by Mary Balogh
Jennifer and Samantha exchanged rueful smiles.
“Well,” Lord Nordal said dismissively, “you will be tired after your journey, I daresay, and will be glad to rest for a while.”
“Aunt Agatha!” Samantha said a short while later as she and Jennifer were being conducted to their rooms by the housekeeper. “The dragon herself. I always have difficulty understanding how she and Mama could have been sisters. Will we have any enjoyment out of this Season, Jenny?”
“Far more than we would without her,” Jennifer said. “Without Aunt Agatha, who would take us about, Sam, and introduce us to Society? Who would see to it that we receive and accept the proper invitations? And who would see to it that we have partners at the balls we attend and escorts to the theater and opera? Papa? Can you really see Papa so exerting himself?”
Samantha chuckled with her at the mental image of her stern and humorless uncle playing the part of social organizer for their Season. “I suppose you are right,” she said. “Yes, she will see to it that we have partners, will she not? She will see to it that my worst nightmare will not be realized. Dear Aunt Aggy. Not that you have to worry about partners, Jenny. You will have Lord Kersey.”
The very thought was enough to turn Jennifer’s heart over in a somersault. Dancing with Lionel. Attending the theater with Lionel. Perhaps being alone with Lionel for a few moments whenever it could be arranged and exchanging kisses with him. Kisses—her knees had turned to jelly at Christmas last year when he had kissed her hand. Would her knees bear her up if—no, when—he kissed her lips?
“But not all the time,” she said. “It would be most indecorous to dance with the same partner more than twice at one ball, Sam, even if he were one’s betrothed. You know that.”
“Perhaps you will meet someone even more handsome, then,” Samantha said. “And someone who is not cold.”
Jennifer felt the old indignation against her cousin’s assessment of Lord Kersey. He was very blond and very blue-eyed and had features of chiseled excellence. And to Samantha he seemed cold—although she shared his coloring. Of course, the warmth of her complexion would always save Sam from such an accusation even apart from the liveliness of her face and the eagerness with which she approached life.
Lord Kersey—Lionel—was not cold. Sam, of course, had never had the full force of his smile directed her way. It was a smile of devastating attractiveness. It was a smile that had enslaved Jennifer ever since at the age of fifteen she had met for the first time the husband her father had picked out for her. She had never resented the arranged match. Never once. She had fallen in love with her intended husband at first sight and had remained in love with him ever since.
“If I do meet someone more handsome,” she said as they reached the top of the stairs and were led in the direction of their rooms, “I shall pass him on to you, Sam. If he has not seen you first, that is, and fallen prostrate at your feet.”
“What a delightful idea,” Samantha said.
“Not that it would be possible to meet anyone more handsome than Lord Kersey, of course,” Jennifer said.
“I will grant you that,” Samantha agreed. “But maybe somewhere in this vast metropolis there is a gentleman who is equally handsome and who admires blond hair and blue eyes and insignificant stature and a nondescript figure.”
Jennifer laughed and turned to enter the room the housekeeper was indicating as hers. “And Sam,” she said just before they parted, “do be careful not to call our aunt Aunt Aggy to her face. Do you remember her expression when you did so last year at Grandmama’s funeral?”
Samantha chuckled and pulled a face.
“STUBBORNNESS WILL BE YOUR undoing one of these days, Gabe,” Sir Albert Boyle remarked to his companion as they rode in Hyde Park unfashionably early in the afternoon. “But I must say I am glad you are back in town for all that. It has been dull without you for the last two years.”
“But you will note that I do not quite have the courage to take to Rotten Row at five o’clock on my first full day back,” Gabriel Fisher, the Earl of Thornhill, said dryly. “Perhaps tomorrow. Probably tomorrow. I’ll be damned before I’ll stay away altogether, Bertie, merely because I can anticipate being looked at askance and watching very proper matrons draw their sweet young charges behind their skirts and away from my contaminating influence. It is a pity hooped skirts fell out of fashion several decades ago. They would be able to hide their daughters more effectively.”
“It may not be half as bad as you expect,” his friend said. “And you could always proclaim the truth, you know.”
“The truth?” The earl laughed without any trace of humor. “How do you know that the truth has not been told, Bertie? How do you know that I am not the heinous villain I have been made out to be?”
“I know you,” Sir Albert said. “Remember?”
“And so you do,” the earl said, fixing his eyes on the approaching figures of two young ladies, still some distance away, who were strolling beneath frilly parasols, their maids walking at a discreet distance behind them. “People may believe what they will, Bertie. To hell with the ton and their scandalmongering. Besides, it is altogether possible that I will be more in demand this year than I have ever been before.”
“Scandal does often add fascination when it attaches to a man’s name,” his friend agreed. “And of course the fact that you are now an earl whereas two years ago you were a mere baron will help. And as rich as Croesus to boot. At least, I assume you are. That is how you always used to describe your father.”
The Earl of Thornhill was apparently paying no attention. His eyes were narrowed. “You will never know, Bertie,” he said, “how I have pined during the past year and a half on the Continent for the sight of an English beauty. There is nothing to compare in Italy or France or Switzerland, you know, or anywhere else either. Tall and short. Dark and fair. Well endowed and more delicate. But each exquisite in her own very English way. Will they pretend not to notice us, do you think, and direct their eyes downward? Or will they look up? Will they blush? Will they smile?”
“Or frown,” Sir Albert said, laughing as he followed the direction of his friend’s gaze. “Exquisite, yes. And strangers, unfortunately. Of course at this time of year London is always full of strangers. After a few weeks one will have seen them a dozen times at a dozen different entertainments.”
“Frown? I think not,” the earl said softly as their horses took them closer to the two ladies, who really should have waited a few hours if they hoped to be ogled as they deserved to be, he thought. He swept off his hat and inclined his head, almost forcing them to raise their eyes.
The small blonde blushed. Very prettily. She was true English beauty personified. The sort of beauty one dreamed of acquiring in a bride when one’s thoughts must eventually bend that way. The tall dark-haired girl did not blush. Her hair, he noted with interest, was not dark brown, as he had first thought. When the light of the sun caught it as she raised her head and the brim of her bonnet no longer shaded it, he saw that it was a dark, rich red. And her eyes were dark and large. Her figure—well, if the other girl could turn the thoughts of even a fancy-free twenty-six-year-old to matrimony, then this one could turn the thoughts in another direction altogether. She was the sort of British beauty he had dreamed through tedious months of duty and a type of self-exile abroad of having naked beneath him on a bed.
“Good afternoon.” He smiled, directing the full intensity of his dark gaze not at the blond beauty who had first taken his eye and who had stopped walking in order to curtsy, but at the greater challenge of her luscious companion, who was making no response at all beyond a candid stare and a slight pause in her walk. It was a pity, he found himself thinking, that she was very obviously a lady.
“Good afternoon,” Sir Albert said beside him while the one girl curtsied, the other waited for her before moving on, and the maids stepped closer.
The two gentlemen rode on and did not look back.
“Eminently b
edworthy,” the earl muttered. “Lusciously, mouth-wateringly so. I am going to have to set up a mistress, Bertie. I have had no one since leaving England, if you will believe it, beyond one reckless encounter with a whore and then several weeks of terror at what she might have given me apart from an hour of strenuous and moderately satisfying sport. I did not repeat the experiment. And taking a mistress seemed somehow disrespectful to Catherine. I shall have to take a look-in at the theaters and opera houses and see who is available. It will not do to salivate in the park every afternoon, will it?”
“Hair the color of pale moonbeams,” said Sir Albert, waxing poetic, “and eyes like cornflowers. She is going to have armies of suitors before many days have passed. Especially if she has a fortune to match the face.”
“Ah,” the earl said, “you fancied the blonde, did you? It was the lady of the long and shapely legs who had my mind turning determinedly in the direction of mistresses. Oh, to have such legs twine about one’s own, Bertie. Yes, I must say I am glad to be back in England, scandal or no scandal.”
He knew he should be spending the spring at Chalcote instead of postponing his return until the summer. His father had been dead only a little over a year—since his own removal to the Continent with Catherine, his father’s second wife. His title and his property were new to him. He should have hastened home as soon as the news reached them, but bringing Catherine back had been out of the question and he had felt himself unable to leave her at that particular time. Staying with her had seemed more important than hurrying home too late to attend his father’s funeral anyway.
Now he knew he should go home. But Bertie had been right. There was a great deal of stubbornness in him. Coming to London for the Season was madness when doing so meant facing the ton, who believed almost without exception that he had eloped to the Continent with his father’s wife after impregnating her. And now, of course, he had abandoned her to live alone in Switzerland with their daughter—or so the story doubtless went. Catherine was indeed living there quite comfortably with the child. He had given her the protection of his company during her confinement and for almost a year following it. Now she was quite capable of living independently—and he had been almost desperately homesick.
It would have been far better to have gone straight home to Chalcote. It was what he should have done and what he had wanted to do. London would be better faced—if at all—next year or the year after when the scandal had cooled somewhat. Except that scandal never cooled in London. Whenever he went there for the first time—whether it was now or ten years hence—it would flare about him.
It had never been his way to avoid scandal or to show that he cared one way or another for what people said of him. He did care as much as anyone, he supposed, but he would go to the devil before he would show that he cared. He had not made any attempt to correct that erroneous conclusion that had been jumped to when he had taken his pregnant stepmother away from his father’s fury after she admitted that she was with child. It was as Gabriel had suspected—his father, sickly since before his second marriage, had never consummated that marriage. He had been afraid that his father would harm Catherine or her unborn child or would openly deny paternity and ruin her forever. The old earl had not done so, but gossip had blossomed into a major scandal anyway when her flight to the Continent with her stepson and her condition had become common knowledge.
Let people think what they would, the present Earl of Thornhill had thought. He had been established in Switzerland with Catherine before she told him who the father of her child was.
He should have returned to kill the man, he had thought often since. But as Catherine had explained to him, what had happened had not been rape. The foolish woman had loved the villain who had so carelessly impregnated her—the wife of a man who would know that he had been cuckolded—and had then made himself very scarce as soon as his sins had threatened to find him out.
And so the Earl of Thornhill was back, fifteen months after the sudden death of his father, almost one year after the birth of the child who bore his father’s name despite the very public conviction that she was not his father’s.
Back and foolishly thrusting his head straight into the lion’s mouth. And eyeing British beauties who were obviously in town for the annual spring marriage mart. There would be one or two parents who would be outraged and foaming at the mouth if they knew that the Earl of Thornhill had just made his bow to their daughters—and had imagined one of them naked on a bed beneath him, her long legs twined about his.
He smiled rather grimly.
“Tomorrow, Bertie,” he said, “weather permitting, we will come for the fashionable squeeze. And tomorrow I shall send back acceptances to some of my invitations. Yes, I have had a surprising number. I suppose my newly acquired rank, as you say, and, even more important, my newly acquired fortune do a great deal to make some people turn a blind eye to my notoriety.”
“People will flock to view you,” Sir Albert said cheerfully, “if only to see if you have acquired horns and a tail during the past year, Gabe, and if they can see any signs through your stockings and dancing shoes of cloven feet. I revel in the irony of your name. Gabriel of the cloven foot.” He laughed loudly.
What would that dark red hair look like without the bonnet, the earl wondered, and beneath the light of hundreds of candles in their chandeliers? Would he find out? Would he ever be allowed close enough to her to see quite clearly?
He looked back over his shoulder, but she and her companion had passed out of sight.
“THERE,” SAMANTHA SAID, TWIRLING her parasol, well pleased with life. “We are not to be quite ignored, Jenny. I even read admiration in their eyes. I wonder who they are. Will we find out, do you think?”
“Probably,” Jennifer said. “They are undoubtedly gentlemen. And how could they fail to admire you? All the gentlemen at home do. I do not see why London gentlemen should be any different.”
Samantha sighed. “I just wish we did not look so rustic,” she said. “I wish some of the clothes we were measured for this morning had been made up already. Aunt Aggy was a positive love, poker face or not, to insist on so many clothes for each of us, was she not? I could have hugged her except that Aunt Aggy is not quite the sort of person one hugs. I wonder if our Uncle Percy ever … Oh, never mind.” She laughed lightly. “I wish I were wearing the new blue walking dress that is to be finished by next week.”
“I am not sure,” Jennifer said, “that those gentlemen should have spoken to us. It would have been more proper if they had merely touched their hats and ridden on.”
Samantha laughed again. “The dark one was very handsome,” she said. “As handsome as Lord Kersey, in fact, though in entirely the opposite way. But I think I liked his companion better. He smiled sweetly and did not look like the devil.”
Jennifer would not own that the dark gentleman was as handsome as Lionel. He was too dark, too thin-faced, too bold. His eyes had bored into hers as if he saw her not only without her clothes but even without her skin and bones. And his eyes and his smile, she had noticed, had been directed wholly and quite improperly on her. If he had deemed it polite to sweep off his hat and to smile and even pass the time of day, then he should have made it a gesture to the two of them. Not just to Samantha, and not just to her. His behavior had been quite unmannerly. She suspected that perhaps they had just encountered one of the rakes with whom London was said to abound.
“Yes,” she said, “he did look like the devil, did he not? As Lord Kersey looks like an angel. You were quite right to say they are handsome in quite opposite ways, Sam. That gentleman looks like Lucifer. Lord Kersey looks like an angel.”
“The angel Gabriel,” Samantha said with a laugh, “and the devil Lucifer.” She twirled her parasol. “Oh, this walk has done me the world of good, Jenny, even though Aunt Aggy has strictly forbidden us to show our faces at anything that might be called fashionable until next week. Two gentlemen have raised their hats to us and bidden us a good aft
ernoon and my spirits have soared even though one of them looks like the devil. A handsome devil, though. Of course, you don’t have to wait a week, you lucky thing. Lord Kersey is calling on you tomorrow morning.”
“Yes.” Jennifer went off into a dream. Word had come during the morning that Lionel was back in town and that tomorrow morning he was to call on her father—and on her.
Sometimes it was very difficult to remember that one was twenty years old and a dignified lady. Sometimes it was difficult not to set one’s parasol twirling at lightning speed and not to whoop out one’s joy to surrounding nature. Tomorrow she would see Lionel again. Tomorrow—perhaps—she would be officially betrothed to him.
Tomorrow. Oh, would tomorrow ever come?
2
LADY BRILL, JENNIFER AND SAMANTHA’S AUNT Agatha, was merely a baronet’s widow and daughter and sister of a viscount, but she had a presence that a duchess might have envied and a self-assurance acquired during many years of residence in London. It should have been impossible for any self-respecting modiste to produce even a single garment less than twenty-four hours after her first call upon a client. And yet, thanks to the cajolery of Lady Brill, early in the morning after Madame Sophie had spent several hours at Berkeley Square with the Honorable Miss Jennifer Winwood and Miss Samantha Newman, a morning dress of pale green was delivered to the former by Madame’s head assistant, who made sure that the fit was perfect before she left again.
Jennifer was to be fashionable when she received her first formal town visit from Viscount Kersey.
And she must be demure and ladylike, she told herself as she brushed cold and unsteady hands lightly over the fabric of her new dress, smoothing out nonexistent wrinkles. Her heart fluttered. She breathed as if she had just run for a mile nonstop and uphill. Samantha had just darted into her dressing room with word that the Earl and Countess of Rushford and Viscount Kersey had arrived.
