Cat suddenly laughed. She sank down beside her aunt. “I could use more than your prayers, Aunt Hecuba. I could use your instruction.”
“Eh?” Hecuba asked.
“You could help me, Aunt Hecuba. You have so much knowledge to bestow. You were the reigning queen of the ton for years. Your information in certain areas must be well nigh omniscient.”
Hecuba scowled and plucked at the black tatting on her half-mitts. “And just why should I help you? So that you might marry some wealthy ne’er-do-well? For what? To have pretty dresses, houses full of servants, jewels, and all the other material snares with which the devil catches the unwary?”
“You know me better than that, Aunt.”
“ ’Course I do. Always had more sense than all your brothers and sisters put together. Until you took on this rattle-pated notion, I would have said too much sense. Always formulating some scheme for increased poultry production or some such economic mathematics.”
“I find it interesting.” Cat shrugged. “And as there was never anyone else about to see to Marcus’s lands, it was necessary.”
“Your brother should have been the one seeing to the needs of that infernal estate he inherited. How in heaven’s name he ever came to the title, I will never know.”
“Third cousin once removed,” Cat answered glibly before continuing softly, “and he was only thirteen.”
“And you were all of what? Seventeen?”
Cat sighed. It was a long-standing source of contention between them. Hecuba had never understood one simple, glaringly obvious fact: Cat liked managing things. Although Hecuba certainly didn’t want for those tendencies herself, thought Cat.
“You have asked for my help,” Hecuba finally said. “You must give me a good reason if you expect me to ally myself with your delinquent scheme.”
“What’s so delinquent about it?” Cat asked. “If I manage to contract a marriage which will provide my family with the means to better themselves, garner myself an undemanding spouse, and secure a position of some influence in society, it is no more than myriad other women have sought to do.”
“I doubt very much whether a union with a fast-developing womanizer is going to make you happy.”
“Happy?” Cat threw up her hands. “When did happiness become a requisite for marriage? Mama was constantly falling ‘happily’ in love. Five times she tripped ‘happily’ up the aisle to the altar!”
“Every union your mother engaged in was of a decidedly genial nature,” Hecuba said primly.
“I don’t deny it. But her continued ‘happiness’ has left the products of her conjugal rapture paupers! Simon can’t borrow the ready to purchase a commission. Timon hasn’t a prayer of entering Oxford, though he could well teach half the courses. Enid should have made her bow a year ago, and poor Marcus suffers the agonies of the damned over an inherited estate whose population is starving. Only Marianne hasn’t felt the pinch of our circumstances, and she will in another year when she is due to come out!”
“You mustn’t blame your poor mother for—”
Cat threw up her hands. “I don’t blame her, Aunt. I merely seek to allay the effects of her ‘happiness.’ We all assumed our troubles would be over when she wed Philip Montrose. Indeed! Mama herself was promised handsome settlements once she and Philip returned from their honeymoon. But, Aunt Hecuba, they left on their honeymoon two years ago and save for the occasional extravagant—and useless—gift, we are still ruinously poor. It is time someone affected some changes before we all end up in debtors’ prison. And I intend to do so in the most practical manner possible. By marrying Lord Strand.”
Hecuba narrowed her eyes. “Why Strand?”
Cat shrugged. “Strand is wealthy. He is witty. He is handsome and he is a pragmatist. He is secure enough not to pester a woman for her undivided attention. He is intelligent enough to have good conversation when we should happen to cohabit. And he has political and social associations that would assuage the boredom of the matrimonial state.
“I have studied the matter in depth, Aunt. I have spent a considerable amount of time and effort compiling a list of candidates and interviewing various sources as to their suitability as a spouse. Not merely their social attachments, either. Their political, business, and family connections have been thoroughly investigated. Lord Strand quite tops the list.” Cat, looking well pleased with herself, patted her skirt pocket.
Hecuba appeared dazed. “You actually have a list in there?”
“Yes. Not that I have need of it anymore, but one cannot be too careful.”
“No,” mumbled Hecuba. “Can’t be too careful.”
“You see, Aunt? There is nothing in the least reprehensible about my motives or my schemes. I assure you I have not made a frivolous choice.”
Hecuba shook her head. “No, no one would ever call you frivolous, Catherine. And you really think you might come to love this man?”
“Love? A most modern notion, Aunt Hecuba. One which, in my opinion, is overrated. I have never been infatuated for longer than a dance or the dessert course at dinner. I would not like to base my future on something so labile.”
“I will think on this, Catherine.” Hecuba shook her head, watching her great-niece with a bemused expression. “In the meantime, I shall lend you my most recently acquired tract, ‘The Lady’s Manifest of Maidenly Virtues.’ It is truly inspired.”
Chapter 5
By midafternoon, Cat was impatient for company. Her aunt had retired to her room for “spiritual refurbishment,” a phrase that usually meant she was going to take a nap. Or perhaps Hecuba was reading whatever it was she had so discreetly hidden in her skirts. Mrs. Medge avoided Cat, disappearing through the door opposite whichever one Cat entered. Hours earlier, Cat had seen Thomas stride off toward the stables. She had penned a few letters to friends in London and a few more to her siblings in York, but quit when a cramp set into her fingers. She was bored. Seldom had she experienced enforced inactivity. It was not an enjoyable experience.
She glanced out of her bedroom window overlooking the kitchen gardens. Several scraggly children were running after a harried-looking cat, pitching overripe fruit at the poor beast as it frantically sought to escape. Finally, in desperation, the motley creature fled up an old apple tree, only to have the hooting, ragamuffin lot encircle the tree and commence hurling rotten apples at it. Cat bristled visibly, turning and stalking from the room. On seeing the narrowing of those green eyes, anyone who knew her would have immediately fled for safer climes. Unfortunately for the children, they hadn’t yet made Lady Cat Sinclair’s acquaintance.
Rounding the corner leading from the stables to the back of the house, Thomas wiped the dust from his brow, kicking his boot heels against the slate path. Mrs. Medge had convulsions if “stable dirt” besmirched the blameless splendor of the front entry, and dirt was the least offensive element he carried on his boots.
Thomas stopped short in his tracks at the tableau before him.
The afternoon sun slanted over the old fieldstone wall, glazing with golden light the woman seated beneath an ancient apple tree. Her striped gown billowed about her legs. A battered straw bonnet hung from a green ribbon tied about her lovely throat. A group of urchins, most of them the estate manager’s brats, lay in rapt attention at her feet, their small chins cupped in their hands, their faces intent. She was illustrating something she said, her slender hands held aloft.
She made a charming picture sitting, Thomas admitted, her expressive features as absorbed as the children’s. Undoubtedly she was telling them a fairy story, and soon would commence to making daisy chains for the two dirty little girls leaning against her. Very pretty, very tranquil, Thomas thought before cynically wondering why the deuce young women always supposed an ability to charm children immediately convinced potential suitors they qualified for motherhood.
As he approached, Thomas wondered what tale she was relaying… Red Riding Hood? Too grisly. Puss ’n Boots?
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�… and once you have him in your sights, you must draw your arm back ever so slowly, so as not to alert him, before launching your projectile. Aim for his body. They always jerk their heads around quick, and a moving target is hard to hit.”
“Go on wid ya,” said an openly doubtful young voice. “You never kilt no rat wid a rock.”
“No? Were my brothers Simon and Timon here, they would attest to my abilities,” Cat said, her grin answering some wicked recollection. “And Enid, my youngest sister, is quite a dab hand, too. Not so handy as myself, but good enough.” She sat back and dusted her skirts with her hands.
“How many rats has you snockered, Lady Cat?” asked a redheaded lad, idol worship clear in his hushed query.
“A few, a few. But I must say, I never managed to dispatch as many of the horrid little beasts as the kitchen cat. She averaged two a week.”
“Ah,” chimed in another boy. “That ain’t so great. Blather there catches that many on some nights.”
Cat leaned forward and fixed each of the avid, dirty little faces with a glare. “And a fat lot of thanks it gets her! No, indeed! You show your appreciation by chasing her up a tree!”
“We wouldna hurt her, not really. We’s just havin’ a bit of sport.”
“Some sport. Sport of fools to chase off a helping hand. Now, pitching rocks at rats? That’s sport.”
“We won’t do it no more,” one of the brats promised.
Thomas leaned his forearms atop the wall, entranced in spite of himself. And she had set her cap at Giles Strand. Why not? If the occasional rumors Thomas had heard from his London correspondents were correct, his friend and onetime fellow officer was well on his way to enjoying the notoriety Thomas once had. Maybe Cat’s plan had some merit, for Giles as well as herself. Maybe she was just the woman who could save Giles from the spiritual degradation Thomas had courted. Looking at her, Thomas could well believe it.
If his ears didn’t deceive him, she was now instructing the brats on the finer aspects of weed control. She had picked up a slender branch and, with near military authority, was directing the movement of her diminutive troop.
“Careful there, Jack, strawberries have notoriously shallow roots. Tansy, thinning a row is not the same as decimating it.” She shook her leafy baton at the girl.
Thomas could hold his tongue no longer. “There are gardeners I pay rather well to do that.”
“It’s ’im!” A half dozen small heads snapped around and then they were fleeing over the wall and around the corner, dispersing like a pack of the rats they had just been discussing.
Cat shot to her feet.
She looked guilty and lovely and altogether fresh and appealing. “You like children.”
“Not at all,” she said, turning toward the kitchen door. “I like cats.”
She hated sitting here, waiting for Thomas to critique. The more she thought of his barely masked amusement at her feminine wiles, the more determined she became to make him grovel, preferably in abject worship, before her. Only pity for his much-reduced circumstances and a tiny bit of embarrassment over her last night’s social transgressions kept her from packing up and leaving now. Only Christian compassion, she told herself, kept her here at all. How dare he not recognize that fact? By the time the door to her bedroom was tapped and the maid called Fielding entered to offer her assistance as a lady’s maid, Cat was in fine, militant fettle.
“Fielding,” Cat said, “I have been issued a challenge.”
“Yes, m’lady?”
“Mr. Montrose,” Cat paused and pushed her skirts down over her petticoats. “Mr. Montrose believes my wardrobe sadly lacking in feminine appeal.”
“He does?” The little maid looked satisfyingly nonplussed. Cat kicked the dress away and strode to the armoire.
“Yes.” She rifled through her clothes, her green eyes gleaming as they fell on a particular dress. She took it from the hanger.
“Fielding, do you think any man has the right to decide what constitutes ‘feminine’ apparel? Of course you don’t. What right-thinking woman would?” She marched over to Fielding and turned her back to the maid. “But, Fielding, we must learn—indeed, it is in our own best interest to do so—to acquiesce to this nonsense in order to achieve our own ends. It is not a noble thing, Fielding. But we have been robbed of direct recourse. No, not noble but bloody well effective! So, Fielding, pull the stays!”
“Yes, ma’am.” The girl approached and gave a tentative yank on Cat’s lacings.
“Harder.”
Fielding grabbed hold of the stays and pulled back tightly.
“Harder.”
Fielding frowned over Cat’s shoulder. “You won’t be able to breathe, m’lady.”
Cat’s answer to this obvious statement was to suck her breath in deeper and growl, “An alluring woman doesn’t breathe, Fielding. Now, pull the stays tighter.”
“Any tighter and your bosom’s going to heave up right over the top of your chemise,” Fielding muttered, but hauled back as hard as she could.
Cat’s chest swelled over the top of the delicate lace edging. She surveyed her flushed countenance with grim approval before shooing Fielding off to fetch the thin muslin petticoat. While she was waiting, grimly watching the blood recede from her face, the door to her room suddenly swung open and Thomas, work-sullied and coarsely garbed, strode into the room. With a gasp, Cat snatched the dress up in front of her.
“Ah, Cat. Good. I was hoping you would be taking more pains with your appearance for this evening’s meal. We dine in—” he checked the mantel clock, “a little less then three hours. You should be able to do something with yourself in that time.”
“What are you doing?” Cat sputtered.
He looked at her in surprise. “Why, I wanted to clarify the purpose of our role playing this evening.”
“And you don’t think you could wait until after I was decently dressed for this conversation?” she asked through stiff lips.
“Why, Cat, you aren’t… Why, yes! You’re embarrassed! How perfectly charming!” Thomas laughed in delight. But then, as though he’d just had an unhappy thought, added, “But charming isn’t exactly what we’re after, is it? No, Cat. ’Twon’t do. You will simply have to forgo embarrassment. A sophisticated beauty is never embarrassed. She takes any uncomfortable situation and turns it to her advantage.
“For example, your maid is present.” Thomas waved a hand at Fielding. “Your aunt is in the next room.” He nodded to the open door from which issued Hecuba’s gentle snoring. “And you should be thrilled to be able to present a man with a provocative, yet still sanctioned, view of your charms.”
He looked her over, from her face to the dress she held to her bodice, and his expression grew doubtful. “Although why, in God’s name, a woman trussed into layers of plain linen and metal bands is considered provocative is beyond me.”
“Whalebone,” she said through clenched teeth.
“Even worse. Anyway, Cat, we can’t have you clutching cloth to your chest as though your worst fears were about to be realized. It reeks of prudishness.”
She went from delicate rose to fiery red before mustering what dignity she could and saying, “Just what is it you want to instruct me on?”
“Oh, that. Well, you see, I wanted to give you more of the flavor of what you wish to accomplish. Because that’s really what it’s all about. Flavor, nuance, innuendo. You wish to titillate your victim, er, pigeon, er, intended.” He smiled. Cat scowled.
“Titillation,” he continued in that odious, instructional manner, “is the art of making someone want something he’s not sure he’ll get. Next, you make him think he not only wants but needs this thing until finally it becomes an obsession driving him to the final capitulation. He’ll do anything to secure the object of his desire. In your case, I believe that the moment of capitulation is called a marriage proposal. Am I correct?”
“Well,” she said, “it’s not quite that cold-blooded.”
“Oh, bu
t it is, Cat. It’s merchandising in its highest form. There’s nothing wrong with it. Perfectly acceptable as long as both the purchaser and the seller know what they’re about. You do know what you’re about, don’t you, Cat?”
His rich, melodic voice had lowered, disarming Cat with unexpected evidence of concern.
“Aye, I am very sure of what I want.”
“As you will,” he said, bowing his head and withdrawing just as Fielding approached, wielding a brush and a fistful of what looked to be grape leaves.
“I must confess the foliage dripping from your hair took me back at first, but now that I have gotten used to it, I find it quite original. Rather enticing after the usual knot of primroses one sees stuck atop most women’s heads.” Thomas nodded his approval.
He was rewarded by an unaffected laugh from his guest.
“I admit that I, too, had certain reservations. But I agree. They are unique. Fielding, I believe, has taken your challenge personally. She is determined to make me à la mode.” Cat smiled broadly.
They had gotten along remarkably well throughout the meal. There had been a few moments at the onset of the evening when Thomas had wondered if he’d pushed her too far. But teasing Cat was simply too delicious to resist. He had even felt a twinge of guilt, which he had quickly smothered, at his cavalier treatment of her. It was obvious she had taken the bait and dressed to impress him with her sophistication.
She had removed the lace inset from the bodice of her gown. If the fabric’s straining seams were any indication, she was trussed so tightly into the thing that a deep breath threatened to spill her over the top. She had further abused the poor gown by liberating it of such niceties as sleeves and hauling what little material was left down around her shoulders, a blatant bow to his remarks about prudishness. Her heavy mane of her auburn hair fell mostly free down her back.
Promise Me Heaven Page 4
