by Lynn Messina
Addleson’s mouth twisted in a wry smile as he wondered if Silvie should thank Mr. Petrie or curse him, for it was certainly his seemingly endless lecture on sundry North American plants that had made him so decisive. He usually approached the end of an affair with more tact and discretion, gradually severing the connection, but he knew the emerald set would go a long way in soothing ruffled feathers.
With the immediate future neatly settled, the viscount expected his mood to improve, but it did not and he arrived at the gaming hell determined to use his memory skills to beat his fellows at cards. Mr. Petrie had a lot to answer for indeed. The imminent penury of the Elder Davis’s patrons was surely all his fault.
Damn the sunset hyssop!
Chapter Four
The problem, Agatha realized, with spending four seasons alienating everyone who tried to establish a connection with you was that when you wanted to find out information about a particular gentleman, you had nobody to ask.
There was always her mother, of course, but such a route necessitated posing the question without appearing interested in the answer, for anything else would inflame the sliver of hope that burned in Lady Bolingbroke’s heart despite her daughter’s best efforts to extinguish it entirely. Although her mother had been too distracted to properly address her Addleson query at the theater, she would recognize a follow-up for what it was—sustained interest—and most likely send an engagement notice to the Times.
Agatha could not run the risk.
Instead, she waited until all the guests from her father’s soiree had taken their leave, including Mr. Petrie, who had accepted Lord Waldegrave’s invitation to continue their conversation over port at Brooks’s, and casually remarked on the success of the evening.
“Such a delightful turnout,” she observed as she followed Lord Bolingbroke into his study, where a collation of cold meats had been served at his request. Supper had been provided at the affair, but he had been too busy with his hosting duties to eat properly. Now he was decidedly hungry.
Truman, who had laid the silverware, offered Agatha a plate, but she politely demurred, preferring a cup of tea, which was instantly provided.
“Yes,” agreed Bolingbroke. “’Twas a delightful turnout, which was entirely gratifying, as Mr. Petrie is not well known in this country. Gruber”—his lordship’s full-time gardener and sometime advisor—“brought him to my attention, for which I’m grateful. The society has never invited an American to speak before, and I’m glad I was able to persuade the membership of Petrie’s worthiness. I believe his talk is going to concern sunset hyssop, which is, if my memory serves me correctly, a topic Townshend has written about extensively. I am surprised Townshend did not come tonight, for he knows more about the flora of North America than the entire membership combined.”
Before her father could make further comments about society members who had failed to attend, she tried to bring the conversation back to those who had. “Petrie must have some admirers, for even Lord Addleson, who is not known for his fondness of horticultural matters, attended.”
Striving for the perfect note of carefully modulated disinterest, Agatha succeeded too well in her aim because her father agreed and quickly changed the subject.
“He came with his cousin Edward Abingdon. They are frequently together,” Bolingbroke explained as he broke off a piece of bread. “The truly astonishing guest was Philby Cromer, who is a member of the Society for the Advancement of Horticultural Knowledge, which, as you know, is decidedly misguided in its approach to advancement and science. I would not expect a member of that institution to attend such an event, for its fellows are resolutely unenlightened, embracing their ignorance with both hands.”
Lord Bolingbroke continued in the same vein for several minutes more, detailing his disgust with the Society for the Advancement of Horticultural Knowledge and mocking everything about it, from its arbitrary membership rules (“One blackball and a fellow is out—no debate, no appeal!”) to its poorly located offices in Cheapside (“As if they are setting up a law practice to prosecute flowers!”).
Although the particulars of the tirade were new to Agatha, the outrage was not, for her father frequently disparaged the rival organization. As far as she could tell, the differences between the two groups were so minor as to not exist at all, for were both not devoted to the study and care of plants? But even though the finer points eluded her, she knew better than to dismiss them. Where she saw seventeen different shades of primrose, her father saw yellow.
While waiting for Lord Bolingbroke’s ire to run its course, Agatha sipped her tea and called to mind the expression on Addleson’s face as he looked down at the frayed carpet—a mix of startled, disgruntled and annoyed. He had worn a glare of such intensity, she had half expected him to demand an apology from the offending scrap of rug.
It was such a small thing to be bothered by, like misaligned buttons on a waistcoat or an untied boot, but the event clearly pricked his vanity, and when he raised his head to discover her gaze upon him, she wasn’t at all surprised to see the flustered expression on his face. What she was surprised by was how quickly he recovered his dignity, for nary a second later he was striding toward her with broad, determined steps meant to intimidate her. He stopped mere inches from where she stood, and Agatha was honest enough to admit that he had succeeded. Up close, his scowl firmly in place, his shoulders intimidatingly broad, he was quite daunting, and rather than succumb to the unsettling feeling with a discreet step backward, she embraced it with a bold step forward.
Naturally, she couldn’t resist teasing him about his stumble. Without intending to, the viscount had revealed the remarkably trivial matter to be a sore point, and she prided herself on spotting and exploiting sore points. The comment also gave her an opportunity to seize the upper hand, for the advantage had been Addleson’s all evening. He had been correct about the encounter with Mr. Petrie: She had been unable to come up with an appropriately cutting reply and walked away in silence as a last resort.
Her inability to think of a more assertive response was all Addleson’s fault. Of course she knew how to handle a preening idiot such as Petrie. The man was staying in her house and had been trying to espouse scientific theories in her general direction for three days now. She successfully routed them all, save for a talk on the highly developed root system of the sunset hyssop. She didn’t care a fig about the advantages of shallow roots, but the spiny tentacles of the roots themselves, with their intricate, lacelike pattern, appealed to her, and she grabbed the flower without asking permission, promptly disappearing with it into her studio.
No, the reason Agatha couldn’t think of a properly dismissive remark to issue to Petrie was the viscount’s barely concealed amusement. Delighted by the whole exchange, he stood by gleefully as the naturalist compared her unfavorably to a household pet. He had orchestrated the whole thing, dragging her into the conversation under false pretenses—she, an aficionado of the dune!—in order to humiliate her with Petrie’s offensive notions about womanhood.
She had been too furious to think properly, her anger made worse by the fact she was still reeling from the perplexing moment earlier when Addleson’s gaze had met hers. What a extraordinarily disconcerting experience that was, to find herself incapable of looking away, to feel as if the room had suddenly fallen silent and everything ceased to move, even the clocks.
The interval ended as abruptly as it began, and Agatha, striving to hide her embarrassment behind a veil of amused indifference, raised one of her eyebrows at Addleson.
Recalling the incident now, she attributed the unsettling moment to the fact that the viscount had caught her staring. Such a thing had never happened to her before, despite the many hours she’d spent examining the beau monde with single-minded focus. Her status as Lady Agony—a young lady unwilling to endear herself to others, readily mocked for her lack of social graces—made members of the ton oblivious to her attentions. It was as if she were capable of not being seen, a s
pecial ability only she had, and she relished the possession of it, for it allowed her the time and the opportunity to get the details right, to fix a scene in her mind so she could re-create it hours later on paper.
But she had not been invisible to Addleson. He had seen her looking at him and returned her stare with equal brazenness.
It was little wonder she could not formulate a sufficient reply to Petrie, with the naturalist comparing her to a dog and the viscount gloating silently and her mind churning with the implications of her sudden visibility. That she could walk away without stumbling herself was accomplishment enough.
Agatha took another sip of her tea, which was cool now, as Lord Bolingbroke congratulated himself on not barring the door to Cromer. “For that is exactly what the Society for the Advancement of Horticultural Knowledge would do to a member of the British Horticultural Society, should one of our numbers so forget himself as to attend a gathering of theirs.”
“Of course,” she said, nodding enthusiastically at his gracious condescension.
“It goes without saying,” he added, “that such an event would never occur, for there is nothing that the absurd travesty of an organization could offer that would interest any members of our illustrious institution. In theory, however, it is easy to predict how they would behave.”
Agatha knew her father could predict an endless variety of rude behaviors for the other group and sought to change the subject before he grew too deeply connected to the endeavor.
“Mr. Petrie instructed me on sand dunes,” she announced apropos of nothing.
If her father thought the non sequitur was unusual, he made no mention of it as he poured himself another glass of claret. “A subject on which he is an expert. His knowledge is vast and impressive, and you would do well to listen to any topic on which he cared to offer instruction. We are very fortunate to have him as a guest on this, his maiden journey to England.”
Knowing very well the state of her fortune, Agatha chose not to dwell on her father’s comment and instead observed that Addleson had been the luckiest recipient of their visitor’s vast and impressive knowledge.
At the second mention of the viscount in a single conversation, her mother would have had the banns posted and the guest list drawn up. Her father, however, noticed nothing amiss. Unlike his wife, Bolingbroke had more things on his mind than the marital status of his lone progeny. Without question, he was fond of Agatha and hoped to see her comfortably settled with a family of her own, but it made no difference to him if that happy event happened that year or in several years. Sometimes his wife insisted on discussing the matter with him, and ever the thoughtful husband, he always agreed to listen to her concerns, though, to be accurate, he never actually agreed to consider them. Rather, he pondered issues of greater importance, such as which orchid to submit to the horticultural society’s annual exhibition, while Lady Bolingbroke chattered away about Agatha’s unencouraging prospects.
He treated his daughter with the same benign indifference, appearing interested in her painting while remaining almost entirely ignorant of her passion. When she presented him with a full-size portrait of himself to hang in his study, he could not say which surprised him more: the imperious sneer she had given to his upper lip or the revelation that he had agreed to let her hang the canvas in his study.
Bolingbroke nodded agreeably to her observation. “Yes, yes, Addleson did in fact have the unparalleled pleasure of Petrie’s company for an extended time. I almost interrupted once to introduce Petrie to Cromer—a bit of showing off, I will admit!—but I did not have the heart to spoil Addleson’s enjoyment.”
Agatha smiled at this assertion, for the viscount had looked far from joyful while her eyes had been focused on him. But her father’s enthusiasms tended to cloud his perception, altering his reality just slightly.
“I am surprised by Addleson’s interest,” Agatha said. “He strikes me as the sort of gentleman who’s more devoted to being a tulip than raising them.”
Her father laughed appreciatively at her witticism, for he himself had recently been represented as a tulip in a drawing by that wicked Mr. Holyroodhouse only a few weeks before. As an obedient daughter, Agatha had felt some qualms about portraying her sire as a flower and appeased her conscience by placing him in the back row, half hidden behind one of Miss Lavinia Harlow’s pointy elbows. The alternative—not doing the caricature—had never occurred to her, for she was too much of an artist to forgo the perfect idea out of a vague sense of filial disloyalty. The Marquess of Huntly had indeed been plucked by the Harlow chit and his own arrogance.
In drawing the illustration, she had treated her father no more harshly than she had treated herself, for Lady Agatha Bolingbroke’s lack of social graces was far too widely discussed to pass unnoticed by a social commentator of Mr. Holyroodhouse’s caliber. Not to lampoon the notorious misanthrope would have raised awkward questions about the cartoonist’s identity, so Agatha gamely took aim at herself. Employing the nickname she had heard muttered in her general direction several times, she put it front and center in her first drawing, a depiction of a dark-eyed woman standing alone in the middle of an empty dance floor: “Lady Agony awaits her next victim.”
And with that, a reputation had been made.
“Well stated, my dear,” Bolingbroke said, “very well stated. Just between us, I will confess that I suspect he’s a bit dicked in the nob. He is mostly a reasonable man of passing intelligence, but he’s given to long, rambling fits about inconsequential things. He once babbled at me for five minutes on the proper height of a Hessian heel! Without question, I recognized the gravity of appropriate footwear and take great pride in the shine of my shoes—not that I would employ Champagne like Brummel in the pursuit of it, for such a thing strikes me as wasteful—but there is a point at which a preoccupation for fashion passes into madness. I wasn’t even wearing Hessians at the time. I was sporting top boots! I fully expected the commissioner of Bedlam to come and carry him off. I think it’s above all things absurd for a man with such an uncertain temperament to be allowed to take up his seat in parliament. Obviously, it’s his birthright and the Crown cannot administer aptitude tests before allowing the privilege, but surely something should be done to prevent cracked pots from deciding the country’s future.”
Considering her father’s own penchant for passionate discussion of the things that mattered to him, Agatha smiled at his indignation and pictured him trapped in a conversation about boot heels. Despite his claim to care about the luster of his footwear, she knew he thought very little about his appearance. His only concern was that he be presented in the first stare of fashion; the tools required to attain that goal—be it Champagne, claret or gutter water—did not occupy him in the least.
For this reason, she could well imagine his impatient stance as the viscount rambled on: the disgruntled brow, the curled lip, the fingers of his left hand tugging on his watch fob. The scene was so diverting, it took her a moment to properly digest the whole of his statement.
“I’m sorry, Father, but did you say that Lord Addleson intends to take up his seat in the House of Lords?”
Bolingbroke nodded in earnest. “I did, m’dear, yes. Your surprise is understandable, for if anyone seems ill-suited to the rigors of political life, with its three-hour speeches on the leveeing of taxes and its decidedly unaccommodating benches—terrible on the back, I assure you—it is he. But it’s not mere rumor. Linlithgow heard it from the gentleman himself. He leans Whigish, you know—Addleson, not Linlithgow.”
At once, the idea of Addleson sporting a Whigish wig occurred to Agatha, but the image that accompanied the thought was of the dreary wigs her grandfather and his contemporaries wore. Towering in height and brimming with pomposity, the powdered confections lent themselves easily to satire, as Hogarth’s brilliant engraving, “The Five Orders of Periwigs,” beautifully demonstrated. There was nothing about the formerly popular adornment, however, that aligned it with the Whig party. Head
pieces in general, she realized, were politically neutral in their bearing, unlike, for example, the scarlet ribbons worn by French nobility during the Terror to denounce the voracious use of the guillotine.
Although she could not come up with a type of wig that had an essential Whigishness about it, she remained convinced the idea had merit and wondered if she was being too literal in her thinking. The wig didn’t have to be accurate in its history.
Or maybe the problem was that she wasn’t being literal enough. Perhaps the dim-witted viscount believed that being a Whig meant wearing a wig.
Oh, yes, she thought as the image started to take form in her mind. She could show Addleson in his dressing room donning a wig and the caption would read: “Lord Addleson becomes a Whig.”
No, she thought, excitement coursing through her, Lord Addlewit becomes a Whig.
As impatient as she was to get started, Agatha was too well bred to dart out of the room like an eager schoolgirl and instead listened politely as her father speculated about Linlithgow’s political affiliation. Although Bolingbroke had known the fellow for more than twenty years, he didn’t have a clue as to which direction he leaned, a thought that had only just occurred to him. Listening to him parse his friend’s horticultural preferences for deeper meaning (“A penchant for reusing topsoil does not necessarily indicate a Tory frugality”), Agatha thought she might pull her hair out at the roots.
Far better to rudely end a conversation than to go bald. Surely, her mother would concur. Lady Agony was horrifying enough with a full head of disheveled ringlets.
“I’m sorry, Papa, but I must excuse myself. I have work to do,” she explained, jumping to her feet.
