Lady Whistledown Strikes Back

by Julia Quinn

  Miss Martin said nothing. They all knew that that would never happen.

  Tillie took the bird back to its owner. “Good evening, Lady Neeley,” she said. “Have you a perch for your bird? Or perhaps we should put him back in his cage.”

  “Isn’t he sweet?” Lady Neeley said.

  Tillie just smiled. Peter bit his lip to keep from chuckling.

  “His perch is over there,” Lady Neeley said, motioning with her head to a spot in the corner. “The footmen filled his dish with seed; he won’t go anywhere.”

  Tillie nodded and brought the parrot over to his perch. Sure enough, it began to peck furiously at its food.

  “You must have birds,” Peter said.

  Tillie shook her head. “No, but I’ve seen others handle them.”

  “Lady Mathilda!” called Lady Neeley.

  “You’ve been summoned, I’m afraid,” Peter murmured.

  Tillie shot him a supremely irritated look. “Yes, well, you seem to have fallen into the position of my escort, so you will have to come along as well. Yes, Lady Neeley?” she finished, her tone instantly transformed into pure sweetness and light.

  “Come over here, gel, I want to show you something.”

  Peter followed Tillie back across the room, maintaining a safe distance when his hostess stuck out her arm.

  “D’you like it?” she asked, jingling her bracelet. “It’s new.”

  “It’s lovely,” Tillie said. “Rubies?”

  “Of course. It’s red. What else would it be?”

  “Er…”

  Peter smiled as he watched Tillie try to deduce whether or not the question was rhetorical. With Lady Neeley, one never could be sure.

  “I’ve a matching necklace as well,” Lady Neeley continued blithely, “but I didn’t want to overdo it.” She leaned forward and said in a tone that on anyone else would not have been described as quiet, “Not everyone here is as plump in the pocket as we two.”

  Peter could have sworn she looked at him, but he decided to ignore the affront. One really couldn’t take offense at any of Lady Neeley’s comments; to do so would ascribe too much importance to her opinion, and besides, one would forever be running around feeling insulted.

  “Wore my earbobs, though!”

  Tillie leaned in and dutifully admired her hostess’s earrings, but then, just as she was straightening her shoulders, Lady Neeley’s bracelet, about which she had made such a fuss, slid right off her wrist and landed on the carpet with a delicate thud.

  While Lady Neeley shrieked with dismay, Tillie bent down and retrieved the jewels. “It’s a lovely piece,” Tillie said, admiring the rubies before handing them back to their owner.

  “I can’t believe that happened,” Lady Neeley said. “Perhaps it is too big. My wrists are very delicate, you know.”

  Peter coughed into his hand.

  “May I examine it?” Tillie said, kicking him in the ankle.

  “Of course,” the older woman said, handing it back to her. “My eyes aren’t what they used to be.”

  A small crowd had gathered, and everyone waited as Tillie squinted and fiddled with the shiny gold mechanism of the clasp.

  “I think you will need to have it repaired,” Tillie finally said, returning the bracelet to Lady Neeley. “The clasp is faulty. It will surely fall off again.”

  “Nonsense,” Lady Neeley said, thrusting her arm out. “Miss Martin!” she bellowed.

  Miss Martin rushed to her side and reaffixed the bracelet.

  Lady Neeley let out a “hmmph” and brought her wrist up to her face, examining the bracelet one more time before lowering her arm. “I bought this at Asprey’s, and I assure you there is no finer jeweler in London. They would not sell me a bracelet with a faulty clasp.”

  “I’m sure they didn’t mean to,” Tillie said, “but—”

  She didn’t need to finish. Everyone stared down at the spot on the carpet where the bracelet landed for the second time.

  “Definitely the clasp,” murmured Peter.

  “This is an outrage,” Lady Neeley announced.

  Peter rather agreed, especially since they’d now wasted precious minutes on her shiny bracelet when all anyone wanted at this point was to go into supper and eat. So many bellies were rumbling he couldn’t tell whose was whose.

  “What am I to do with this now?” Lady Neeley said, after Miss Martin had retrieved the bracelet from the carpet and handed it back to her.

  A tall, dark-haired man whom Peter did not recognize produced a small candy dish. “Perhaps this will suffice,” he said, holding it out.

  “Easterly,” Lady Neeley muttered, rather grudgingly, actually, as if she didn’t particularly care to acknowledge the gentleman’s aid. She set the bracelet in the dish, then placed it on a nearby credenza. “There,” she said, arranging the bracelet in a neat circle. “I suppose everyone can still admire it there.”

  “Perhaps it could serve as a centerpiece on the table while we dine,” Peter suggested.

  “Hmm, yes, excellent idea, Mr. Thompson. It’s nearly time to go in for supper, anyway.”

  Peter could have sworn he heard someone whisper, “Nearly?”

  “Oh, very well we’ll eat now,” Lady Neeley said. “Miss Martin!”

  Miss Martin, who had somehow managed to put several yards between herself and her employer, returned.

  “See to it that everything is ready for supper,” Lady Neeley said.

  Miss Martin exited, and then, amid multiple sighs of relief, the party moved from the drawing room to the dining room.

  To his delight, Peter found that he was seated next to Tillie. Normally he wouldn’t find himself next to an earl’s daughter, and in truth, he suspected that he was meant to be paired with the woman on his right, but she had Robbie Dunlop on the other side, and he seemed to be keeping her in conversation quite nicely.

  The food was, as gossip had promised, exquisite, and Peter was quite happily spooning lobster bisque into his mouth when he heard a movement to his left, and when he turned, Tillie was looking at him, her lips parted as if she were about to say his name.

  She was lovely, he realized. Lovely in a way that Harry could never have described, in a way that he, as her brother, could never even have seen. Harry would never have been able to see the woman beyond the girl, would never have realized that the curve of her cheek begged a caress, or that when she opened her mouth to speak, she sometimes paused first, her lips pursing together slightly, as if awaiting a kiss.

  Harry would never have seen any of that, but Peter did, and it shook him to the core.

  “Did you want to ask me something?” he asked, surprised that his voice came out sounding quite ordinary.

  “I did,” she said, “although I’m not sure how…I don’t know…”

  He waited for her to collect her thoughts.

  After a moment, she leaned forward, glanced about the table to ascertain if anyone was looking at them, and asked, “Were you there?”

  “Where?” he asked, even though he knew exactly what she meant.

  “When he died,” she said quietly. “Were you there?”

  He nodded. It wasn’t a memory he cared to revisit, but he owed her that much honesty.

  Her lower lip trembled, and she whispered, “Did he suffer?”

  For a moment Peter didn’t know what to say. Harry had suffered. He’d spent three days in what had to have been tremendous pain, both his legs broken, the right one so badly that the bone had burst through the skin. He might’ve survived that, maybe even without too much of a limp—their surgeon was quite adept at setting bones—but then the fever had set in, and it hadn’t been long before Peter realized that Harry would not win his battle. Two days later he was dead.

  But when he’d slipped from life, he’d been so listless that Peter hadn’t been certain whether he’d felt pain or not, especially with the laudanum he’d stolen from his commander and poured down Harry’s throat. And so, when he finally answered Tillie’s q
uestion, he just said, “Some. It wasn’t painless, but I think…at the end…it was peaceful.”

  She nodded. “Thank you. I’ve always wondered. I would have always wondered. I’m glad to know.”

  He turned his attention back to his soup, hoping that a bit of lobster and flour and broth could banish the memory of Harry’s death, but then Tillie said, “It’s supposed to be easier because he’s a hero, but I don’t think so.”

  He looked back at her, his question in his eyes.

  “Everyone keeps saying we must be so proud of him,” she explained, “because he’s a hero, because he died on a battlefield at Waterloo, his bayonet in the body of a French soldier, but I don’t think it makes it any easier.” Her lips quivered tremulously, the kind of strange, helpless smile one makes when one realizes that some questions have no answers. “We still miss him just as much as we would have done had he fallen off his horse, or caught the measles, or choked on a chicken bone.”

  Peter felt his lips part as he digested her words. “Harry was a hero,” he heard himself say, and it was the truth. Harry had proven himself a hero a dozen times over, fighting valiantly, and more than once saving the life of another. But Harry hadn’t died a hero, not in the way most people liked to think of it. Harry was already dead by the time they fought the French at Waterloo, his body hopelessly mangled in a stupid accident, trapped for six hours beneath a supply wagon that someone had tried to repair one time too many. The damn thing should have been chopped for firewood weeks earlier, Peter thought savagely, but the army never had enough of anything, including humble supply wagons, and his regiment commander had refused to give it up for dead.

  But clearly this wasn’t the story Tillie had been told, and probably her parents as well. Someone had tried to soften the blow of Harry’s death by painting his last minutes with the deep red colors of the battlefield, in all its horrible glory.

  “Harry was a hero,” Peter said again, because it was true, and he’d long since learned that those who hadn’t experienced war could never understand the truth of it. And if it brought comfort to think that any death could be more noble than another, he wasn’t about to pierce the illusion.

  “You were a good friend to him,” Tillie said. “I’m glad he had you.”

  “I made a promise to him,” he blurted out. He hadn’t meant to tell her, but somehow he couldn’t help himself. “We both made a promise, actually. It was a few months before he died, and we’d both…. Well, the night before had been grisly, and we’d lost many of our regiment.”

  She leaned forward, her eyes wide and glowing with compassion, and when he looked at her, he saw the rose milkiness of her skin, the light dusting of freckles across her nose—more than anything, he wanted to kiss her.

  Good God. Right there at Lady Neeley’s dinner party, he wanted to grab Tillie Howard by the shoulders, haul her against him and kiss her for everything he was worth.

  Harry would have called him out on the spot.

  “What happened?” she asked, and the words should have jolted him back to reality, reminded him that he was telling her something rather important, but all he could do was stare at her lips, which weren’t quite pink, but rather a little peachy, and it occurred to him that he’d never, ever bothered to look at a woman’s mouth before—at least not like this—before kissing her.

  “Mr. Thompson?” she asked. “Peter?”

  “Sorry,” he said, his fingers fisting beneath the table, as if the pain of his nails against his palms could somehow force him back to the matter at hand. “I made Harry a promise,” he continued. “We were talking about home, as we often did when it was particularly difficult, and he mentioned you, and I mentioned my sister—she’s fourteen—and we promised each other that if anything should befall us, we would watch out for the other’s sister. Keep you safe.”

  For a moment she did nothing but look at him, and then she said, “That’s very kind of you, but don’t worry, I absolve you of the vow. I’m no green girl, and I still have a brother in William. Besides, I don’t need a replacement for Harry.”

  Peter opened his mouth to speak, then quickly thought better of it. He wasn’t feeling brotherly toward Tillie, and he was quite certain this wasn’t what Harry had had in mind when he’d asked him to look out for her.

  And the last thing he wanted to be was her replacement brother.

  But the moment seemed to call for a reply, and indeed Tillie was regarding him quizzically, her head tilted to the side as if she were waiting for him to say something quite meaningful and intelligent or, if not that, something that would allow her to offer a teasing retort.

  Which was why, when Lady Neeley’s awful voice screeched across the room, Peter didn’t mind the sound of it, even if it was to say:

  “It’s gone! My bracelet is gone!”

  Chapter 2

  The week’s most coveted invitation is now the week’s most talked about event. If it is possible that you, Dear Reader, have not yet heard the news, This Author shall recount it here: Lady Neeley’s hungry guests had not even finished their soup when their hostess’s ruby bracelet was discovered to have been stolen.

  There is, to be sure, some disagreement over the fate of the precious jewels. A number of guests maintain that the bracelet was simply misplaced, but Lady Neeley claims a crystal clear memory of the evening, and she says that it was burglary, without question.

  Apparently, the bracelet (whose clasp was discovered to be faulty by Lady Mathilda Howard) was placed in a candy dish (selected by the elusive Lord Easterly) and set upon a table in Lady Neeley’s drawing room. Lady Neeley intended to bring the dish to the dining room, so that her guests might admire its apparent brilliance, but in the rush to reach the food (by this time, This Author is told, the hour had grown so late that the guests, famished all, abandoned decorum and made a mad dash for the dining room), the bracelet was forgotten.

  When Lady Neeley remembered the jewels in the next room, she sent a footman to collect them, but he returned with only the candy dish.

  This, of course, was when the true excitement began. Lady Neeley attempted to have all of her guests searched, but truly, does anyone think one such as the Earl of Canby would consent to have his person ransacked by a baroness’s footman? The suggestion was made that the bracelet was stolen by a servant, but Lady Neeley maintains an admirable loyalty toward her servants (who, quite remarkably, return the sentiment), and she refused to believe that any of her staff, none of whom have been in her employ for less than five years, would have betrayed her in such a manner.

  In the end, all of the guests departed in bad humor. And perhaps most tragically, all of the food—save for the soup—went uneaten. One can only hope that Lady Neeley saw fit to offer the feast to her servants, whom she had so recently defended against attack.

  And one can be sure, Dear Reader, that This Author shall continue to comment upon this latest on-dit. Is it possible that a member of the ton is nothing more than a common thief? Nonsense. One would have to be most uncommon to have spirited away such a valuable piece, right under Lady N’s nose.

  LADY WHISTLEDOWN’S SOCIETY PAPERS, 29 MAY 1816

  “And then,” gushed some elaborately dressed young gentleman, speaking in the tone of one who is quite certain he is always aware of the latest gossip, “she forced Mr. Brooks—her own nephew—to strip off his coat and allow two footmen to search him.”

  “I heard it was three.”

  “It was none,” Peter drawled, standing at the entrance of the Canby drawing room. “I was there.”

  Seven gentleman turned to face him. Five looked annoyed, one bored, and one amused. As for Peter, he was profoundly irritated. He wasn’t certain what he’d expected when he’d decided to travel to the opulent Canby residence in Mayfair to call upon Tillie, but it hadn’t been this. The spacious drawing room was overfull with men and flowers, and the small bunch of irises in his hand seemed rather superfluous.

  Who knew that Tillie was so popular?
r />   “I’m quite sure,” the first gentleman said, “that it was two footmen.”

  Peter shrugged. He didn’t much care if the fop had the truth or not. “Lady Mathilda was there as well,” he said. “You can ask her if you don’t believe me.”

  “It’s true,” Tillie said, smiling at him in greeting. “Although Mr. Brooks did remove his coat.”

  The man who had claimed that three footmen had been searching guests turned to Peter and inquired, somewhat archly, “Did you remove your coat?”

  “No.”

  “The guests revolted after Mr. Brooks was searched,” Tillie explained, then changed the subject by asking her assembled beaux, “Are you acquainted with Mr. Thompson?”

  Only two were; Peter was still rather new to town, and most of his acquaintances were limited to school friends from Eton and Cambridge. Tillie made the necessary introductions, then Peter was relegated to the eighth-best position in the room, as none of the other gentlemen was willing to relocate and allow another any advantage in courting the lovely—and wealthy—Lady Mathilda.

  Peter read Whistledown; he knew that Tillie was considered the season’s biggest heiress. And he recalled Harry saying—quite often, actually—that he was going to have to beat off the fortune hunters with a stick. But Peter hadn’t realized until this moment just how assiduously the young men of London were fighting for her hand.

  It was nauseating.

  And in truth, he owed it to Harry to ensure that the man she chose (or as was more likely the case, the man her father chose for her) would treat her with the affection and respect she deserved.

  And so he turned to the task of inspecting, and then when appropriate, scaring off the lovesick swain surrounding him.

  The first gentleman was easy. It took mere minutes to determine that his vocabulary did not reach into the triple digits, and all Peter had to do was mention that Tillie had told him that the activity she enjoyed above all else was reading philosophical tracts. The suitor made haste for the door, and Peter decided that even if Tillie hadn’t actually mentioned such a predilection to him the night before, the fact remained that she was certainly intelligent enough to read philosophical tracts if she so chose, and that alone ought to disqualify the match.