With that, he took his leave of them. “That went well, I think,” Jack commented as soon as he was sure they were out of earshot.
“I have nothing to wear to a ball,” Elizabeth said, her voice gone hollow, “and I’m by no means certain I even remember how to dance.”
“Why, that’s easily remedied,” Mrs. Lang assured her, and the two ladies began to talk of modistes and music.
Chapter Sixteen
Elizabeth stood on the threshold of her very first ball and tried not to succumb to an attack of nerves. Had it not been for her father’s crimes she would have passed this milestone half a lifetime ago.
“All well?” Jack murmured in her ear.
She turned her head to admire him. He was dressed in the most glittering possible version of his uniform, the gold lace sparkling on his scarlet coat, his usual plain boots replaced by elegant dancing slippers. He would not dance tonight, but still he must look the part.
“I feel,” she whispered back, “as if I were sixteen and sixty at the same time.”
He blinked quizzically at her. “You certainly look thirty to me—no, if I didn’t know your age I might take you for five-and-twenty, but certainly not sixteen.”
“Five-and-twenty? You flatter me.”
“Hardly. You’ll dance every dance, see if you don’t. But what do you mean, you feel sixteen and sixty all at once?”
She tried to explain, though she doubted it was something a man could truly understand. “I feel just as I imagined I would when I dreamed of balls, before...before Father. Terrified and joyful all at once, as if I were sixteen. But then I tell myself how absurd it is to feel like a young girl, and I suddenly feel twice my age.”
“You look splendid, and I think you should feel as much like a girl at her first ball as you like, since it is your first. Though it sounds as if you may get the chance to make up for a lifetime’s missed balls within a month.”
Elizabeth smoothed an invisible wrinkle out of her white muslin skirts and hoped she was fine enough for the company. There was nothing elaborate about the dress. The modiste she had found willing to make her a gown in time for the Duke of Wellington’s ball hadn’t had time to do more than sew a band of green-and-yellow rosettes above the hem and trim the high waist and sleeves with green ribbon in the shade Jack liked best on her. Glancing around at the other ladies waiting to enter the ballroom, she thought she would do, but if she received praise it certainly wouldn’t be as the best-dressed woman in the room.
She was still startled by the constant whirl of gaiety that was life in Brussels on the edge of war. Though this was her first ball, she and Jack had had only one quiet evening at home since their arrival. There had been three dinners, two musical evenings and a card party, and Elizabeth would be giving her own first dinner, an intimate gathering for the senior regimental officers of Jack’s brigade, the night after next.
When she had expressed her surprise to Jack, he had laughed and asked her what she had expected.
“Less dancing and more drill,” she’d replied.
“Ah, but we drill all day. Don’t let all this fool you into thinking we don’t take Boney seriously, all of us from the duke on down. But it does no good to give up all pleasures. You wouldn’t like that in any case,” he’d added, trailing a suggestive fingertip along the neckline of her gown.
“I take your point.”
“I thought you might. Surely you wouldn’t want to deny men who might die tomorrow the joys of today.”
“No talk of dying!” she’d chided him.
At last their turn came to enter the ballroom, and all thoughts but the present were swept from her mind. Lieutenant Beckett, Jack’s young aide-de-camp, claimed her hand for the opening cotillion, and she discovered she remembered how to dance after all.
“It was kind of you to ask me to begin,” she said when a brief pause allowed them time for conversation, “even if Sir John ordered you to do so.” She caught Jack’s eye where he stood along the wall, chatting with the Duke of Richmond, and smiled.
“Nonsense,” Lieutenant Beckett said cheerfully. “Your husband isn’t my commander when it comes to balls, and I have the pleasure of knowing that all the gentlemen who haven’t yet met you are looking at me with envy and wondering who my partner is.”
She laughed. “You flatter me too much.”
But as the evening went on, it almost seemed that he had spoken truth. She found herself partnered with a succession of young captains and older colonels and generals, culminating in a country dance with the young Prince of Orange and a reel with the Duke of Wellington. From what her partners told her, she gathered her husband had been praising her to anyone who would listen, and that Wellington had been heard to mention General Armstrong’s pretty wife, and that was enough to secure her popularity.
The next dance was a waltz, and since Elizabeth had never had the opportunity to learn it—such a thing would never have been imaginable in York when she was a girl learning to dance—she found Jack and sat beside him.
“This must be a sad bore for you,” she said.
“Not at all. I’m watching you be happy, and that is enough for me.”
“Truly?”
He tucked her hand into his elbow and gave it a squeeze with his other hand. “Truly. Now, I wish I could dance a waltz with you, and hold you in my arms like that for all the world to see.”
Elizabeth glanced at the swirling couples. “It seems shocking, though, for couples who aren’t intimate, to engage in such public embraces.”
“Are you sure some of those couples aren’t intimate?” he asked, turning a glance of cool disapproval upon their host, who whirled by with Lady Frances Wedderburn-Webster. Both the duke’s wife and Lady Frances’s husband were back in England, and neither of the dancers seemed to consider their absent spouses any impediment to their pleasures.
“I love to hear you censure other men for their affairs.”
“I suppose it is hypocritical of me.”
“Not at all,” she assured him. “It is most delightful.”
He bent to whisper in her ear. “Later tonight,” he murmured, “I will show you the one place where I can dance as well as any gentleman out there.”
Entering into the spirit of the thing, she snapped her fan open and gazed at him over its edge. “Oh, la, Sir John! And where might that be? On the battlefield?”
He grinned. “In your bed, Lady Armstrong.”
She felt her face heat, and they laughed together. “I hope that is a promise,” she said as soon as she was calm enough to speak archly.
“A certainty, unless you’d rather stay here till four o’clock in the morning so you can dance every dance.”
It was indeed already midnight, and the ball showed no signs of breaking up. “I suppose we must at least stay to supper,” she said, “but I see no need of lingering long after.”
“I hope you’re enjoying your first ball,” he said earnestly.
“Oh, I am indeed. And I can hardly wait to write Eugenia Ilderton and Augusta Rafferty tomorrow, that they may tell Lady Dryden I danced with a prince and a duke.”
He laughed. “I wish I could see her face when she learns of it.”
“Oh, but I can imagine it perfectly well, can’t you?”
“I can. And I’m glad to see you so happy. You deserve it, after all you’ve done.”
“I am enjoying it. But I enjoy you more.”
And enjoy him more she did, as soon as they made it back to their own temporary home, a little after two in the morning.
* * *
From that night onward, Elizabeth found herself popular in the social whirl of Brussels. The last thing she had expected when she had chosen to accompany Jack on campaign was fun, but May in Brussels became the debut she had never got the chance to have, only she doubted even a highborn heiress in the London Season could have gone to as many dinners and balls over such a few short weeks.
“Do you regret that you missed your chance
for this at seventeen or eighteen?” Jack asked one morning about a fortnight after they’d arrived as they strolled together in the park.
“Not at all,” she assured him.
“But you would have been single, with all these gentlemen to choose among.”
“Then? No, I would’ve been shy, and gauche, and just as awkward as you were at that age. Besides, all this popularity of mine is due to you.”
“What do you mean?”
“Why, all I hear, especially from those few men who knew you when the Forty-Ninth was last in Europe, is that everyone wants to meet the woman who brought Jack Armstrong to heel.” She glanced at him sidelong from beneath her bonnet’s brim to see how he took it, and was delighted by his half-embarrassed grin. “And I don’t want any of these other gentlemen, you know. I have you.”
He drew her closer to his side as they walked, and Elizabeth thought he would have kissed her had they been anywhere but a public promenade. But her bliss was spoiled by a creeping sensation that they were being watched, and by no friendly eyes. She turned her head to the left and saw a man of fifty or so seated on a bench about twenty feet away. She had never seen him before, but he was dressed like an English country squire and he stared at her and Jack with undisguised loathing.
“Jack,” she murmured.
“What is it?” he asked, alert to her changed tone.
“Who is that man on the bench there, staring at us?”
She’d looked away—she didn’t want to see more of the hate on his face—but Jack peered over the top of her head for a moment. “Is he wearing a brown coat?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“I couldn’t see his face, I’m afraid. He’s walking away now. You say he was staring?”
“Yes, and with such hatred. I don’t know him, but perhaps he knows you?”
“Who knows? Perhaps one of us simply reminded him of someone he dislikes.”
* * *
Elizabeth tried to forget the incident, but for the next two mornings when she walked in the park with Louisa she caught further glimpses of the older man, always alone. He never looked at her with quite as much hatred as on that first day, but there was a speculative gleam in his eyes that she didn’t like. Louisa saw him, too, but he had a gift for melting into the crowd of strollers enjoying the verdant park before they could approach him too closely.
She had nothing to fear, Elizabeth tried to assure herself. She never went anywhere alone, and even if the man did try to attack her, she was almost certain she could fight him off or outrun him. He looked thin, wasted, the very reverse of robust. But the last time she had been stared at so was just after her father died, and it mixed a note of disturbance with her happiness.
At first she didn’t see him at any of her evening entertainments, which led her to conclude he was not part of the exalted circle of military society she and Jack had found a place among. Then one night as she was dancing a cotillion with the Duke of Wellington, she saw him again, standing by a potted palm.
“Sir, do you know that man in the green coat?” she asked with a slight nod in his direction during the first quiet interval in the dance.
Wellington followed her gaze. The stranger wasn’t looking at her any longer—she supposed he dare not look threateningly at her under the gaze of the duke himself—but the press of the crowd was too great for him to immediately slip away.
“Hm. It’s been several years since I last saw him, but I believe that is Henry Liddicott,” Wellington said as the man managed to take himself out of sight. “He was a lieutenant-colonel then, but sold out after his wife died, several years ago. He was in the Forty-Ninth with your husband, I believe, but exchanged into a different regiment before they went to Canada. Why do you ask?”
“It’s not important. I only thought he was looking at me oddly.”
“Impertinent of him, but he never had much address.”
Elizabeth didn’t want to mention that it wasn’t the first time she’d caught Liddicott staring at her, so she turned the subject to a light item of army gossip Lieutenant Beckett had reported to her and Jack over dinner, and the dance passed pleasantly enough.
But why should this Liddicott dislike her when he didn’t know her? Could Jack have made an enemy of him, somehow? Oh, no—was he the officer whose wife had seduced Jack when he was a young lieutenant, the lady Jack had told her she need not dread meeting because she was dead?
After much deliberation, she decided to confront Jack with her suspicions after they arrived home that night. It didn’t matter any longer, she assured herself. It was all past, and she’d long since forgiven him. But she wanted an explanation of Liddicott’s odd behavior for her own peace of mind.
Jack was behaving rather oddly himself. He didn’t gossip with her over what they had seen at the party or make any attempt to seduce her as they undressed for the night.
“May I ask you something?” she said as he climbed into bed beside her. He’d blown out the last candle, to her relief. This conversation would be easier to have in the dark.
“Of course,” he replied, but his voice sounded wary.
“Do you remember the other morning in the park, when I said I saw a man staring at us?”
“Yes. I didn’t see him, though.”
Elizabeth suspected he had, or he wouldn’t be making such a point of how he hadn’t. “He was at the ball tonight, too. I caught him staring at me while I danced with the duke, and he told me his name was Liddicott, that he’d been in the Forty-Ninth with you once, and that he’d left the army altogether after his wife died a few years ago.”
“Oh. I, ah, did think he looked familiar, from the little glimpse I saw of him.”
“Then why didn’t you say something? And did you not notice him at all tonight?”
“I was in the card room, except when I sat out the waltz with you.”
That wasn’t quite an answer, so Elizabeth took a deep breath and confronted him with her suspicions. “I wondered...was his wife the one who seduced you, when you were one-and-twenty?”
He didn’t speak for a moment, though his heavy sigh told everything. At last, he murmured, “You’re so quick. Yes. She was the one. Bella Liddicott.”
Why did he sound so worried, and why had he tried to hide his recognition of the man from her? It wasn’t as though this was some new secret. Elizabeth had known there was such a woman, after all. She shrugged. “There can’t have been many officers in the Forty-Ninth who exchanged into other regiments and had wives who died in the past few years. And why would he look at us—at me—with such particular dislike?” That was the part that most puzzled her. She could understand, easily, why a gentleman might resent a man who had made a cuckold of him, even many years later. But why would he hold a grudge against that man’s wife?
“I’m not sure. I would’ve sworn he didn’t know. I was hardly the only one, either.”
“Perhaps he didn’t know, then, but it came up in some quarrel later.”
“I’m sorry, Elizabeth.”
She began to wish she’d never brought it up. Reaching into the darkness, she laid a tentative hand on his shoulder. “You don’t have to apologize all over again. This doesn’t change anything. I already knew everything but her name, and I’ve already forgiven you. I’m sorry Mr. Liddicott is making himself unpleasant, but it shouldn’t change anything that’s between us now.”
“No,” he said after a long pause. “It shouldn’t. I hope we won’t be obliged to see much of him, but you’re right. Nothing has changed.”
But something had changed, Elizabeth thought as she lay awake long into the night. It was the first time they had returned home from a ball, no matter how late the hour, and not come together in bed. She supposed it was only natural after such a conversation, but it left another chill on her happiness.
* * *
The next day Jack awoke in a foul mood. He tried to tell himself it was only lack of sleep that made the late May sunshine seem like a personal affron
t, but he knew better. What the devil was Henry Liddicott doing in Brussels? He wasn’t with the army anymore, so what had brought him here when he ought to be rusticating at his home in Cornwall? Bella had always hated Cornwall, Jack remembered, resenting any time her husband obliged her to spend there, away from the glamour of London society or the young, masculine environment of the regiment on campaign.
He’d quickly learned that his aide-de-camp was an endless fount of gossip, so he asked, casually, as soon as Beckett had finished listing the gentlemen the young Lennox ladies had danced with the night before and which of them were thought to be serious suitors, if he had any idea why Liddicott was here.
“I don’t know, sir.” Beckett frowned at his own ignorance, then brightened. “But I’m sure I can find out.”
“If you will, but I’d rather you not mention that I was asking questions about it. He and I, ah, we weren’t the best of friends when we served together. I’m ready to forget old grudges, but I’m less certain he is.”
“Silent as the grave, sir.”
With that, they both turned their minds to regimental business, but the next morning Beckett came whistling into the parlor that Jack had made his office. “Your old friend Liddicott, sir, is here for precisely the same reason so many of our civilian families are. He wishes to live more cheaply than he can at home.”
Jack frowned over the regimental returns he’d been reviewing. “I thought Brussels wasn’t cheap any longer now that we’ve filled it up with soldiers. I’m sure I heard Lady Caroline Capel complaining about how dear everything was becoming just last week.”
“If people will have a dozen children and gamble at every opportunity...but you wish to know about Liddicott, not the Capels. His need is more particular. It seems his home was damaged in a fire, and he had a nephew already established here in town who offered to let him stay gratis until the repairs are completed.”
Jack nodded. “Thank you, Lieutenant. What messages from the duke? I don’t suppose we’re to march for France tomorrow?” he said lightly. He knew the answer was no, though he wished it were otherwise. It would solve the problem of Liddicott neatly, if they could simply leave Brussels. But army gossip held that the advance wouldn’t commence until July, and if Wellington had any other plans, he’d taken no one into his confidence.
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