of glamorous catastrophe that had become, over the years, their family’s chief distinction.

Poppy rose and smoothed her morning gown. The gown was plain white muslin, belted with a faded blue ribbon, and chosen for the sort of morning in which one expected to review ledgers, not encounter yolk, poets, and inebriated countesses.

She tried to recover the expression of serene competence she had cultivated since the age of thirteen—since her father died. It was the expression that said nothing in this household had ever surprised her, though in truth almost everything did.

Especially today.

“Miss Montfort?”

Their butler, Jenkins, hovered in the doorway, his expression suggesting he had spent the morning deciding whether to resign, take to prayer, or hurl himself into the Serpentine.

“Yes, Jenkins?”

In a properly ordered house, such reports would have reached Poppy by way of a housekeeper. The Montforts, however, had been without one for nearly two years, since every respectable woman with references had shown a tiresome preference for regular wages, manageable guests, and a mistress who did not assign bedchambers according to inspiration.

Jenkins took a breath. “There is a gentleman in the foyer interested in discussing the accounts from the wine merchant, and Tommy says the Frenchwoman in the yellow bedchamber refuses to leave unless someone finds her pearl earbob. Also…” He hesitated.

Poppy braced herself. Jenkins did not hesitate unless the news was quite bad indeed.

“Her ladyship has ordered champagne.”

Poppy stared at him. “Champagne?”

“For breakfast, miss.”

Lady Stone lifted one hand weakly from the sofa. “A woman of taste.”

“A woman of gout, if she continues,” Poppy murmured.