“More worthwhile than Ainsworth? I wasn’t aware a royal duke was in need of a wife.”
“I refer to social causes, sir.”
“Ah yes! How you ladies love to work yourselves into a lather over something or other,” he said. “Do you ever do more than talk?”
“Do you imply that I am a hypocrite?”
“Dear me, no. I suspect apathy not hypocrisy. I’d wager anything that you prefer to discuss causes and criticize others without ever bestirring yourself.”
“I need not enumerate my bona fides to you,” Jane sniffed.
“Just as I thought. The answer is,” he said, “much said, nothing done.”
“No, I do help.”
“Is that what you call it? I understand you critiqued Earl Rostand’s horsemanship in the park and, after that beneficial excoriation, spurned his proposal in full view of everyone. I’m sure he found that most helpful.”
“I don’t care what that lackwit or any other oaf in your crowd says of me,” Jane retorted. “The war may’ve given you a noble purpose for a time, but what have you now? Your hair, your wit, your clothes—no, wait. One cannot own what one hasn’t paid for. So as a matter of law, they’re still your tailor’s.” She rested her chin on her fan, eyes upward as if considering the matter. “What will you do when the ton realizes its golden hero is nothing but polished brass?”
“All home questions, my lady, but being worthless is my concern,” he said, staring daggers. “You ought to ask yourself where you’ll be when no one can stomach your improving emetic doses any longer.”
“I will be wherever I want.” She flicked open her fan with a snap and glared at him over its lacy edge. “But where will you go when the tipstaffs come for all your finery? I hear Brummell has a room to let in Calais2.”
Disappointment made her cruel but she no longer cared. She could never marry Lord Seelye.
* * *
Thanks to decent looks and sufficient taste, Seelye came home to England late in the summer of 1815 to find himself a darling of the ton, which could only benefit an unmarried second son of insolvent nobility.
Likewise, it helped that he returned a well-known cavalry officer. Seelye had originally joined the 1st Royal Dragoons but ultimately served in the Royal Horse Guards Blue of the Household Cavalry alongside Major Lord Jem Maubray (now tenth Duke of Ainsworth), William de Sayre, Lord Clun, and the Hon. George Percy.
In the war’s final years, the foursome stayed alive in no small part due to their friendship and, in the course of keeping each other alive, performed feats of derring-do that amused the high command and ultimately Great Britain’s newspaper-reading public. By the time Napoleon set sail for St. Helena, everyone knew of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.
Seelye considered this notoriety more blessing than curse because what enhanced his standing in the ton might also help him marry well enough to have a comfortable future. This was no sure thing for a second son returning from military service without prospects.
His illustrious connections were similarly prized in the Marriage Mart. In addition to his close friendships with Ainsworth, Clun and Percy, he was the brother-in-law of the sixth Duke of Bath and Lady Jane Babcock, a perennial if difficult diamond of the first water.
The Impossible, the Insufferable, the Intolerable, he’d heard them all applied to her. Too bad the little girl he remembered had become an arrogant, outspoken termagant who lived up to every unflattering epithet.
Little did that lady know, it was her own damned fault he’d ripped up at her before witnesses when they met. He did it to save her from worse.
His Turkish treatment of her violated his every principle as a gentleman, but it was the bargain he struck to mollify the angry membership at White’s—or more accurately, nearly every unmarried member. Indeed, he had the noblest intentions when he behaved like a boor. For if he hadn’t, the legion of men Jane managed to offend since her come out would still be urging one another to slight her at every opportunity.
Such talk had been rife at White’s before he came racing down to Bath with Clun and Percy to save Ainsworth from a succubus3.
In fact, Seelye had been relaxing at the club when a group of men descended upon him. Among them was Earl Rostand, an arrogant, dissipated louse with a sense of entitlement every bit as irritating as Jane’s.
Rostand’s habitually cross countenance perfectly suited his nature and was ripe for caricature. His thinning curls fell over a fleshy, puckered brow. Small, button eyes blazed indignant on either side of a snub nose stuck between doughy cheeks. His mouth, when not in use, hung in the pout of a perpetually dyspeptic putto.
With studied nonchalance, the earl asked, “How does Lady Jane Babcock fare these days? Your sister-in-law, ain’t she?”
“She is, though I haven’t seen her in years. Why do you ask?”
The colicky cherub recounted her offenses against his dignity the previous spring. Like it or not, Seelye learned that Jane accused the earl of mistreating his mount, an unforgivable insult among his horsey set, and she did so in Hyde Park at the fashionable hour. During which, she also took the opportunity to reject his suit in a carrying voice.
A better man than Rostand would want to retaliate. As it was, the earl took umbrage easily and held grudges indefinitely. So it was hardly surprising that he vowed to see Jane’s dance card forever half-full, with no supper dance partner to lead her in to dine, everything short of the cut direct.
Emboldened by Rostand, the other men discussed in Gothic terms how to repay the matrimonial prize who’d badgered them about her beliefs and their behavior and turned her nose up at all of them.
Seelye learned Jane was a cottage industry for the club’s gamblers. She was not only “the Impossible,” but the Incorrigible, the Intractable, the Insupportable, et cetera. The betting book was full of wagers made and lost involving her and scores of unsuccessful suitors.
Several spurned swains pressed him for his perspective on the ‘Babcock impasse.’
He mumbled something noncommittal.
They joined him uninvited, ordered spirits, and began to drink. When better lubricated, they talked of trying to gain her favor the way crippled mountaineers might reminisce about their last, near-fatal climb. She was a height too treacherous even for the most expert. They admired her grudgingly but resented their lack of success far more.
“Called me a bumbling dunderhead.”
“Why?” Seelye asked the Hon. John Wentworth, who was in fact a dolt.
“Can’t recall, but daresay I didn’t deserve it,” the man said.
“No, s’pose not,” Seelye replied.
Rostand cut in, “Had the gall to tell me I had no heart worth having. All because my blasted horse shied at a squirrel. Could’ve sold it to the knackers and who’d have blamed me? Her Iciness took exception when she saw me give it a few slaps with my quirt.”
“The squirrel?” Seelye asked.
“No, damn you, the horse.”
“And did whipping your hack teach it to ignore squirrels?”
“You sound like that bloody-minded female,” Rostand grumbled. “It don’t become you.”
“No, s’pose not.”
Rostand’s mistreatment of a skittish mount confirmed his reputation as a ham-fisted horseman with a vicious streak. It was he who resurrected the Hellfire Club and its ‘amusements’ of orgies and all manner of blood sport. Seelye found the club’s pursuits distasteful, but its activities were not illegal or all that unique.
What he did condemn Rostand for was blaming the lady rather than accepting her rejection in silence like a gentleman. Why and how Jane refused him were no excuses for his behavior, full stop.
A true gentleman remained a gentleman whatever the provocation. To this ideal he himself strove, frequently failed, and undertook the appropriate self-flagellation. Perhaps expecting so much from himself made him too critical of his fellow man, but of what use are standards if they are not exacting?
; The longer these men discussed Jane, the more extravagant their fantasies of retribution. It reminded him of sieges during the war. After a town fell, Seelye witnessed what cruel, hurtful things frustrated men did when egged on by others. In one place, Wellington was forced to call in the cavalry to restore order at saber point.
In this case, Seelye felt obliged to step in once more. He offered to deliver unto Her Iciness a suitable setdown so long as everyone present gave his word to treat her without prejudice thereafter.
He despised the task but reassured himself that his sister-in-law would suffer less this way. A single frontal assault was far easier to defend against than an ongoing war of attrition. So he made a brutish bargain with honorable motives, leaving him uncertain how to judge himself. Did behaving badly to spare someone worse make him a gentleman or a cad?
Then again, dilemmas over means and ends had bedeviled him for years. Why should this be any different?
The men accepted Seelye’s stipulation so long as he gave no quarter and there were witnesses.
He agreed to this. Given the number of suitors she’d rejected, there were sure to be eager volunteers at every Society function he attended. What’s more, these witnesses would enjoy her discomfiture with no personal repercussions—for repercussions there would likely be. Jane’s brother, the Duke of Bath, was an understanding fellow, but no one dared incur the wrath of his duchess, Seelye’s sister, Gertrude. And there was no telling what Jane herself might do. Or say. Publicly. In a carrying voice.
Seelye intended to chastise Jane as necessary but spare her worse because he refused to believe she was the virago described. That is, he did until he encountered her in Bath’s Upper Rooms.
He wouldn’t have lost his temper and spoken so harshly, if she hadn’t ripped into him precisely where he was tenderest. Her haughty observation about ‘wastrel lordlings’ compounded his own sense of inadequacy, which he certainly could have done without.
Seelye led her off to finish their spat in private, but he was too angry to keep his answers light.
“A room in Calais, touché,” he said, hand to heart, pantomiming a lethal stab. “Lest you forget, my lady, time is passing, tick, tock, tick, tock.” He swung his quizzing glass on its ribbon like a clock’s pendulum to illustrate his point. “So many Seasons and still no takers? With your beauty, jewelry, and dowry, one can’t help but wonder why.” He tapped his chin with his quizzing glass, pondering Life’s Great Mystery as she had done with her fan moments ago. “Perhaps you’ve been as charming to your suitors as you’ve been to me.”
“You started this, Lord Seelye. You haven’t laid eyes on me in years, yet you set out to offend me in front of your apish claque. To what end?”
Seelye pivoted slowly to face her fully and said, “You’ve changed, Jane, and I don’t like what you’ve become.” He stood silent for a moment then shrugged. “Fortunately, I’m nothing but a wastrel lordling whom you despise, so my opinion can be of no consequence.”
“You underestimate yourself. Meeting you has been a revelation, Lord Seelye.”
“Likewise,” he said and bowed slightly over her hand before dropping it to stalk away.
* * *
Her mind reeled. Everything she’d done till that moment Jane had done to marry the man she loved. But Lord Seelye hated her on sight.
She was used to being disliked by ladies who resented her and men she’d refused. But no one came out of the gate dead set against her the way he had. That he, of all men, did so set a torch to her plans.
Since her come out, she kept eligible gentleman at bay because a second son’s proposal hadn’t a chance against an earl’s or a viscount’s. Indeed, when she was labeled ‘The Impossible’ it was a relief, but only her closest confidante, Lady Iphigenia Thornton, knew why.
In her first Season, Jane cultivated an off-putting reserve—no easy task for a lady fresh from the schoolroom. She held herself aloof and criticized her many admirers for infinitesimal improprieties. This nit-picking never sat well with her, but in the end, romance trumped regret.
Would-be suitors and her brother grew impatient and, in turn, she grew more difficult. As a rule, she alienated suitors to their degree of precedence: a polite “no, thank you” to the Honorable Mr. So-and-so, public embarrassment for a cruel, importunate earl.
It so happened that none of these gentleman faulted her for refusing other men. They agreed she had every right to be picky. They resented her rejection because each man thought himself the only one worthy to be exempt from her disdain.
Fortune hunters who proved impervious to rebuff, Jane bored. She held forth on any number of dull, reformist topics—abuse of dray horses, the plight of climbing boys, the evils of gambling, drinking, boxing, dogfighting, cockfighting, and bullbaiting. She lectured them until they wished either she were less rich, or they were more anesthetized by brandy before entering Almack’s, land of bitter, dilute lemonade and insipid ratafia.
These men endured her harangues with fixed smiles and gritted teeth, knowing that whosoever won her hand could as lord and master stay that hand and stopper that mouth with his own. And given her bee-stung lips, that prospect had its charm.
Jane had not imagined this line of reasoning, she’d overheard it during a crowded ball. Two such gentlemen standing in front of a pillar discussed her without realizing that she stood behind it fanning herself.
“If the Incomparable had ten thousand guineas fewer no one would bother,” said one.
The other declared, “I wish Her Iciness to Jericho—not Hell, mind. Beelzebub would blight my own hereafter for sending her there and cooling the place down.”
“Too true! Daresay it’d be balmy.”
Hm. Hm.
By her second Season, the Incomparable had become the Incorrigible.
“My money and conscience are mine alone,” she told swains point-blank and noted how declarations of undying love promptly died on their lips when they realized the bulk of her fortune might never be theirs.
Thirty-thousand pounds in her dowry, while generous, was modest compared to her future inheritance. Before her twenty-first birthday, George could earmark that fortune for female issue in a marriage settlement or entrust it to her husband as was customary. But if she came of age unmarried, that stupendous sum would be hers alone legally—and negotiations to obtain it, well, uncomfortable.
In her third Season, the crowd of suitors and dance partners thinned. She didn’t care. Her love for Lord Seelye made sitting out a few dances unimportant. But it made her first encounter with him more devastating. Her chest ached so, she feared her heart had shattered within it.
When he called her ‘Ice Maiden’ and faked a shiver, she experienced a searing moment of clarity: she had been a blithering idiot. And for what? A childhood memory? A ghost? The endearing young man she once knew must have died on the battlefield. A few minutes’ conversation proved that he was like all the rest but for one distinction, he dared disparage her to her face.
As angry as she was at him, she was furious with herself. How stupid, how arrogant, was she to assume Lord Seelye would want her simply because every other man did—and particularly second sons in need of financial rescue. Her own presumption was quite as hard to swallow as his dislike of her.
She resolved there and then to avoid him or cut him. She would certainly not give him another opportunity to humiliate her. And of course, she would no longer love him, though she had for a decade. She’d stopped biting her nails with strict self-governance, in time, she would break the emotional habit that attached her to a hopeless case.
She allotted seven months for the task, at which point, she would turn one-and-twenty and could afford to do whatever she wished with the rest of her life.
The question was, if she wasn’t to be Lord Seelye’s wife, who would she become instead?
Chapter 2
In which our hero’s Achilles heel develops blisters.
Seelye knew he was the least apocalyptic of the
Four Horsemen. Still, he’d never felt so minuscule as when he was treated to Lady Jane Babcock’s unvarnished opinion of him.
He didn’t need her to point out that being Beau Burton was no great achievement. It was a necessary evil, a means to an end. Having risked life and limb for king and country—unlike a certain scornful lady—perhaps he could be forgiven for doing what he must to secure his future. After all, he wished for a wife, quiet amusements, and creature comforts, unlike his comrades who had considered marriage an unavoidable duty.
The towering Duke of Ainsworth, formerly Major Lord Maubrey, cultivated his taciturnity to a near-wordless art form that kept the ton at arm’s length. He did this because he wasn’t anxious to marry so much as ladies were anxious to marry him. (And no man enjoys being the prey in a stag hunt.) Likewise, Lord Clun relied on his daunting demeanor and size to intimidate would-be matchmakers. Even the Hon. George Percy opted to be formidable. In a ballroom, golden-eyed Percy resembled a stalking lion keen to cull the weak from the herd.
His friends overawed others intentionally, whereas Seelye charmed and reassured them. If he were a lion, he’d be the one escorting a limping gazelle from the savannah to safety, even if meant he’d go hungry. That was his nature. He couldn’t help the paradox of being the amiable Horseman of the Apocalypse. He was a man who liked to be liked.
So when fellows complimented his tailored perfection, his self-deprecation aroused more admiration, never envy. (He would say they should only envy him his valet, Montret, the meticulous Belgian he lured away from Brussels after the war.)
His popularity owed even more to the distaff half of the ton. Ladies of all ages cooed over his looks and easy address. Matrons with daughters to launch approved him most of all, for he had the knack of teasing forth a young lady’s natural charm, which brought her to the attention of many eligible gentlemen, and which in turn made a good match far more likely.
As a consequence, he was a sought-after guest during the Season and at country house parties throughout the autumn. In fact, he saved the cost of a cook and a maid attending an uninterrupted series of these all over England with Montret in tow.
His Lordship's Last Wager Page 2
