Excerpt of The Debutante's Dilemma by Elyse Mady

London, 1814

Miss Cecilia Hastings was the luckiest girl who had ever lived to draw breath.

This was the near-universal assessment of the five hundred guests who found themselves crushed into Lady Stanhope's lavish ballroom like so many potted fish on this early June evening.

That the young lady was well-favoured, with a tall, even figure, a smooth throat and milk-white skin, striking grey eyes and dark chestnut hair, there was no doubt. Just eighteen, Miss Hastings was everywhere lauded for her calm manners and her unerring ability to navigate London's treacherous social shoals while appearing neither missish nor imperious. She danced divinely. She both sang and played the pianoforte. She could read Italian and spoke French beautifully. She befriended those wealthy and modest, with equal disregard for their particular standings. Her sartorial sense was unmatched and her dresser had been offered no less than a half-dozen bribes if she would but reveal the secrets to her mistress's beauty regime.

But there was no doubt that Miss Hastings's most particular and celebrated feature had been her ability—in this, her first London Season—to attract not one, but two, of the most eligible bachelors in England as suitors to her hand.

Single, handsome, titled heirs, educated at Cambridge, related to some of the oldest families in the country, and possessors of estates that would make the most hardened steward weep for joy. Each with a splendid house in town, their family seats—in Kent and Sussex, respectively—marvels of country grandeur and, crowning joy of crowning joy, each able to avail himself of a clear £30,000 a year.

In a word, that which every young woman—and her mama—aspired to with a fierce and competitive single-mindedness during the whole course of the Season from January to June, Miss Hastings had achieved in duplicate without seeming to discompose a single hair on her perfectly coiffed head.

Of course, there were some of her immediate peers, girls who had not met with such unmatched reception, who thought this excess smacked of matrimonial gluttony and behind her back took a savage delight in criticizing her faults, real or imagined. But to her face, they were all smiles and compliments, begging, in their most gracious voices, to have Miss Hastings share her secrets for winding her turban à la turque or to solicit a recommendation for the name of her mantua maker.

The knowledge that both gentlemen had made handsome presentations to Miss Hastings's gratified father in advance of their declarations to the lady herself was in such widespread circulation that any repetition of the fact elicited the merest murmur of acknowledgement by its weary listeners, so shop-worn had that particular social nugget become in the retelling. Now, as the Season wound its way to another overstuffed and over-heated conclusion, the single most pressing question in the minds of nearly everyone who had made an appearance in the Stanhopes' crowded ballroom on this warm summer night was which of the two gentlemen Miss Hastings would ultimately accept.