Chapter ONE
WHERE IT ALL BEGAN, EIGHT YEARS BEFORE …
Portia Kendall hadn’t just so much had an epiphany as an earth-shattering, mind-blowing, seismic, life-changing revelation.
The sort that, as she stared sightlessly at her still unfamiliar bedchamber ceiling, upended her life and everything that she had been brought up to believe. The sort that left her uncharacteristically speechless and floundering. And angry. So justifiably furious that she could barely hold it all in.
“Are you all right, Portia?” From the bed squeezed beside hers at Miss Prentice’s School for Young Ladies, her new friend Kitty rubbed her sleepy eyes. She took in the flickering stub that remained of what had once been their bedtime candle, and then the waning moonlight bleeding through the window as dawn beckoned, and frowned.
“No,” Portia whispered, still dumbstruck but mindful that their two other friends, Georgie and Lottie, were fast asleep in the same dormitory. “I’m … I’ve…”
How exactly did one calmly articulate the sheer magnitude of the despicable injustices that she had recently been enlightened to within the yellowed pages of the battered pamphlet she had brought up to bed? A nondescript and dull-looking missive that had been gathering dust on the shelves in the small library here at this well-respected school in Mayfair—her new home for the last week. A pamphlet that she’d hoped would bore her to sleep in this strange bed.
Except it had done the opposite and kept her awake all night instead.
Because it explained so much.
“I’ve been reading this.” Portia lifted the booklet so that Kitty could see it. “And I think it has just changed my life.”
“A Vindication of the Rights of Men.” Her friend screwed up her face with distaste as she whispered the title aloud. “By Mary Wollstonecraft—whoever she may be.” A genius! That’s what Mrs. Wollstonecraft was! “Sounds as dull as dishwater.”
“That’s precisely what I had hoped it would be.” Needing to vocalize, albeit in hushed tones, some of her outrage at all the new and troubling knowledge she now possessed, Portia rolled on her side to face her friend. “But instead, the scales have fallen from my eyes.” An understatement. “They have been wrenched from them actually, and I am incensed as a result. Seething, in fact.” That dusty little pamphlet had lit a fire in her belly. “At society, the rotten aristocracy, the shameful way they treat the rest of the population, and my blithe and naïve acceptance of the constructs that they have collectively used to control me—to control all of us—for time immemorial.”
In truth, Portia already had a chip on her shoulder about the fickle nature of those she was supposed to curtsy in subservience to without the help of Mrs. Wollstonecraft. It was difficult not to when Portia and her mother had been evicted from their gamekeeper’s cottage on the Earl of Corston’s substantial estate within weeks of the untimely demise of her father—the gamekeeper. That was his reward for fifteen loyal years of service. The skinflint Corston had even halved Papa’s promised pension, and then only paid it for two years, so his widow had been instantly plunged into poverty. But promises were only binding while people lived, the earl had explained dispassionately, mere days after their world had fallen apart. They had to understand that the pension was supposed to be for her father and the new gamekeeper would need their cottage. A grand estate could hardly function properly without a gamekeeper, after all.
And of course, she and her mother had accepted that as the way of things, because it was the way of things. People like them were disposable. Interchangeable. Replaceable. That was the lot of those born to serve and always had been.
They had scrimped and saved to rent a cramped and leaky cottage where poor Mama had struggled to make ends meet ever since. And they had accepted their situation gratefully. So pathetically gratefully that Portia now tasted acid at the very thought of it. Because that’s what lowly people did when they had no other choice.
Or believed that they had no other choice.
Because they were just the pawns in the chess game, and always sacrificed first by the more important pieces who used and abused them without a single care or any moral consideration.
The scoundrels!
“Isn’t it a bit late—or far too early—to be seething?” Kitty yawned again. “Especially when you’ve struggled all week to sleep in a strange bed.” Her friend reached out to stroke Portia’s shoulder. “Only I don’t think seething is conducive to sleep.”
While Kitty made a valid point—because Portia had barely managed a couple of hours a night since leaving her home in Somerset—she was suddenly wider awake than she had been in years. Her pulse was racing and her blood was pumping. Like a racehorse champing at the bit, she knew that she had been profoundly altered and galvanized by the shocking words printed on those old pages.
Who knew that a few simple words could be so powerful? Clearly the pen was mightier than the sword just as the old adage claimed!
“How on earth can I sleep now that I know how corruption and manipulation have robbed me of all my freedoms!” She was more hissing than whispering now, knowing she was one of the few enlightened. Although how it was possible that total societal reform hadn’t happened already, when Mary Wollstonecraft had penned her excellent essay seven years before Portia had even been born, beggared belief. “We are being used, Kitty! Used and abused and lied to. Subjugated by the wrongly privileged, simply to maintain the status quo which they’ve managed to unjustly keep for millennia!”
A travesty that could not be allowed to continue when people were suffering all around them!
“Portia.” Her friend released a heavy sigh. “I think all your insomnia has finally caught up with you and you are delirious. You need to go to sleep. We need to go to sleep. So, hand me that pamphlet which has incensed you so, and we’ll discuss whatever it is that has enraged you tomorrow when we are both more refreshed and rational.” Kitty tried to grab it, but Portia snatched it from her grasp.
“Mrs. Wollstonecraft states that people should be judged on their merits, Kitty, and not on their birthrights. Birthrights, I might add, that all those pompous dukes and pious earls and hedonistic kings probably stole from someone else at some point in history anyway. Yet because of them—because they have stolen all our power and control our government—we have to survive by living off their meager scraps. Bowing to our supposed betters lest they take their frugal largesse away and leave us to die in the gutters!”
“Look around you, Portia.” Kitty huffed her impatience as she swept her arm to encompass their shadowy Mayfair bedchamber. “We are hardly living on frugal scraps or in the gutter, so please shut up so that I can go back to sleep. We’ve got a deportment class at eight, and I promised Miss P faithfully that I would actually arrive to my first lesson on time today.”
“But don’t you see that is part of the problem? The entire premise of this school feeds into the corrupted facade we are all forced to exist behind. We aren’t just being taught duty, decorum, diligence, and discretion at all times.” Otherwise known as the Four D’s, the cornerstones of Miss Prentice’s teachings and the mantra she had repeated almost hourly since the afternoon post had dropped Portia outside this school on Half Moon Street seven days ago. The school where, for reasons known only to Miss P, Portia had been handpicked, out of the blue, to train to be a governess. “We are being taught our place, Kitty. And worse, we are being indoctrinated into not only accepting it—but being grateful for the opportunity to serve our oppressors rather than question their authority or push for reform.”
“If this is a dreadful facade”—Kitty gestured around the pretty, cozy room again—“I am utterly at peace with it. Just as I am utterly at peace with learning the Four D’s so that I can become one of Miss P’s coveted protégées. Because everyone knows that a protégée can command twice the normal salary from one of our oppressors than any run-of-the-mill governess could. In fact, I actually consider myself quite fortunate at this very moment and so should you. Most girls of our station would give their right arms to become a protégée.”
“Doesn’t the injustice of our station bother you?”
“Not as much as it currently bothers you.” Her friend rolled over so that her back faced Portia. “Read your silly pamphlet till your eyes bleed if you have to, but in the name of all that is holy, kindly shut up so that I can head back to dreamland.” Kitty’s head burrowed beneath her pillow in an attempt to do just that and groaned when Portia yanked it away.
“We need to change the world, Kitty, just like Mary Wollstonecraft says. We need to end the aristocracy’s prolonged tenure of tyranny that is held together with nothing but pomp, tradition, and our oppressors’ lies.” She raised a righteous finger and jabbed the air. “We need to shout the truth from the rafters and stand up for the rights that those with ill-gotten hereditary power work so hard to deny us. It is our civic responsibility, as the next generation, to save all future generations from their suffocating and soul-destroying influence. Surely you can see that?”
“Right at this precise moment, all I want to see is the back of my eyelids, but if you want a revolution, by all means go ahead and start one.” Kitty yanked her pillow back and flopped back down on it. “But don’t blame me if you end up guillotined for it!”
And there was the rub!
Dare question the oppressors and you’d probably end up punished for it. It was a vicious cycle that would not stop until a few brave souls stuck their heads above the parapet and enlightened the rest of the oppressed to both the truth and the alternatives.
“Perhaps I will start the revolution.” Because they had never guillotined people here in England. They didn’t even chop people’s heads off nowadays either, so she wouldn’t allow fear to put her off doing what was right. Reforming the entire system from the top all the way down to the bottom was a daunting prospect for a sixteen-year-old girl with no actual prospects—but Portia had never shied away from a challenge. Especially when it suddenly felt like her overwhelming destiny to rise to the occasion. “And perhaps, when I’ve freed you and the rest of the working masses from the shackles of servitude, you’ll thank me for it.”
When Kitty failed to reply, Portia poked her in the ribs. “I shall not rest until I do it, Kitty Blackstone, and I will. You mark my words.”
Although quite how a down-at-heel gamekeeper’s daughter from Somerset was going to do all that when she grew up was anyone’s guess.
Then it came to her—her second epiphany of the night—she would use her words just like Mary Wollstonecraft! And those words, those irrefutable, truthful arguments, would be relentless until the world listened and agreed to change things.
The days of entitled earls and detestable dukes controlling everything were numbered.
Copyright © 2026 by Virginia Heath