by Mary Balogh
“One might almost believe, Miss Huxtable,” Duncan said, dropping his quizzing glass on its black ribbon and taking her hand to set on his shirt cuff, then holding it there with his other hand, “that you had orchestrated the whole thing. It is a marvelous piece of theater in itself, is it not?”
She laughed. “That would have been very clever of me,” she said. “Do you admire Mr. Goldsmith’s plays?”
“I shall answer the question after viewing the performance,” he said.
But he could not concentrate upon it. He was very aware of the warmth of her hand, the slim length of her fingers, the perfect oval of her short-cut nails. And he was aware that she was a woman of great physical attractions, and that he was definitely attracted—physically, that was. Bedding her would be no hardship at all, if they ever married.
He was aware of her family sitting very close and watching in silence—though whether it was him or the play that they watched, he did not know since they were all behind him.
And he was fully aware that those who were in attendance tonight would have far more interesting things to discuss tomorrow than the caliber of the performance that was proceeding on the stage.
Would Randolph Turner finally defend his honor and challenge him to a duel now that he had dared show his face in London?
Even though duels were illegal?
Sound swelled as the first act came to an end and the intermission began.
“Is the performance better than you expected, Meg?” the duchess asked, leaning forward in her chair. “She believes, Lord Sheringford, that she prefers to read plays rather than watch them performed.”
“It is because we grew up in the country,” Lady Montford explained, “where there were far more opportunities to read than to watch a performance.”
“The characters on stage almost never look quite as I imagined them,” Miss Huxtable said. “And the dialogue is never quite as sprightly. On the whole I prefer to bring my imagination to bear upon literature rather than my eyes and ears.”
“But this is an unusually fine performance,” Merton said.
“Tell me, Meg,” Monty said, winking at Duncan. “Would you rather read a musical score than listen to a symphony?”
“That is a different matter altogether,” she told him with a smile.
“Not really,” Moreland said. “A play is written to be seen and heard, not read, Margaret.”
“But I would say,” Duncan said, “that anything that is written in any form for the purpose of entertaining an audience may be enjoyed in any manner each individual finds most entertaining.”
“Oh, what a very diplomatic answer,” Lady Montford said, clapping her hands. “I must remember that the next time you decide to tease Meg about her preferences, Jasper.”
“Shall we go for a stroll outside the box?” he suggested, getting to his feet and offering an arm to his wife. “Would anyone care to join us?”
He looked deliberately at Duncan.
Merton and Moreland and his duchess were already on their feet.
“We will remain here,” Miss Huxtable said, and a few moments later they were alone together in the box.
“You are showing a small degree of mercy on me, are you, Miss Huxtable?” Duncan asked. “Or on yourself? Do you enjoy the notoriety you have courted by inviting me here this evening?”
“It is a notoriety I brought upon myself the moment I gave in to temptation and introduced you to Crispin Dew as my betrothed,” she said. “Though the word notoriety suggests the existence of some wrongdoing. I have done nothing wrong—except to tell that lie.”
“Which,” he said, “will soon turn out not to be a lie after all.”
“Will?” she said. “You are very confident, my lord.”
“What will happen to you,” he asked her, “if you do not marry me?”
She was the sort of woman, he thought, who could wear any color and look as if that was the color she ought always to wear. Tonight it was a netted silver tunic over turquoise silk. She was the sort of woman who would look beautiful even when her dark hair began to turn gray.
She shrugged and fanned her face slowly.
“Nothing whatsoever will change,” she said. “The gossip will soon die down for lack of fuel to feed it, and I shall go home to Warren Hall, where I am always happy and where I can always keep myself busily occupied.”
“And as time goes on?” he said. “Will your life always remain the same? How old is Merton?”
“Twenty-two,” she said.
“In five or six years’ time, then,” he said, “if not sooner, he will undoubtedly turn his mind toward marriage and the begetting of heirs. What will happen to your life at Warren Hall then?”
“It is a large house,” she said. “There will still be room for me.”
He gazed deeply into her eyes and said nothing.
“I will find something to do,” she said.
“With your brother’s children, no doubt,” he said.
“Yes,” she agreed. “That will be pleasant.”
“Would it not be more pleasant,” he asked, “if they were your own?”
She fanned her face a little more briskly.
“We are talking about what I will do if I do not marry you,” she said. “Perhaps I will marry someone else.”
“Who?” he asked her. “Major Dew?”
She folded her fan, laid it very carefully across her lap, and looked down at it.
“No,” she said. “The time for that was ten years or more ago. What I felt for him then cannot be recaptured now, and I could not settle for less.”
“And yet,” he said, “if you marry me, you will be settling for considerably less, will you not? You have never loved me, and I have never loved you.”
She looked up at him, a smile tugging at the corners of her mouth.
“Lord Sheringford,” she said, “you are supposed to be wooing me. Do you expect to succeed if you tell me so baldly that you do not love me?”
“I suspect I would stand far less chance of success,” he said, “if I were to sit here pouring ardent platitudes into your ear and sighing piteously like a lover who fears that his love will be scorned and his heart trampled underfoot.”
“I believe you would,” she admitted, laughing.
He held her eyes with his own.
“You are not a virgin,” he said, “by your own near admission. Are you content to go through the rest of your life without any more sexual experiences?”
She flushed but did not look away from him.
“As you believe I will,” she said, “if I do not marry you?”
“As you probably will,” he said, “if you do not marry me or someone else. I do not judge you to be promiscuous. But why not me? I could give you that experience. I believe I could make it very enjoyable indeed for you. Unless, that is, you prefer the passive pleasure of simply reading about it.”
“Assuming,” she said, “that there were somewhere I could read about such a thing. Are there any such books? I daresay there are in the male world. But is this how you would woo me, Lord Sheringford? By telling me how skilled and satisfying you would be in the marriage bed?”
“It is not a slight consideration,” he said, “even though properly nurtured ladies are doubtless taught to believe that a marriage bed is a place for duty, not pleasure—and that there is no other type of bed in which the pleasures of sex can be indulged and enjoyed.”
“You, Lord Sheringford,” she said, “are quite outrageous. Is this how you planned to woo a frightened young girl with impoverished parents?”
“Good God, no,” he said. “I would not have needed to woo her at all. I would have wooed her father with statistics detailing the prosperity of Woodbine Park and a listing of my grandfather’s holdings. Though it would have been unnecessary to do either. My title and the one to which I am heir would have been inducement enough.”
“I believe God is good,” she said. “But I would prefer not to have the fact
blurted out as an exclamation in my hearing, Lord Sheringford.”
“I beg your pardon.” He felt his first real amusement of the evening.
“But you believe your present wealth—provided you marry within the next two weeks—and your future prospects will not weigh sufficiently with me?” she said. “But of course you do. I told you so this afternoon. And so I must be enticed with the promise of—of—”
She seemed unable to complete the thought.
“A good time in bed?” he suggested.
“I must be enticed by that?” she said.
“I believe it might weigh with you more than you will admit,” he said. “You are beautiful and attractive, Miss Huxtable—and thirty years old. And single. And it is presumably ten years or more since you last lay with a man. I believe the prospect of being able to do so again, not just once but nightly—and even daily too, perhaps—must be very appealing indeed to you.”
“Nightly and daily with you?” she said.
“Do you find me repulsive?” he asked her.
“You are not handsome,” she said. “You are not even particularly good-looking.”
Well, he had asked!
He raised his eyebrows.
Her flush returned with a rush.
“But you are not ugly either,” she said. “You are certainly not repulsive. Indeed, you are—”
At which interesting point in their conversation they were interrupted when someone tapped on the door of the box and opened it without waiting for an invitation. His mother stepped inside, followed by Sir Graham.
“Duncan,” she said. “Oh, how brave of you to come to the theater this evening, though Graham calls it foolhardy, just as he did last evening when you attended the Tindell ball. I ought to have waited for you to bring your betrothed on a formal visit, I know, but you did not come this afternoon when I remained at home in the expectation that you would, you provoking man. Introduce us now, if you please.”
“Mama,” he said, “may I have the honor of presenting Miss Huxtable, who is not my betrothed, though she was kind enough to invite me to join her family in the Duke of Moreland’s box this evening? May I present my mother, Miss Huxtable? And Sir Graham Carling, her husband?”
“Not betrothed?” His mother stepped forward and took both of Miss Huxtable’s hands in her own, preventing her from curtsying. “But of course you are or will be soon. The whole world believes it, and what the whole world believes inevitably come to pass later if not sooner. And did you not, Miss Huxtable, admit last evening to some military officer whose name escapes me that you are betrothed to my son?”
“I did, ma’am,” Miss Huxtable said. “But I was vexed with Major Dew over a private matter and lied, I am afraid.”
“At my suggestion,” Duncan added, noticing the pained expression on Sir Graham’s face.
“And so you have found yourselves in a very public scrape today,” his mother said with a laugh. “But it need not continue to embarrass either of you when the solution is so easy. You must make the lie into the truth and announce your betrothal. You make a very handsome couple. Do they not, Graham?”
“I believe, Ethel,” he said after growling out something that might have been agreement and might not, “the play is about to resume. We had better return to our box.”
“Yes, we must,” she agreed, squeezing Miss Huxtable’s hands before releasing them. “My son must bring you for tea tomorrow, Miss Huxtable. We will talk about the wedding, which must be arranged quickly because Duncan’s grandfather, who has always been an old grump, is being even more odious than usual and has cut off his funds. He is bound to restore them if Duncan marries someone so very eligible. He will really have no choice, will he? But even a hasty wedding need not be a clandestine or dreary affair. I shall have some ideas to suggest by tomorrow. Do promise to come.”
Miss Huxtable looked at Duncan—and then smiled.
“I will be delighted, ma’am,” she said. “Though I must warn you that there may not be a wedding.”
“Of course there will,” his mother said. “All men develop icy feet when marriage looms large on their horizon. I shall work upon Duncan before tomorrow afternoon and bring him to heel. You must not lose a wink of sleep over the matter.”
“I shall not, ma’am,” Miss Huxtable promised, and her eyes were actually twinkling as Sir Graham ushered Duncan’s mother from the box and they resumed their seats.
“Oh,” she said, “I do like your mother. I like people with character.”
“Do you also like the infamous sons of such mothers?” he asked.
But she merely laughed as her family returned to the box.
Perhaps, he thought as the play resumed, his mother would talk her into the marriage. He hoped so.
There was so little time left to begin all over again.
The box that had been occupied by Turner and Norman and Caroline was empty, he noticed.
9
SIR Humphrey and Lady Dew had arrived from Shropshire on a rare visit to London. They had brought their granddaughter with them and were staying at Grillon’s Hotel.
They had come primarily to spend some time with their son and bring his daughter closer to him. However, they were delighted to find that their old neighbors, the Huxtables, were in town and lost no time in sending invitations to them all to come for dinner in their private dining room at the hotel the evening after the theater visit.
Stephen was obliged to send a reluctant refusal, though he did promise to call upon the Dews another day. He had another engagement for that evening. But the others were free to go.
Margaret wished she were not. She had loved the Dews as neighbors and was quite eager to see them. But she also feared that Crispin would be at dinner too. Indeed, it was almost inevitable that he would be. She really did not want to see him again. She was still angry with him and upset and confused. She did not still love him, and she did not want to marry him. But even so…
Well, she wished his wife had lived and he had stayed with her and their child in Spain. She had put that painful part of her life behind her, and it was disturbing to have it all resurrected again.
Lord Sheringford had told her she still loved Crispin.
He was wrong.
Nevertheless, she did send off an acceptance to her invitation.
In the meantime, though, she had agreed to take tea with Lady Carling in the afternoon. She could have walked or taken the carriage to Curzon Street, as she had pointed out to the earl last evening. But he had insisted that he would come and escort her there himself. He arrived earlier than she expected.
“I am under orders to woo you in public, Miss Huxtable,” he said after they had stepped out of the house, leaving Stephen standing in the hallway like a concerned and brooding parent. “We will walk to my mother’s house by a circuitous route, then, and go through the park. It is a lovely day and there are bound to be crowds there even this early in the afternoon.”
“I daresay there will,” she agreed, taking his offered arm.
“I would have brought a curricle in which to convey you,” he said, “except that I do not have a curricle, I am afraid. I really am quite impoverished, you see.”
“Walking is better exercise anyway,” she said. “But am I now intended to feel so sorry for you, Lord Sheringford, that I will agree to marry you tomorrow if not sooner in order to restore your funds?”
“Do you?” he asked. “And will you?”
“No,” she said.
“Then I did not intend any such thing,” he said.
Margaret smiled.
“Had you seen Mr. Turner before last evening?” she asked as they walked in the direction of Hyde Park. “Since your elopement with his wife, I mean?”
“No,” he said. “Nor his sister either, since the evening before my planned wedding with her. The morning papers made the most of the almost-encounter, did they not?”
“They did,” Margaret said. It had been somewhat disconcerting to see her n
ame in print for the second morning in a row. “It was noted that Mr. Turner and Mr. and Mrs. Pennethorne did not return to their box for the conclusion of the play, that a perfectly well justified outrage drove them away from having to share a roof with a notorious villain. Are you sorry that you spoiled their evening?”
“Not at all,” he said. “If it was spoiled, that is. Which I very much doubt. They probably enjoyed an hour or two of righteous and thoroughly pleasurable indignation over their supper.”
He handed a coin to the crossing sweeper as they crossed the road and then entered the park.
“Is your heart so very hard, then?” she asked him.
“I daresay it is,” he said. “Life’s experiences do that to a person, Miss Huxtable.”
“Harden the heart?” she said. “I hope not. I would hate to become a cynic merely because I could not take responsibility for my wicked actions.”
“Am I wicked, then?” he asked, looking down at her.
“You tell me,” she said. “You are the one doing the wooing.”
The paths and carriageway were busy enough even though it was not yet the fashionable hour. Their appearance attracted noticeable attention, as though the ton could not get its fill of looking at them. What did they expect to see, exactly?
What they saw was the Earl of Sheringford leaning his head closer to hers and looking very directly into her eyes as his free hand came up to cover hers on his arm. A deliberately intimate gesture? Well, she had asked for it.
“Things are not always what they seem, Miss Huxtable,” the earl said.
No, indeed. She half smiled.
“Meaning that you are not wicked after all?” she said. “You did not really abandon the bride you professed to love? You did not really run off with another man’s wife and live in sin with her for five years? We all know that gossip can err, but can it err to quite such a degree?”
“I did not love Caroline by the time I abandoned her,” he said, “though that fact in itself did not excuse me for doing so. I daresay nothing did. And Laura Turner was very willing to run away with me, a fact that did not at all excuse me for taking her, I suppose. I daresay nothing did. Yes, Miss Huxtable, I must concede that by your definition of wickedness I am doubtless very evil indeed.”
