House of Cads (Ladies of Scandal Book 2)

by Elizabeth Kingston

  “His poetry is divine,” offered Phyllida eagerly. “I’m sure he’ll recite some for you, and you’ll be as captivated as the rest of us. Just yesterday he wrote the most beautiful verse on the nightingale’s song.”

  At this, Amy gave an unmistakable snort of laughter. As she quickly manufactured a cough to cover it, Marie-Anne gave a bright smile and asked if he had read Mr. Shelley’s latest dramatic verse. It was the only thing she could think to say and she soon saw it was an unwise choice. Mr. St. James proceeded to talk endlessly and tried to impress with his knowledge, which caused Amy to grow very annoyed and Phyllida to look at him like he was some sort of paragon of manhood. Amy even went so far as to make an uncharacteristically waspish remark about how pretty words were as much a modern affectation as artfully windswept hair.

  At this, Mason give a broad smile and a look of camaraderie to the other man.

  “It seems there’s only one sister in this family who appreciates artistic sensibilities, St. James. You’ve chosen well.”

  This made Phyllida gaze yet more lovingly at the poet, but also seemed to dispel some tension.

  “I think it’s very rude to talk about nothing but poetry when we finally have Madame de Vauteuil here.” Lady Shipley’s mispronunciation of her name grated on Marie-Anne nearly as much as the ostentatious accent she employed.

  “Please, you must call me Marie-Anne,” she insisted, to save herself from the verbal butchery. “We were almost family, after all. And you must remember I am not fond of formalities.”

  “Yes of course!” Lady Shipley looked delighted. “I wonder that you can bear the formalities at Summerdale House. The earl is well known for his propriety, they say he’s very exacting. Is it true?”

  There followed a thorough interrogation on all things to do with Lord and Lady Summerdale. It was tiresome, but Marie-Anne found herself almost admiring how Lady Shipley strenuously avoided the topic of Helen’s past scandal. She could see the questions gleaming behind the woman’s eyes, yet she voiced none of them. It was fairly likely she had memorized a list of other topics to discuss, so long did she monopolize the conversation with harmless minutiae.

  Throughout the chatter, Marie-Anne stole frequent looks at Mason. He managed to appear desperately bored, which they had agreed was the best tactic to employ. He was really marvelous at it, the way he leaned back and gave barely audible sighs of impatience, without ever looking languid or effete in the pose. It was unforgivably vulgar of her, of course, to continuously examine the lovely bulge of muscle in his thigh – but really, what was her alternative? To stare at the impossibly pretty poet? She thought maybe she should, as the poet’s beauty did not make her feel as though steam were rising from her skin.

  “I cannot fault you for preferring to remain a guest at their beautiful home,” Lady Shipley was saying, after a detailed inquiry into the décor at Summerdale House. “You are always welcome to change your mind and stay with us, the girls have longed to visit with you.”

  “And I am so happy to spend time with them,” Marie-Anne smiled, and resigned herself to the fact that she would not be able to bring up Dahlia’s rejected Lord Releford so long as her mother was present. Lady Shipley had no ability to hide her feelings, and her obvious eagerness for Marie-Anne to agree with her own preference of suitors would prove disastrous.

  What she needed was to get the girls alone, away from their mother. She slid a quick look to Amy before turning to Dahlia and saying, “In fact I hope you have no great plans for tomorrow? Lady Summerdale’s modiste will call, and I need you smart London ladies to advise me what is fashionable now.”

  As Lady Shipley had already mentioned a prior engagement, this kept her safely out of the way. Not that she didn’t try to invite herself along, until Amy managed to whisper something at her that sounded very like: “She is here for us, mama, not to socialize with you!” Everyone politely pretended not to hear it, and Marie-Anne began to make her excuses and prepared to leave. She could feel Mason trying to catch her eye, but she couldn’t spare him more than a helpless glance as she was quizzed by the girls about the modiste and when they should be there.

  “Oh, are you leaving already?” Lady Shipley protested. “But I have hardly had the chance to ask you about the dowager countess, and I hear Lady Summerdale has the most envied staff. They say her cook is divine, and is it true the butler is a Hindustani? Oh, I should so like one!”

  Marie-Anne blinked. “A divine cook?”

  “Oh yes, that too, but I mean a Hindustani butler. It’s the most fashionable thing, you know, and I do think it would go so well with this new red and gold scheme in the drawing room.”

  Marie-Anne blinked again. In just the proper shade, she supposed, and with a perfectly matched turban. She bit her tongue against saying it, for fear she would give the woman ideas. Loathsome people, Helen had always called them – not just the Shipleys, but all nobility, great and small. A loathsomeness so varied and absolute that you can live among them for a lifetime and never reach the end of it, she had once said.

  “No, they would never think to match their butler to the curtains,” Marie-Anne finally replied. She could not quite keep the edge out of her voice, but did give a tight little smile. “They are always insisting on treating people with respect and humanity. And do you know, they think of their staff and Hindustanis as people.” She clucked her tongue. “So eccentric!”

  Mason choked lightly on his tea, sputtering a bit while the others sat frozen with polite smiles amid the tension. But it was not remotely surprising that Lady Shipley merely nodded in confident understanding, oblivious to Marie-Anne’s disapproval and delighted to have this little insight. “The great families all have their little peculiarities. How charming,” she beamed. “Just charming.”

  All the way home, Marie-Anne thought of a thousand other, more cutting things she might have said. But she also thought of how Helen had often said that people so perfectly convinced of their own superiority would never relinquish that conviction. Such an attitude must be doubly true of Lady Shipley, who was not only convinced of her own superiority but fanatically devoted to convincing others of it.

  After an early supper, she sat with Collins in the drawing room and, over a game of chess, related the details of her afternoon at the Shipley’s. It was obvious why Helen had made fast friends with this butler. He really was an inveterate gossip with a heart of gold and an ability to remain very dignified as he related his tidbits. He had a great many of them, as servants talked among themselves with abandon, especially about disliked employers. Sir Gordon Shipley was notorious for his severity and snobbery, and this was widely believed to be a reaction to how his own father had been rarely sober and always an embarrassment. He was almost more unbearable than Lady Shipley, who reminded every servant and shopkeeper that her husband was a baronet and privately lamented that this did not automatically open every door of Society to them.

  “She does not understand how to be discreet in the way that they like,” Marie-Anne told him as she considered moving a pawn. She was on the point of saying more on the subject – she so enjoyed discussing these people with others who, like her, lived among them without being one of them – but they were interrupted by a footman.

  “Mr. Mason come to call, madame,” he said, and Marie-Anne’s belly performed a little flip of excitement. She was quite sure Collins noticed it, too, and so she concentrated on maintaining a bland expression while she said Mr. Mason could be shown in.

  He gave his restrained little nod in greeting, the soft light chasing briefly across his glossy red hair as he moved. “Madame,” he said as the butler left the room.

  “Why do you do that?” she asked him.

  “Do what?”

  “You never give a bow like the other gentlemen. You bend your head, but only a little, and almost like you do not want to. Is bowing not the custom in America?”

  “It depends where you go, and the situation. I don’t think there is one American custom.
Does it offend you?”

  “Not at all,” she reassured him. He looked terribly self-conscious. “It delights me to know there is a place where one is not always required to bow and scrape.”

  “Vive la revolution?” he asked in his darling American accent. She let her full smile spread out, and watched his own unfurl in response.

  “Very good, now we know that Collins is not eavesdropping,” she told him as she took a seat near the fire. “He would carry you off to the docks himself to banish you from the British soil, if he heard you say that. He is very disapproving of these revolutionary ideas. Hélène told me – Lady Summerdale, I mean. She said their cordial relationship was once very strained when she mentioned her admiration of your President Washington.”

  He did not sit, even when she gestured to a chair. He stood near the fireplace instead and asked, “Why would the wife of an earl admire Washington?”

  “The daughter of an earl, too, and sister to one.” Marie-Anne took slow and even breaths to calm the anger she immediately felt at the thought of those people. Helen had endured great cruelty from her aristocratic family and friends, because of what they called honor and decency. How savage these so-civilized people could be. “It is strange I never wondered why she was always so infatuated with the Americans. I thought it was only a fascination of the intellect, but today when Lady Shipley made that remark…”

  “A butler to match the drapes, you mean?”

  “Yes,” she said, and wished she had a fan in her hand, so that she might snap it closed with a satisfactory slap into her palm. “Well. I see now, I think, why my friend would admire a government so determined to defy and destroy the aristocracy.”

  “Is she a secret radical?”

  He seemed intrigued, eager to hear more, which made Marie-Anne laugh. “Not those two things together, no. She is very secret, and she is not very radical. But she has enough audacity to be a friend to me, thank goodness. Now tell me why you are here? I hope it is because Dahlia and Phyllida have both announced they have decided to die as spinsters and the only thing I must do now is to choose a dress to wear for Amy’s wedding.”

  “Only a fraction as thrilling as that,” he admitted, “but still thrilling. Dahlia is reconsidering. She was aiming to put your dressmaker to work tomorrow, to order a pile of dresses to dazzle all of New York society. She looked like I’d canceled Christmas when I told her there was no need for a fashionable wardrobe since I planned for us to live far outside the city.”

  “Oh, very well done! I must be sure to point out all the most practical fabrics and dreary designs tomorrow.”

  “But that’s not even the best part. She interrupted my stirring discourse on the growth rate of hardwood forests in the Middle West to say she suddenly decided she wants a long engagement. Last week she was agitating to put an announcement in the paper, but tonight she said she prefers to keep it quiet until the season’s long over.”

  Marie-Anne clapped her hands together in delight. “Wonderful! You see? I am sure more than ever she uses you to make Lord Releford jealous. If you marry and take her away too soon, it spoils her chance to win him back. And now she thinks you are not such a consolation, if she cannot get Releford.” She stood and began to pace, thinking. “It would be good to push them together, you know? At a party of some kind. I would have one and invite him, but I do now know him.”

  “I thought he was friends with your Lord Summerdale.”

  “Yes, probably he is. Everyone is friends with Stephen, but he is not here, so it is no help to us.” At his look of confusion, she explained. “To walk up to the son of a duke and say hello, this is a kind of unspeakable offense. Without an introduction, he might faint from the shock, which would be very unpleasant.”

  He chuckled, which pleased her immensely. “Ah. His ancestors would rise from their graves to chase us back into the nearest gutter where we belong, that sort of thing. What about the Huntingdons?”

  “Oh yes! Joyce might know him. I will ask.” She was on the verge of proposing that they have tea and cake to celebrate their progress, when she remembered the other half of her task. “This retrenchment is very good, but now for the problem of the poet.” She scowled at him. “Why did you not tell me how impossible this will be?”

  “Impossible? Why do you say that?”

  “Oh mon dieu,” she said, exasperated, and crossed herself before throwing her hands up. “You are worse than Amy, and what is your excuse, hm? It is without flaw, his beauty, and you have the eyes of an artist. Why did you not warn me of his face!”

  “I never said I was an artist.”

  Marie-Anne would have none of this quibbling. “I watched you with the paintings and I hear how you speak of them. The eyes and the voice of an artist, it is there in the things you notice. Also you said you draw with the pencil.”

  “That’s not art. It’s just scribbling.” He was frowning back at her. She had made him very irritable. “I’d never call myself an artist, and there are plenty of flaws.”

  “In your scribbling?”

  “In his face.”

  “Hah. Tell me one,” she insisted.

  He stopped short, clearly trying to think of any. “All right, his eyes have that perfect shape, and his chin – it’s a good chin, and those are hard to come by in these circles, I’ll concede that. Especially in profile. And there’s the cheekbones, the less said about them the better, but the line of his jaw is… It’s…”

  “Designed to make a woman weak in the knees?”

  “His nose!” he said, with a triumphant jab of his finger in the air. “His nose is boring. Insipid.”

  Marie-Anne crossed her arms and merely looked at him. He let out a sigh and sagged a little in defeat.

  “All right, he’s an Adonis,” he admitted, in a voice that precisely matched her own helpless exasperation with the fact. “It’s like Michelangelo sculpted that face. You’re right, of course. Women can’t resist it.”

  He looked so dejected, staring into the fire with his little scowl. She felt it tug at her heart a bit, and for a moment she wondered if his pose was calculated for exactly that effect. But there were those splotches of color on his neck creeping just above the collar, and now he was trying to compose his features hide his little burst of envy.

  “Well.” She gave a tsk and waved a hand in dismissal. “Not women. It is girls who want perfection. A girl is enchanted by a perfectly smooth cheek, but a woman likes a little of the beard on it, to make it interesting.” Her lips twitched. “Or freckles.”

  He looked up at her, his hazel eyes showing more green than brown in the firelight, and she felt very breathless. She suddenly could not remember what the poet looked like at all. Why on earth were they talking about some pretty boy with a ridiculous name, who was polished to a shine and spoke of boring things and had not once made her laugh? Mr. Mason made her laugh. He also made her mouth water, and she was having a terrible time hiding it from him.

  “Miss Marie-Anne,” he said in that slow and low voice that came out of him sometimes. It made her think of lazy, hot summer days. Sweat on the skin, laying back in the shade, feeling the heat seep right through and melt your bones. “I would very much like to kiss you,” he announced. “Very much and very deep and very long.”

  She tried to imagine a proper and demure response to that. Unfortunately, her imagination was otherwise engaged at the moment.

  “I would very much like to kiss you too,” she replied, which was the wrong thing to say. One shouldn’t simply blurt the truth, especially when they were alone in this room and he looked unbelievably tempting in the glow of the firelight, and now he was looking at her mouth and moving toward her, which was a complete disaster. A completely delicious disaster.

  “But,” she said, rather desperately.

  He halted only inches from her raised hand. “But?”

  “But of course we cannot do such a thing when you are engaged to be married.”

  After a very long and frozen m
oment, during which he continued to look fixedly at her mouth, he said, “Of course. And if I were not engaged?”

  “Then I would kiss you, I think,” she said simply. “Like you said. Very much and very… long.” She did not say very deep, because already she knew she would have difficulty recovering from this conversation. “But you are engaged. And I am outrageous and even reckless sometimes, but I try not to be hurtful. Sometimes – it is rare, but there are times when honor is not just a foolish ideal.”

  He took a step back and said, “Right. And I’m not that much of a cad.” He had the air of someone coming to his senses, and she suppressed a sigh of disappointment. “Or at least I’m trying not to be.”

  She raised her brows, relieved at his easy agreement, and summoned up a more lighthearted tone. “No, am I having a reforming effect? What a disappointment I have become!”

  “I don’t believe it’s possible for you to disappoint, Marie-Anne.”

  She looked away briefly to avoid his admiring gaze. “Let us hope you are right, at least in the matter of convincing Dahlia to release you. It is a strong motivation, this kiss you promise me. That will be my reward, hm?”

  It was equal parts delightful and alarming, how his smile could so easily go from pleasant humor to wildly suggestive. “A kiss,” he said, with a long and lascivious look that touched every point of interest between her shoulders and her knees. “I think I can arrange for that to be a very satisfying reward.”

  Chapter Six

  Freddy was saying something, but Mason’s attention was entirely taken up with Lady Summerdale’s breast. He considered exaggerating the line of it, or changing the angle of her hip so that it was more unmistakably sexual. It would take very little to turn it into a caricature, and just a little more than that to make it a grotesque mockery. He didn’t like to do it, though. It didn’t feel right to distort a body that was so perfectly formed by nature, and that he had managed to capture so exactly.