by Mary Balogh
She got to her feet and approached the pianoforte, near which he was standing.
“Miss Holt-Barron?” Lady Potford was asking politely, and Charlotte without a murmur of protest approached the instrument and began a flawless performance of some Mozart sonata.
The marquess picked up the whole pile of music and carried it to a wide, velvet-padded window seat. He sat on one side of it and Freyja on the other.
“Might I be permitted to observe, Lady Freyja,” he said, “that you look particularly fetching in that shade of sea green? It matches your eyes. And might I apologize for not believing your claim to be the sister of a duke? No duke's sister of my acquaintance, you see, sleeps in unlocked inn rooms without any accompanying maid, or walks in a public park without a chaperone. Or punches men in the nose when they displease her.”
“You would deny, I suppose,” she said, picking up a sheet of music that announced itself as a song for two voices. But she saw at the very first glance that the singer of the top part had to soar to a high G and slipped the music to the bottom of the pile. “You would deny, I suppose, that you were about to steal a kiss from that poor girl?”
“Oh, absolutely,” he agreed.
“Then you lie!” she retorted, snatching another sheet for a song in more than one part off the pile and glaring at him. “I am not quite stupid, despite your insinuation yesterday morning to the contrary.”
“No!” he said, his eyes laughing at her—he was making no attempt to look through the music himself. “Did I do that? But why would I do something so ungentlemanly when the ghastly truth must have presented itself to the intelligence of everyone gathered around? It was rather a large gathering, was it not?”
Freyja was given the distinct impression that she might have met her match—something that rarely happened outside the members of her own family. She gave her attention to the music in her hands. It was all about cuckoos, and the songwriter appeared to have devised his whole piece so that the two voices—no, four—might deceive the audience into believing they were a flock of demented birds in a dither and unable to utter any sound but their own names. It was the sort of song most gatherings would exclaim over in delight and admiration. Freyja set it at the bottom of the pile.
“I feel compelled to defend my honor yet again,” the marquess continued. “I was not about to steal a kiss, Lady Freyja. I was about to convey one and have one conveyed willingly in return. I cannot tell you how ill-timed your interruption was. She had lips like cherries and I was within moments of tasting their sweet nectar. Does one suck nectar from a cherry? But I daresay my meaning is clear enough anyway.”
If his eyes danced any more merrily, they would be in danger of dancing right out of his head. And he was wearing some perfume. Freyja despised men who wore perfume, but this was subtle and musky and wrapped enticingly about her senses. Her eyes dipped to his lips, which had come so close to kissing the maid in the park, found them as perfect as the rest of him, and dipped lower to the pile of music. She had just remembered that those lips had actually kissed her.
“You are supposed to be helping me select a duet to sing,” she said.
“I thought I would leave it to you,” he said. “If you did not like my choice you would doubtless quarrel with it and with me and find some reason for punching me in the nose, and it is altogether possible that other people in the room might notice. And even if they did not, I derive no great pleasure from having my nose punched. Now why are you frowning so ferociously?”
“Nymphs and shepherds and Phyllises and Amaryllises,” she said, frowning down in disgust at the music in her hands. “The last one was all about cuckoos.” She set the piece with the other discarded ones beneath the pile and found another duet.
“Are you always so cross?” he asked her.
“In disagreeable company, yes,” she said, looking coldly at him.
He grinned at her. “Do you ever smile?”
“I have been smiling all evening,” she told him. “Until, that is, I was forced into this tête-à-tête.”
“Almost, Lady Freyja,” he said softly, “I am led to believe that you are trying to deliver me a resounding setdown.”
“Almost, Lord Hallmere,” she retorted, “I am led to believe that you must have some intelligence.”
He chuckled softly, a sound that was drowned beneath the polite applause that succeeded Charlotte's playing. No one else took the instrument. Card tables were being set up and the guests were taking their places. No one attempted to include either of the two sitting on the window seat.
“Tonight,” the marquess said, “you have been smiling what I suspect is your public Lady Freyja Bedwyn smile, the gracious expression that informs the world that you are someone of consequence and equal to any social situation. I have a mind to see your private Freyja smile, if there is such a thing.”
There were not many men who would dare to flirt with her. And this was definitely flirtation—he had deliberately lowered his voice. Mock flirtation, of course. His eyes were still laughing at her.
“I have what my brothers describe as my feline grin,” she told him, regarding him coldly. “Shall I oblige you with a display of that?”
He chuckled again and reached across the pile between them to take the music from her hands.
“Hmm,” he said after examining it for a moment or two. “‘Near to the silver Trent Sirena dwelleth.' I like the sound of her already. It gets better. ‘She to whom nature lent all that excelleth.' The mind boggles, does it not?”
“Your mind obviously does,” she said.
He did something then that had her itching to curl her fingers into fists. He let his eyes roam slowly down her body, starting with the rather wide expanse of bosom showing above the fashionably low neckline of her gown and moving on downward, giving the impression that he saw every curve beneath the barrier of her high-waisted gown and its loose, flowing skirts. He pursed his lips.
“‘She to whom nature lent all that excelleth,' ” he murmured again. And then he smiled—it was definitely not his grin this time but an expression of great charm clearly designed to make women turn weak at the knees. “Shall we move to the pianoforte bench, Lady Freyja, and try this one?”
She was weak at the knees with suppressed wrath, Freyja decided when she got to her feet. And then his hand came to rest against the hollow of her back. She looked haughtily over her shoulder at him.
“I am quite capable of crossing the distance between the window and the pianoforte without your guidance, I thank you, Lord Hallmere,” she said.
“But I felt compelled to test a theory,” he told her. “‘She to whom nature lent . . .' Never mind.”
“I suppose,” she said, “you realize that I am quite immune to your flatteries and attempts at flirtation. But of course you do. That is why you are doing it. I suppose you hope to provoke me into some public display of temper.”
“Better flirtation than courtship, I would think,” he said. “My grandmother has suggested to me that I court you. She believes our marriage would be a dazzling match for both of us.”
She stared at him, speechless.
He grinned at her. “We agree on one thing at least, sweetheart,” he murmured, and indicated the pianoforte.
A few moments later they were seated side by side on a pianoforte bench that had not been designed to seat two. He made no attempt to perch on the very edge of his end of it, as any decent gentleman would do, but crowded her at the hip and all along her bare arm. They had apparently been forgotten by the rest of the company, who were concentrating upon their card games to the accompaniment of the low hum of conversation.
“Let us try,” the marquess said, spreading the music on the stand and resting his hands on the keys—they were long-fingered, well-manicured hands, Freyja saw. Was there anything not perfect about him physically? Yes, there were his crooked teeth, though actually they were only very slightly crooked, and they looked more attractive this way than if they had been line
d up all in a neat row. “Do you read music?”
“Of course I read music,” she said. “I just cannot play it.”
He had a pleasant tenor voice, which turned out to be rather similar to her contralto voice. Surprisingly, they made a pleasing blend of sound. The song moved slowly and melodiously so that it was fairly easy to sing it passably well even if not to master it.
“Oh, well done, indeed,” Lady Potford said when, after a few false starts, they sang the song all the way through without stopping or making any major blunders.
It seemed she had not been the only one listening quietly as they had sung. There was polite applause from every table. Lady Holt-Barron was beaming her approval.
“I believe,” the marquess murmured, “a crisis has been successfully weathered, Lady Freyja. I have been seen openly to have forgiven you, and you have been seen graciously to have accepted the error of your assumptions.”
She leapt to her feet and glared down at him while he looked back in innocent astonishment.
“You have forgiven me?” she said with all the hauteur she could muster. “The error of my assumptions? When it was all your doing? I would have you know—”
But Lady Potford had got hastily to her feet too, mere moments after Freyja.
“It is time we had the tea tray brought in,” she said. “Joshua, my dear, would you be so good as to pull the bell rope?”
Freyja busied herself with folding the music and bringing the rest of the pile back from the window seat. That had been a near escape. She was beginning to feel like a puppet dancing on the Marquess of Hallmere's string. He had done that deliberately—again. She had always been known for her outspokenness and hot temper, but she had always known where and when to use each—and, more to the point, where and when not to.
She went to stand at Charlotte's table, and looked at the cards over her friend's shoulder.
Joshua was feeling ready to move on again, though he would stay out the week in Bath since his grandmother expected it. Lady Freyja Bedwyn was avoiding him even though he went everywhere the fashionable were expected to go and so did she. It was amusing to watch her greet society with gracious, if rather bored, hauteur. He sensed that it was not entirely an act to cover the embarrassment of that scene she had trapped herself into in the Pump Room. She was the daughter and sister of a duke—arrogance came naturally to her. He ought to have believed her from the start.
He saw her two mornings in a row in the Pump Room. The first time, she was leaving with Lady Holt-Barron and the lady's daughter just as he was arriving with his grandmother, and they all exchanged the merest civilities. The second time she was strolling with the Earl of Willett, whose head was bent attentively to hers as she talked. She favored Joshua with the merest nod of acknowledgment when she saw him.
He saw her on Milsom Street that same afternoon. She was standing on the pavement talking with Willett. Lady Holt-Barron and her daughter were coming out of a milliner's shop as Joshua walked by. There was a flurry of greetings all around, and he continued on his way.
He saw her at the theater one evening. She was sitting between Miss Holt-Barron and Willett and fanning her face languidly. She raised her eyebrows when Joshua caught her eye, nodded graciously, and then turned her attention back to the conversation.
There was not much, then, by way of flirtation to keep Joshua in Bath beyond the week—not even when he accompanied his grandmother on an afternoon visit to Lady Holt-Barron's on the Circus, that splendid circle of tall Georgian terraced houses with a circular green at its center and several magnificent ancient trees. It was true that they arrived just as Lady Freyja and Miss Holt-Barron were setting out to walk on the Royal Crescent close by and that Miss Holt-Barron invited him to join them. But they already had another escort. Willett took his place firmly at Lady Freyja's side, though she did not take his arm.
She walked, Joshua noticed as he strolled along Brock Street behind them with Miss Holt-Barron, with a firm, manly stride despite her small stature. Willett's cane tapped elegantly along the cobbles. Joshua clasped his hands behind him and set about making himself agreeable to his companion.
The Royal Crescent was a magnificent semicircle of terraced houses, a deliberate complement to the Circus. Several other people were strolling along the cobbled street before the houses, enjoying the view over the park in front and down the hill to the town below. And inevitably, of course, these people exchanged greetings as they passed one another and sometimes stopped to exchange any news or gossip that had accumulated since the morning gathering in the Pump Room.
“Bath is divine,” Miss Fanny Darwin declared when her group came up with Joshua's and they had all stopped, “and there are so many exciting things to do all the time. Would you not agree, Lord Willett?”
“Certainly, Miss Darwin,” the earl said. “Bath offers a pleasing combination of outdoor exercise and indoor entertainment. All to be enjoyed in the congenial company of one's peers.”
“We took the carriage to Sydney Gardens yesterday afternoon and strolled there for all of an hour,” Miss Hester Darwin said. “It was wonderful exercise in delightfully picturesque surroundings. Have you seen the park, Lady Freyja?”
Her brother cleared his throat, her cousin, Sir Leonard Eston, picked an invisible speck of lint from one of his sleeves, her sister flushed scarlet, and Miss Hester Darwin clapped a hand to her mouth too late as everyone remembered what had resulted from Lady Freyja's solitary foray into Sydney Gardens.
Joshua grinned. “I do believe Lady Freyja has, Miss Darwin,” he said. “So have I.”
“Exercise!” Lady Freyja exclaimed. “People come to Bath for their health, and for the sake of their health they stroll in the Pump Room and they stroll on the Crescent and they stroll in the park. It is a word that should be struck from the English language—strolling. If I do not walk somewhere soon, or—better yet—ride somewhere where there is space to move, I may well end up in a Bath chair, being wheeled from place to place and sipping on Bath water.”
Her audience chose to react to her words as if she had uttered something enormously witty. The gentlemen laughed; the ladies tittered.
“You must certainly be rescued from the Bath water,” Joshua said. “Come riding with me tomorrow, Lady Freyja. We will seek out the hills and the open spaces beyond the confines of the city.”
“It sounds like heaven,” she said, looking at him with approval for perhaps the first time. “I will gladly come.”
“But not alone, Lady Freyja,” Willett said hastily. “It would be somewhat scandalous, I fear. Perhaps we can make up a riding party. I would certainly join it. Would you, Miss Holt-Barron?”
“Oh, I would too,” Miss Fanny Darwin cried. “I enjoy nothing better than a ride, provided the pace is not too fast or the distance too far. Gerald, you must come too, and you, Leonard, and then Mama can have no objection to allowing Hester and me to join the party.”
Joshua's glance locked with Lady Freyja's. He could sense the grimace she kept from her face. He grinned at her and winked.
He was pleased to see her nostrils flare with indignation.
Perhaps, he thought hopefully, tomorrow would be more amusing than the past few days had been.
CHAPTER V
Neither Freyja nor Charlotte had her own horse with her in Bath, but they were able to hire some for the day. Freyja sent back the first horse that was brought around to the house with the message that she had been riding since she was in leading strings and had never felt any inclination to bounce along on a tired old hack that looked to be lame in all four legs. The second mount met with her approval even though Lady Holt-Barron thought it high-spirited enough to need a man's firm hand on the reins and begged Freyja to ride very carefully.
“Whatever would I say to the duke, Lady Freyja,” she asked rhetorically, “if you were carried home with a broken neck?”
Freyja and Charlotte rode side by side down steep Gay Street in the direction of the Abbey, outside whic
h they had agreed to meet the other six members of the riding party. It was a glorious day, warm enough for summer but with more freshness in the air.
“If we have to amble along once we have left Bath behind at the horse equivalent of a stroll, Charlotte,” Freyja said, “I shall have a tantrum. Will the Misses Darwin be so mean-spirited?”
“I fear they will,” Charlotte said with a chuckle. “We are not all neck-or-nothing riders like you, Freyja. Will the Earl of Willett find some time alone with you today, do you suppose? He has been very determined during the past few days. He must be very close to making a declaration.”
“Oh, dear,” Freyja said. She had encouraged him rather, simply because she had wanted to discourage the Marquess of Hallmere, who had been deliberately amusing himself at her expense and who seemed to know exactly how to make her forget herself in public. Doubtless it was all very amusing to a man who had probably never entertained a serious thought in his life. Unfortunately, the Earl of Willett did not need much encouraging. “I do hope he can be saved from that embarrassment.”
“You would not accept him, then?” Charlotte asked.
She should, Freyja thought. He was an earl with a grand estate in Norfolkshire and a fortune rumored to be very large indeed—not to mention his prospects of doubling it after the demise of his uncle. He was amiable if a little starchy in manner. He would meet with Wulfric's approval. She should marry him and be done with it. But the memory of the sort of passion she had known with Kit Butler for one brief summer four years ago came to mind unbidden. And then her eyes alighted upon the gorgeously handsome figure of the Marquess of Hallmere as they approached the appointed meeting place. And she knew that she wanted more out of life than merely making do with a marriage that promised respectability and good fortune.
He was riding a splendidly powerful and sleek black mount—the marquess, that was. Freyja was instantly envious. His long legs, encased in buff riding breeches and black top boots, showed to best advantage when he was on horseback. So did the rest of him. He might be a frivolous, licentious man, and she seemed to do nothing but bristle with hostility whenever she was near him, but at least he was alive and made her feel alive. And she was enormously grateful to him for suggesting this ride, though she hoped it was to be more than a mere sedate crawl over the countryside.
