by Julia Quinn
And then, of course, there was the matter of his father, Lord St. Clair. They were rather famously estranged, although no one knew why. Hyacinth personally thought it spoke well of Gareth that he did not air his familial travails in public—especially since she’d met his father and thought him a boor, which led her to believe that whatever the matter was, the younger St. Clair was not at fault.
But the entire affair lent an air of mystery to the already charismatic man, and in Hyacinth’s opinion made him a bit of a challenge to the ladies of the ton. No one seemed quite certain how to view him. On the one hand, the matrons steered their daughters away; surely a connection with Gareth St. Clair could not enhance a girl’s reputation. On the other hand, his brother had died tragically young, almost a year earlier, and now he was the heir to the barony. Which had only served to make him a more romantic—and eligible—figure. Last month Hyacinth had seen a girl swoon—or at least pretend to—when he had deigned to attend the Bevelstoke Ball.
It had been appalling.
Hyacinth had tried to tell the foolish chit that he was only there because his grandmother had forced him into it, and of course because his father was out of town. After all, everyone knew that he only consorted with opera singers and actresses, and certainly not any of the ladies he might meet at the Bevelstoke Ball. But the girl would not be swayed from her overemotional state, and eventually she had collapsed onto a nearby settee in a suspiciously graceful heap.
Hyacinth had been the first to locate a vinaigrette and shove it under her nose. Really, some behavior just couldn’t be tolerated.
But as she stood there, reviving the foolish chit with the noxious fumes, she had caught sight of him staring at her in that vaguely mocking way of his, and she couldn’t shake the feeling that he found her amusing.
Much in the same way she found small children and large dogs amusing.
Needless to say, she hadn’t felt particularly complimented by his attention, fleeting though it was.
“Hmmph.”
Hyacinth turned to face Lady Danbury, who was still searching the room for her grandson. “I don’t think he’s here yet,” Hyacinth said, then added under her breath, “No one’s fainted.”
“Enh? What was that?”
“I said I don’t think he’s here yet.”
Lady D narrowed her eyes. “I heard that part.”
“It’s all I said,” Hyacinth fibbed.
“Liar.”
Hyacinth looked past her to Penelope. “She treats me quite abominably, did you know that?”
Penelope shrugged. “Someone has to.”
Lady Danbury’s face broke out into a wide grin, and she turned to Penelope, and said, “Now then, I must ask—” She looked over at the stage, craning her neck as she squinted at the quartet. “Is it the same girl on cello this year?”
Penelope nodded sadly.
Hyacinth looked at them. “What are you talking about?”
“If you don’t know,” Lady Danbury said loftily, “then you haven’t been paying attention, and shame on you for that.”
Hyacinth’s mouth fell open. “Well,” she said, since the alternative was to say nothing, and she never liked to do that. There was nothing more irritating than being left out of a joke. Except, perhaps, being scolded for something one didn’t even understand. She turned back to the stage, watching the cellist more closely. Seeing nothing out of the ordinary, she twisted again to face her companions and opened her mouth to speak, but they were already deep in a conversation that did not include her.
She hated when that happened.
“Hmmmph.” Hyacinth sat back in her chair and did it again. “Hmmmph.”
“You sound,” came an amused voice from over her shoulder, “exactly like my grandmother.”
Hyacinth looked up. There he was, Gareth St. Clair, inevitably at the moment of her greatest discomfiture. And, of course, the only empty seat was next to her.
“Doesn’t she, though?” Lady Danbury asked, looking up at her grandson as she thumped her cane against the floor. “She’s quickly replacing you as my pride and joy.”
“Tell me, Miss Bridgerton,” Mr. St. Clair asked, one corner of his lips curving into a mocking half smile, “is my grandmother remaking you in her image?”
Hyacinth had no ready retort, which she found profoundly irritating.
“Move over again, Hyacinth,” Lady D barked. “I need to sit next to Gareth.”
Hyacinth turned to say something, but Lady Danbury cut in with, “Someone needs to make sure he behaves.”
Hyacinth let out a noisy exhale and moved over another seat.
“There you go, my boy,” Lady D said, patting the empty chair with obvious glee. “Sit and enjoy.”
He looked at her for a long moment before finally saying, “You owe me for this, Grandmother.”
“Ha!” was her response. “Without me, you wouldn’t exist.”
“A difficult point to refute,” Hyacinth murmured.
Mr. St. Clair turned to look at her, probably only because it enabled him to turn away from his grandmother. Hyacinth smiled at him blandly, pleased with herself for showing no reaction.
He’d always reminded her of a lion, fierce and predatory, filled with restless energy. His hair, too, was tawny, hovering in that curious state between light brown and dark blond, and he wore it rakishly, defying convention by keeping it just long enough to tie in a short queue at the back of his neck. He was tall, although not overly so, with an athlete’s grace and strength and a face that was just imperfect enough to be handsome, rather than pretty.
And his eyes were blue. Really blue. Uncomfortably blue.
Uncomfortably blue? She gave her head a little shake. That had to be quite the most asinine thought that had ever entered her head. Her own eyes were blue, and there was certainly nothing uncomfortable about that.
“And what brings you here, Miss Bridgerton?” he asked. “I hadn’t realized you were such a lover of music.”
“If she loved music,” Lady D said from behind him, “she’d have already fled to France.”
“She does hate to be left out of a conversation, doesn’t she?” he murmured, without turning around. “Ow!”
“Cane?” Hyacinth asked sweetly.
“She’s a threat to society,” he muttered.
Hyacinth watched with interest as he reached behind him, and without even turning his head, wrapped his hand around the cane and wrenched it from his grandmother’s grasp. “Here,” he said, handing it to her, “you will look after this, won’t you? She won’t need it while she’s sitting down.”
Hyacinth’s mouth fell open. Even she had never dared to interfere with Lady Danbury’s cane.
“I see that I have finally impressed you,” he said, sitting back in his chair with the expression of one who is quite pleased with himself.
“Yes,” Hyacinth said before she could stop herself. “I mean, no. I mean, don’t be silly. I certainly haven’t been not impressed by you.”
“How gratifying,” he murmured.
“What I meant,” she said, grinding her teeth together, “was that I haven’t really thought about it one way or the other.”
He tapped his heart with his hand. “Wounded,” he said flippantly. “And right through the heart.”
Hyacinth gritted her teeth. The only thing worse than being made fun of was not being sure if one was being made fun of. Everyone else in London she could read like a book. But with Gareth St. Clair, she simply never knew. She glanced past him to see if Penelope was listening—not that she was sure why that mattered one way or another—but Pen was busy placating Lady Danbury, who was still smarting over the loss of her cane.
Hyacinth fidgeted in her seat, feeling uncommonly closed-in. Lord Somershall—never the slenderest man in the room—was on her left, spilling onto her chair. Which only forced her to scoot a little to the right, which of course put her in even closer proximity to Gareth St. Clair, who was positively radiating heat.
>
Good God, had the man smothered himself in hot-water bottles before setting out for the evening?
Hyacinth picked up her program as discreetly as she was able and used it to fan herself.
“Is something amiss, Miss Bridgerton?” he inquired, tilting his head as he regarded her with curious amusement.
“Of course not,” she answered. “It’s merely a touch warm in here, don’t you think?”
He eyed her for one second longer than she would have liked, then turned to Lady Danbury. “Are you overheated, Grandmother?” he asked solicitously.
“Not at all,” came the brisk reply.
He turned back to Hyacinth with a tiny shrug. “It must be you,” he murmured.
“It must,” she ground out, facing determinedly forward. Maybe there still was time to escape to the ladies’ retiring room. Penelope would want to have her drawn and quartered, but did it really count as abandonment when there were two people seated between them? Besides, she could surely use Lord Somershall as an excuse. Even now he was shifting in his seat, bumping up against her in a way that Hyacinth wasn’t entirely certain was accidental.
Hyacinth shifted slightly to the right. Just an inch—not even. The last thing she wanted was to be pressed up against Gareth St. Clair. Well, the second-to-last, anyway. Lord Somershall’s portly frame was decidedly worse.
“Is something amiss, Miss Bridgerton?” Mr. St. Clair inquired.
She shook her head, getting ready to push herself up by planting the heels of her hands on the chair on either side of her lap. She couldn’t—
Clap.
Clap clap clap.
Hyacinth nearly groaned. It was one of the Ladies Smythe-Smith, signaling that the concert was about to begin. She’d lost her moment of opportunity. There was no way she could depart politely now.
But at least she could take some solace in the fact that she wasn’t the only miserable soul. Just as the Misses Smythe-Smith lifted their bows to strike their instruments, she heard Mr. St. Clair let out a very quiet groan, followed by a heartfelt, “God help us all.”
Chapter 2
Thirty minutes later, and somewhere not too far away, a small dog is howling in agony. Unfortunately, no one can hear him over the din…
There was only one person in the world for whom Gareth would sit politely and listen to really bad music, and Grandmother Danbury happened to be it.
“Never again,” he whispered in her ear, as something that might have been Mozart assaulted his ears. This, after something that might have been Haydn, which had followed something that might have been Handel.
“You’re not sitting politely,” she whispered back.
“We could have sat in the back,” he grumbled.
“And missed all the fun?”
How anyone could term a Smythe-Smith musicale fun was beyond him, but his grandmother had what could only be termed a morbid love for the annual affair.
As usual, four Smythe-Smith girls were seated on a small dais, two with violins, one with a cello, and one at a pianoforte, and the noise they were making was so discordant as to be almost impressive.
Almost.
“It’s a good thing I love you,” he said over his shoulder.
“Ha,” came her reply, no less truculent for its whispered tone. “It’s a good thing I love you.”
And then—thank God—it was over, and the girls were nodding and making their curtsies, three of them looking quite pleased with themselves, and one—the one on the cello—looking as if she might like to hurl herself through a window.
Gareth turned when he heard his grandmother sigh. She was shaking her head and looking uncharacteristically sympathetic.
The Smythe-Smith girls were notorious in London, and each performance was somehow, inexplicably, worse than the last. Just when one thought there was no possible way to make a deeper mockery of Mozart, a new set of Smythe-Smith cousins appeared on the scene, and proved that yes, it could be done.
But they were nice girls, or so he’d been told, and his grandmother, in one of her rare fits of unabashed kindness, insisted that someone had to sit in the front row and clap, because, as she put it, “Three of them couldn’t tell an elephant from a flute, but there’s always one who is ready to melt in misery.”
And apparently Grandmother Danbury, who thought nothing of telling a duke that he hadn’t the sense of a gnat, found it vitally important to clap for the one Smythe-Smith girl in each generation whose ear wasn’t made of tin.
They all stood to applaud, although he suspected his grandmother did so only to have an excuse to retrieve her cane, which Hyacinth Bridgerton had handed over with no protest whatsoever.
“Traitor,” he’d murmured over his shoulder.
“They’re your toes,” she’d replied.
He cracked a smile, despite himself. He had never met anyone quite like Hyacinth Bridgerton. She was vaguely amusing, vaguely annoying, but one couldn’t quite help but admire her wit.
Hyacinth Bridgerton, he reflected, had an interesting and unique reputation among London socialites. She was the youngest of the Bridgerton siblings, famously named in alphabetical order, A-H. And she was, in theory at least and for those who cared about such things, considered a rather good catch for matrimony. She had never been involved, even tangentially, in a scandal, and her family and connections were beyond compare. She was quite pretty, in wholesome, unexotic way, with thick, chestnut hair and blue eyes that did little to hide her shrewdness. And perhaps most importantly, Gareth thought with a touch of the cynic, it was whispered that her eldest brother, Lord Bridgerton, had increased her dowry last year, after Hyacinth had completed her third London season without an acceptable proposal of marriage.
But when he had inquired about her—not, of course because he was interested; rather he had wanted to learn more about this young lady who seemed to enjoy spending a great deal of time with his grandmother—his friends had all shuddered.
“Hyacinth Bridgerton?” one had echoed. “Surely not to marry? You must be mad.”
Another had called her terrifying.
No one actually seemed to dislike her—there was a certain charm to her that kept her in everyone’s good graces—but the consensus was that she was best in small doses. “Men don’t like women who are more intelligent than they are,” one of his shrewder friends had commented, “and Hyacinth Bridgerton isn’t the sort to feign stupidity.”
She was, Gareth had thought on more than one occasion, a younger version of his grandmother. And while there was no one in the world he adored more than Grandmother Danbury, as far as he was concerned, the world needed only one of her.
“Aren’t you glad you came?” the elderly lady in question asked, her voice carrying quite well over the applause.
No one ever clapped as loudly as the Smythe-Smith audience. They were always so glad that it was over.
“Never again,” Gareth said firmly.
“Of course not,” his grandmother said, with just the right touch of condescension to show that she was lying through her teeth.
He turned and looked her squarely in the eye. “You will have to find someone else to accompany you next year.”
“I wouldn’t dream of asking you again,” Grandmother Danbury said.
“You’re lying.”
“What a terrible thing to say to your beloved grandmother.” She leaned slightly forward. “How did you know?”
He glanced at the cane, dormant in her hand. “You haven’t waved that thing through the air once since you tricked Miss Bridgerton into returning it,” he said.
“Nonsense,” she said. “Miss Bridgerton is too sharp to be tricked, aren’t you, Hyacinth?”
Hyacinth shifted forward so that she could see past him to the countess. “I beg your pardon?”
“Just say yes,” Grandmother Danbury said. “It will vex him.”
“Yes, of course, then,” she said, smiling.
“And,” his grandmother continued, as if that entire r
idiculous exchange had not taken place, “I’ll have you know that I am the soul of discretion when it comes to my cane.”
Gareth gave her a look. “It’s a wonder I still have my feet.”
“It’s a wonder you still have your ears, my dear boy,” she said with lofty disdain.
“I will take that away again,” he warned.
“No you won’t,” she replied with a cackle. “I’m leaving with Penelope to find a glass of lemonade. You keep Hyacinth company.”
He watched her go, then turned back to Hyacinth, who was glancing about the room with slightly narrowed eyes.
“Who are you looking for?” he asked.
“No one in particular. Just examining the scene.”
He looked at her curiously. “Do you always sound like a detective?”
“Only when it suits me,” she said with a shrug. “I like to know what is going on.”
“And is anything ‘going on’?” he queried.
“No.” Her eyes narrowed again as she watched two people in a heated discussion in the far corner. “But you never know.”
He fought the urge to shake his head. She was the strangest woman. He glanced at the stage. “Are we safe?”
She finally turned back, her blue eyes meeting his with uncommon directness. “Do you mean is it over?”
“Yes.”
Her brow furrowed, and in that moment Gareth realized that she had the lightest smattering of freckles on her nose. “I think so,” she said. “I’ve never known them to hold an intermission before.”
“Thank God,” he said, with great feeling. “Why do they do it?”
“The Smythe-Smiths, you mean?”
“Yes.”
For a moment she remained silent, then she just shook her head, and said, “I don’t know. One would think…”
Whatever she’d been about to say, she thought the better of it. “Never mind,” she said.
“Tell me,” he urged, rather surprised by how curious he was.
“It was nothing,” she said. “Just that one would think that someone would have told them by now. But actually…” She glanced around the room. “The audience has grown smaller in recent years. Only the kindhearted remain.”
