by Maya Rodale
“Not always a perfect gentleman?” Francesca laughed. “Pray tell.”
“There’s nothing to tell.”
“Too much of a gentleman, I suppose?”
Hardly, if his thoughts and behavior this evening were any indication. He again became aware of the Americans nearby . . . of Lady Bridget . . . and a disturbance to his equilibrium. Suddenly, he’d had enough of this ball and enough of this evening. Already he’d had enough of her.
Chapter 2
Lessons in proper etiquette avoided: 27
Lessons I should not have avoided: 27
Reception in English society: dreadful
Lady Bridget’s Diary
The duchess sat at her dressing table, sipping a glass of sherry while her companion, Miss Green, painstakingly removed all the hairpins holding up her elegant coiffure. It was their evening ritual, ever since Miss Green had come to act as companion and occasional lady’s maid to the duchess, taking over the position her mother had filled before her.
Josephine took one sip of sherry, then another, before she could bring herself to speak of the evening they had all barely survived. She’d been so certain of success; how wild could her American nieces and nephew be? Surely if anyone could turn them into darlings of the ton, it was she, the esteemed and feared Duchess of Durham.
“How was the ball?” Miss Green asked.
“It was a disaster.”
“It could not have been that bad.”
Josephine gave her A Look in the mirror, even though it was a requirement of Miss Green’s position to say things like that.
“Lady Bridget fell and lay sprawled upon the floor. Lady Claire could not hide her boredom if her life depended on it, which it does, though I cannot seem to impress it upon her. She already has a reputation as a bluestocking, which will hardly serve her well. Lady Amelia mentioned riding astride on their farm, so now everyone thinks her a hoyden at best. That one will be the death of me, I am sure of it. And the duke . . .”
“What about the duke?”
The duchess watched Miss Green closely in the mirror. Had her breath hitched at the mention of the duke?
“You’d think he was being led to the gallows, not waltzing with the finest young women in England.”
“And how was the dancing?”
Together they had watched the lessons Monsieur Bellini had been hired to provide. The sisters had eventually grasped the waltz, thank the Lord, with its three simple steps. The steps of the quadrille and other dances had eluded them thus far. Was it really too much to ask that one dance with a modicum of grace?
The duchess took another sip of her sherry.
“They were adequate. They were not ready for society, but if we delayed their debut, everyone would think the worst.” At least, that had been her rationale. It pained her to admit even privately to herself that she might have been mistaken. “Of course now they already know the worst.”
“They still must be better than Mr. Collins.”
“The less said about Mr. Collins, the better.”
But the man was never far from her mind, for until James had a son or two, there was a chance that Durham could fall into the hands of a bumbling provincial clergyman who possessed neither wit, taste, nor self-awareness. It was a ghastly combination.
But more importantly, he lacked what it took to run an estate like Durham. And too many good people were dependent upon a duke with his wits about him and heart in the right place.
Which was why she had searched high and low for her late husband’s younger brother, only to learn that he’d died in the Americas some years earlier. But he had a son—an heir—and she had, by the grace of God, managed to persuade him to leave the dirt and dust of the stables and assume his rightful place in England.
Now she just needed to ensure that he stayed.
“There is always tomorrow for more lessons with the girls. And there is always you to teach them.”
“Thank you, Miss Green. If anyone can mold them into perfect lords and ladies, it is I. Though I fear for the future of the dukedom if even I cannot manage it. I have had one task in life and it was to secure the Durham dukedom for another generation. Failure is simply not an option I shall consider.”
After this disastrous evening, I am resolved harder to become the Woman of Quality the duchess wishes me to be—whom I wish to be. I shall adhere to my reducing diet, become an expert in the order of precedence, distinguish between all the forks at the dinner table, and learn how to waltz without stepping on my partner’s feet.
Lady Bridget’s Diary
After their debut in society, each Cavendish sibling quietly retired to his or her bedchamber in the monstrous Durham residence. But one by one, after the maids were dismissed for the evening, the sisters made their way to Claire’s bedroom and climbed onto her four-poster bed. It was a habit of theirs from back home. Bridget needed to know that this, at least, had not changed. She had a feeling her sisters did, too.
“Tonight was a disaster,” Bridget said flatly. She didn’t want to talk about it, but she could not not talk about it.
“I wouldn’t say that—” Claire began diplomatically.
“Claire, I fell. On the floor.”
“And apparently I am not supposed to refuse offers to dance,” Amelia said. “Even from decrepit old gentlemen with lecherous grins. That sort should not be allowed out near young ladies.”
“Apparently I already have a reputation as a bluestocking,” Claire said flatly. “All because I wear spectacles. And possess a modicum of intelligence.”
“You also asked a few ladies which subjects they liked to study and mentioned that you looked forward to meeting the Duke of Ashbrooke to discuss mathematical theories,” Amelia pointed out. “Apparently we are only supposed to discuss the weather.”
“Well, at least you’re not known as the girl who fell.”
Amelia giggled. Then Claire. Sisters.
Bridget glared at them. She pretended she was Josephine—no, that dreadful Darcy—and gave them her best death-to-you-insect look.
“Are you ill, Bridget?”
“No.”
“Because you were making an odd face.”
“It’s nothing,” she said, heaving a sigh and thinking back again to what she’d overheard the Despicable Darcy say. She is not handsome enough to tempt me to overlook her manners. He thought her ugly and ill-mannered. A tragic peasant, trussed up in fancy clothes. And he was, in all likelihood, merely echoing the sentiments of everyone they’d met tonight. While Bridget didn’t care what he thought, as he was a dreadful human, she did care what the rest of the ton thought of her and her family.
In that moment, it all became very real to her: chances were, this was their home now. This was where they would make friends, fall in love, start families of their own. If they weren’t laughed out of town.
She supposed they could go back to America. But now that Bridget thought about it, could she really return to everyone whispering that she just couldn’t succeed in England? They would say that she wasn’t pretty enough or ladylike enough so the English sent her back to the horse farm from whence she came.
She pictured a look of smug satisfaction on the face of Dreadful Darcy.
“So much for the duchess’s plan for us to take the haute ton by storm,” Amelia said, lazily twisting one of her long brown curls around her finger. “I hope we have disabused her of that notion so we can cease all those tedious lessons. I couldn’t care less how to address the younger son of a viscount. Or whomever.”
“Actually, I think I understand the point of all those lessons now,” Bridget said softly. They were to help her succeed rather than infringe upon her time spent perusing fashion periodicals in bed, sipping chocolate. They were to help her become a True Lady. “And now that I have already ruined my reputatio
n, and made myself a laughingstock, I want to make them all forget.” She pictured Darcy, snidely dismissing her looks and her manners. She thought of that tall, beautiful woman being all tall, beautiful, and well mannered. She probably knew whether a baron outranked an earl. She probably never fell, not even when learning to walk as a baby.
In that moment, Bridget was resolved. She would silence their laughter. She would earn their respect. She would faithfully attend to Josephine’s every lesson. “I will make everyone forget that I am the girl who fell,” she said, with a look of fierce determination. “I shall be known as Lady Bridget, diamond of the first water.”
Amelia laughed.
“Really?” Claire asked, skeptical. “I would much rather have some complex equations to solve. At least numbers make sense and are what they are, and opinions don’t matter at all.”
“To you. They make sense to you,” Amelia pointed out.
“If you would just apply yourself . . .” Claire replied.
Bridget interrupted a frequently recurring argument. “If we would all just apply ourselves to the duchess’s teachings, then we wouldn’t be the laughingstocks of London.”
“That has quite a ring to it,” Amelia said.
“That is entirely beside the point, Amelia,” Bridget huffed.
There was a knock on the door. James pushed it open slightly.
“Are you all decent?”
“Yes, do come in, Your Grace,” Claire called out.
“Oooh, it’s the duke,” Amelia teased. “We’d better bow and curtsy.”
Giggling, she and Bridget slid off the bed and Bridget was, well, Bridget. When she bowed and lifted her arm with a flourish, it smacked Amelia in the nose.
“Ow!”
“Good evening, Your Grace,” Bridget said in her most Dignified Lady voice. She might as well start practicing, for she had much catching up to do.
“We are so honored to have you grace us with your presence, Your Grace.” Amelia tried to curtsy and hold her nose at the same time, which resulted in her tumbling to the floor.
“Do shut up, all of you,” he muttered. Then he pulled up a chair next to the bed and took a seat, stretching his long legs out before him. He wore breeches, boots, and just a shirt. The duchess would undoubtedly be horrified by the informality.
“We were just discussing what a disaster this evening has been,” Claire told him.
“Living through it wasn’t enough? You have to discuss it, too?”
“Was it so bad dancing with all those women?”
“Aye.” James made A Face.
“What is it with gentlemen who do not like dancing?” Bridget wondered.
“It’s not so much the dancing as it is having everyone watch you do it,” James said with a shrug.
“I cannot believe Father never mentioned any of this,” Amelia said. Their parents died, one after the other. First, their mother passed away after contracting a wasting disease. Their father followed a few days later. Everyone said his cause of death was a broken heart.
“Sometimes he spoke of life in England before he came to America,” Claire said. She was the oldest and remembered more than the rest of them. “He spoke of foxhunting, cruel schoolmasters, and his time in the cavalry.”
“He spoke about Messenger,” James added with a fond smile.
They all smiled wistfully at the memory of the family’s prized horse, may he rest in peace. Legend had it that their father had absconded to America with the prize stallion—owned by his brother, the duke, Josephine’s late husband. He’d fallen in love with an American woman his family forbade him to wed, so he left England and never looked back. When their father needed to find a way to support his new family, he bred Messenger and raised and trained a series of champion racehorses on their farm.
They’d had an idyllic existence . . . loving parents, a beautiful farm to roam, and siblings to either play with or fight with or both.
“But he never mentioned any of this, did he?” Bridget asked softly. She waved her hand at the bedroom, and the house, and the unimaginable wealth they hadn’t even set eyes on yet. The duchess had mentioned country estates. Plural.
“He occasionally referenced his brother the duke but he did not say much. He certainly never mentioned that he or I were in line to inherit. He never even knew that he had inherited. Which is for the best; it probably wasn’t the best topic of conversation back home, if you think about it, with all the anti-royalty and anti-British sentiments.”
“Vastly preferable to all the anti-American sentiments we encountered this evening,” Bridget said.
She thought again of Darcy, standing there so proud and perfect and seeing her as the downfall of civilization.
She thought of home, too. She hadn’t fit in there either, but at least it was familiar and comforting.
“I wonder if there is a portrait of Father somewhere in this great big house,” Amelia mused. “I’d love to see what he looked like as a young man.”
“We can ask Josephine tomorrow,” Claire said, affectionately patting Amelia’s hand.
“Oh good. Perhaps it can distract her from more deportment and etiquette and torture lessons,” Amelia said.
“No, we need those,” Bridget said. All eyes turned to look at her. “If we are going to stay . . . we need to fit in.”
“Bridget, that is all part of her nefarious plot to marry us off. We’ll be separated,” Amelia said, anguished.
“I’m not going to let her marry the lot of you off,” James said. Then, with a slight grin, he added, “Much as you plague me and I sometimes consider it.”
“I hate to point this out, but Bridget does have a point,” Claire said thoughtfully. “If we are going to stay, we ought to make an effort to fit in.”
“This is not a temporary situation then, is it?” Amelia asked.
The siblings fell silent. James was the duke. He ought to stay. The sisters could return, of course. They could go back to Maryland and tell stories of their little (failed) foray into English high society. But Bridget, for one, couldn’t imagine life without all her siblings nearby.
The Cavendish siblings stuck together. No matter what.
It was all becoming clear to Bridget: she would have to start applying herself to becoming a True Lady and ensuring that her sisters did as well. If they stayed, they needed to fit in. If they returned to America, it would not be as failures.
“I don’t want us to be apart,” Claire said softly.
“So we stick together,” James said, leaning forward to look earnestly at his three worried sisters. “We either all stay in England. Or we all return to America. Together.”
A short while later, Bridget tossed and turned in her large bed, in her large room, in this large house. She was homesick for her small bed, in her small room, in a smaller house, halfway round the world.
But she knew she couldn’t go back.
She might have had one misstep (literally) during her debut tonight, but that paled in comparison to her years back in America. She never had quite the right dress, her hair was never done enough, she always seemed to have mud on her boots, and she always seemed to say the wrong things.
She was so tired of being laughed at and so tired of never quite getting this business of being a woman right. She missed her mother, who wasn’t here to show her how or to console her and encourage her to try again.
Instead she had Dreadful Darcy. And the way he looked at her with those dark eyes, down the length of his perfect noble nose, as if she were mud on his precious, expensive boots. As if he couldn’t believe the riffraff had been allowed in to mingle with the Good and Proper people.
The way he said, in that haughty English voice of his, She is not handsome enough to tempt me to overlook her manners.
But she had the duchess to help her.
She would become a Person of Quality and a True Lady, if it was the last thing she did. She would be strict with the reducing diet so she could have a fashionable figure and fit into the fashionable dresses. Somehow, she’d get her hair to be glossy, sleek, and curled. She’d learn all the steps of the quadrille and all the other obscure country dances she might need to know. She would learn how to bite her tongue, unless she had exactly the right thing to say. She would figure out the right thing to say. And she’d never again hear or see condemnation from the likes of Lord Dreadful Darcy.
Tomorrow. She would begin becoming perfect tomorrow.
Chapter 3
Most people I met tonight were horrible, crashing bores, except for one handsome and charming gentleman, Mr. Wright. But his brother Lord Darcy was The Worst.
Lady Bridget’s Diary
Darcy was at work on vital estate business and matters of national importance when his brother strolled into the study and dropped into a chair.
“Did you know that Rothermere lost ten thousand pounds and a hunting box in Scotland over a game of whist last week?”
“I did not.” Darcy didn’t bother looking up from his paperwork.
“Certainly puts things in perspective, doesn’t it?”
“What things?”
“Well, say a person lost just a few hundred pounds . . . It’s really not the end of the world, now is it?”
“Should I even bother to ask who lost a few hundred pounds?” Darcy asked dryly, finally looking up from his work. In the past few months, Rupert had begun losing at cards. In fact, he was steadily becoming worse and racking up increasing debts with each game. It should be noted that Darcy wasn’t opposed to cards or wagering; he was simply opposed to losing.
“You know, Darcy, you’re my favorite brother.”
“I am your only brother.”
“And brothers take care of each other. Especially when they haven’t any other family in the world.”
