An Extraordinary Flirtation

by Maggie MacKeever

  Fitz was wringing every possible ounce of drama from the moment. Paul longed to throttle him, along with the damned marquess, who looked every bit as entertained as if he were watching a play.

  Cara bit back laughter. “Surely you didn’t say such an unkind thing, Squire Anderley. Perhaps the baron misunderstood?"

  The baron had misunderstood nothing. Paul had tolerated the mincing jack-a-dandy’s prittle-prattle until he could stomach no more. Not that the popinjay could mince on horseback, but there was something suspicious about his sorrel’s gait. Or there had seemed to be, because they’d dawdled along at an old lady’s pace, falling farther and farther behind, until the fribble had touched his heels to the horse’s flanks and left Paul blinking at his dust.

  And then he’d ridden into the copse to see Cara flirting—flirting!—with that blasted Mannering. “I said it and I meant it! And there’ll be no bloody duel. If you’ve had enough entertainment for this morning, Lady Norwood, I will see you home.”

  “Now there’s an interesting point,” mused Fitz. “If one fellow demands honor be satisfied, and the second fellow refuses, does that mean the second fellow is a cad?”

  “It means the second fellow is all out of patience!” Paul glowered at Cara, whose hand Lord Mannering still held. “Lady Norwood, if you please."

  Cara didn’t please, not with Nicky holding on to her as if he owned her, which she hadn’t realized until Paul pointed out the fact. She snatched her hand away. “I’ll be expecting you,” the marquess murmured, for her ears alone, “at ten o’clock tonight.”

  Chapter 11

  Among the many social festivities favored by the ton, musical evenings were much enjoyed, where young ladies of the best families showed off to hopefully good advantage the result of expensive lessons from imported teachers who, even if they couldn’t speak the English language without mangling it, perfectly understood the complexities of forte and adagio. Because this particular evening’s entertainment included not only Handel’s Water Music performed on the glass harmonica, but also a pair of Italian opera singers hired for the occasion, in addition to the young ladies whose relatives had made known their severe displeasure should any of the invitees fail to attend, Lady Clement’s rooms were filled. They were not quite so filled as they might have been, however, for Lady Norwood was not present, a circumstance upon which her brother was brooding as a nervous Miss Carruthers recited Mrs. Barbour’s stirring lines, “Still the loud death drums, the thundering from afar....”

  Cara was supposed to chaperone Zoe, was she not? She could hardly chaperone anyone from her bedchamber, where once again she’d secluded herself, claiming an aching head. Damned if Beau could see mat his sister had done a single useful thing since she’d returned to town. So here he was, accompanying Ianthe and Zoe to this dull affair, and listening to a whey-faced chit blather on about freedom being prostrate, and fallen blossoms strewn on a foreign strand.

  Beau would have much rather been at one of his clubs. Or with one of his own fallen blossoms, although that garden was also in disarray. He had visited one of those lovelies just this afternoon, and matters had been progressing nicely, when the lady was moved to announce that she didn’t think she cared to be one of several anymore, even if it was traditional for a male Loversall to keep a stable of sweethearts, at which point both ardor and Beau had fled out the door. First he’d disappointed Lavinia, and now he’d fled from Sidoney. Beau dreaded to think what would happen when he visited Celeste.

  Ianthe, at least, was intent on the young performer, perhaps because the girl had mentioned heart witherings. She dabbed a pretty lace handkerchief to the corner of her eye. Zoe was off in another room, escorted there by her young lieutenant and several of his fellow officers, enjoying a glass of punch. Beau wondered if his love life might improve when his daughter was safely settled. Perhaps he should start interviewing prospective candidates for her hand. Separate the wheat from the chaff, so to speak. Although all he’d seen thus far was chaff. And hopefully, in the interim, none of his own blossoms would spread word of his failure to perform all about the town.

  Reference to throbbing bosoms caught his attention. He eyed the young performer critically. Her hands were clasped to her own bosom as if it were thus afflicted. It was a nice bosom, Beau decided. Egypt’s virgins, indeed.

  If Ianthe was not similarly affected by mention of bosoms, she was very moved by Miss Carruthers’ stirring delivery, and the fact that the damsel had stumbled over only a few lines; and when London began exulting, thus signifying that the interminable verse was corning finally to an end, she prepared herself to enthusiastically clap.

  Fitz also awaited that moment, in the hallway outside the drawing room, which he already knew to be the most elegant of chambers, with pretty blue-and-white foliate-striped wallpaper, rosewood furniture inlaid with lacquered gilded brass, a beautiful plaster ceiling with moldings of musical instruments, large windows, and a fine marble chimneypiece. He cast a last critical glance at his reflection in an exquisitely gilt-framed wall mirror alive with carved moving animals and birds, foliage, and twisting candle brackets; and assured himself again that he looked especially fine tonight in a midnight blue coat and white satin breeches, with frilled linen on his shirtfront, and shiny buckled shoes with daringly square toes. All of this splendor was secondary, however, to his masterfully tied cravat, a variation on the Coup de Grace, which incorporated elements of the Mathematical, with two horizontal dents as in the latter, and two collateral dents as in the former, as well as a Gordian knot, in a lovely shade of cerulean blue, which was complemented by the clocks in his stockings and the stripes in his waistcoat. Where Brummell believed that the severest mortification a gentleman could incur was to attract attention in the street by his appearance, Fitz believed the opposite, and had spent two hours scrubbing himself with a pig-bristle brush, then tweezing his eyebrows and whiskers with the aid of a dentist’s mirror, before beginning the serious business of putting on his clothes.

  The recitation ended to polite applause. Next on the program was the glass harmonica, which Fitz had already decided his eardrums could tolerate. He strolled into the drawing room and glanced about for a vantage point from which to best display himself. Ianthe Loversall caught his eye. She was dressed with unusual restraint in a dress fashioned from rose Italian crepe, lavishly trimmed with floss silk and blond lace, her hair dressed in the antique Roman style, confined at the back of the head in two light knots, and adorned with a bandeau of polished steel. If at her age she should more properly have been wearing toques and turbans and French caps, she was hardly mutton dressed as lamb.

  He made his way toward her. Zoe had also returned to her family, a glass of punch in her hand, a viscount, the aged knight, and her Hussars trailing in her wake; and although the latter gentlemen sported an impressive amount of gold braid on their blue uniforms, to compare them to performing monkeys was unkind. Fitz grudgingly conceded that the young woman looked unexceptionable in a gown of clear lawn with a cherry-colored sash and edging around the skirt, her hair dressed in irregular curls and decked with flowers.

  Unfortunately, she didn’t act it. “Hello, Baron Fitzrichard!” she chirped. “Is Lord Mannering also here?”

  Fitz looked down his nose at her. “Don’t know why he should be. For that matter, don’t know why anyone should be! Only reason I’m here is because m’cousin is making her appearance. I’d be drummed out of the family if I hadn’t come. I like my family.” He also liked his cousin, and had twisted several arms to insure that several people who might have liked to be otherwise were here. Nicky had pleaded a previous engagement. Blandly, Fitz remarked, “Lady Norwood ain’t here?”

  Ianthe smiled at Fitz. “Poor Cara has the headache. Allow me to present to you my brother. Beau, this is Baron Fitzrichard. He has been kind enough to instruct me in the principles of female dress.”

  “You are the epitome of harmonic progressions this evening, Miss Loversall,” Fitz said gallantly. H
e then turned his attention on her brother. Corbeau-colored coat with covered buttons, white Marcella waistcoat, light sage green breeches, hair fashionably tousled, cravat tied in the elegantly austere Trone d’Amour— No gentleman so striking in appearance could not have taken a considerable amount of time with his toilette, which was a charming thing in one known to be a regular Trojan, a noted Corinthian, and at home to a peg.

  “Delighted,” said Fitz, and bowed.

  “Likewise.” Beau returned the salute. “We’re here because Ianthe is too tender-hearted to fail to lend her support to any budding musical endeavor. Your cravat is very fine. And I cannot help but admire your moustache.”

  Fitz beamed in response to the compliments. “Your cousin is going to sing?” inquired Ianthe.

  “Lord, I hope not!” Fitz shuddered. “She has a voice like a bullfrog. But she plays the harp prodigious well.” Conversation ceased then, because a young woman seated herself at the keyboard of the glass harmonica, a curious device with a set of glasses nestled inside each other and mounted on a spindle which was turned by a foot pedal, and began to play.

  Paul Anderley paused on the threshold of the drawing room, and gazed into the crowd. No arm-twisting relative of one of the performers had brought him here tonight—Paul didn’t care for music, and even less for women, young or otherwise, who chose to make themselves a public display—but some arm-twisting of his own had secured him an invitation to the event. Arm-twisting and a hefty bribe to a certain elderly butler, who had refused to speak of his employer’s business for less than ten pounds. A gleam of red-gold caught Paul’s eye, and he made his way toward it, earning several annoyed glances, about which he didn’t care the least. Then he grew annoyed himself, because that red-gold hair didn’t belong to the member of the family he sought. Beau grinned at him. “Hello, Anderley. Misplace your fox?”

  Paul chose to overlook this provocation. “Lady Norwood didn’t accompany you?”

  “Poor Aunt Cara has the headache,” offered Zoe, eyelashes aflutter. “She seems to be the sickly sort, poor thing.”

  Here was no potential suitor. “Zoe,” Beau said sternly, “behave yourself!” Unaccustomed to being rebuked by her papa, Zoe stared at him in astonishment.

  Paul took up a stance behind the ladies. If Cara was in a fragile state of health, it was easily understood. Her family would leave anyone terminally vexed. And as for headaches, he might soon have one himself, due to the warmth of the crowded room, and the mingled odors of candle wax and a hundred different perfumes. An “Ahem!” caught Paul’s attention. He turned to see Baron Fitzrichard peering at him through a quizzing glass.

  A blue cravat? It was enough to make a man ill. “Dandified jackanapes,” muttered Paul.

  Fitz raised his quizzing glass in a salute. “Country yokel,” he retorted, for if the squire was correct enough in brown coat and cream-colored breeches, his cravat was tied in the Irish, which Fitz considered very dull indeed.

  Damned if the baron wasn’t brandishing his glass as if it were a sabre. “Impudent coxcomb.”

  Fitz set about distracting his opponent with a bit of slashing about. “Padgroom!” he observed.

  To accuse him of poor horse-handling ability! Paul bared his teeth. “Curst dandy!” he retorted, somewhat unoriginally.

  Fitz executed an artful combination of the Vertex strike, delivered from above, against his opponent’s scalp; then followed with the Wrathful, executed from the right shoulder upon the opponent’s left ear. “Turnip sucker! Honors to me, I think.”

  “Quiet!” snapped a lady seated in front of them, who happened to be related to the harmonium player. "Some of us would like to hear the entertainment, if you please!”

  Paul didn’t please, particularly, but it was beneath him to get into a brangle with a fribble. Wondering why Cara and her cousins encouraged the man, he crossed his arms and looked severe.

  The harmonium recital ended. Next on the program were the Italian opera singers. Paul disliked opera. He scowled even more. Observing this reaction, Fitz immediately waxed enthusiastic. “The Italian manner of singing is refined and full of art. It moves us and at the same time excites our admiration; it is the very spirit of music; pleasant, charming, expressive, rich in taste and feeling; and it carries the hearer agreeably from one passion to another. The French manner of singing, on the other hand, is more plain than full of art, more speaking than singing, the expression of the passions and the voice more strange than natural. Although one cannot disregard Rameau’s treatise on musical theory, which provides musicians with a well-organized, enduring concept of harmonic progressions and tonality.”

  Fitz’s opinion to the contrary (which wasn’t really his opinion, and voiced only to further aggravate the squire), a significant number of the guests agreed with Paul concerning the opera, or sufficient of them that low conversations continued as the male mezzo-soprano, pretending to be in a Persian garden, sang to a tree; and a female soprano compared the victims of love to a little stream that loved its freedom.

  Ianthe felt sorry for Paul Anderley, who clearly was out of his depth. “You are Cara’s neighbor, I believe? The Cotswolds are very fine. All those lovely rolling hills.”

  “All those sheep,” interjected Beau.

  Ianthe cast her cousin a chiding glance. “Sheep are also very nice. They provide us all that lovely wool. Tell me, Squire Anderley, do you ride to hounds?”

  Paul immediately brightened and embarked upon a paean to the hunt. Batteaus, when hunters were preceded into the field by beaters, began the first Wednesday in November and continued twice a day for the rest of the three-month season. There was nothing so beautiful and stirring a sight as the hunters assembled for the start of the day’s hunt, as could be attested to by the ladies who rode out to the meet to see their menfolk off, although it was not considered respectable for them to actually follow the hounds.

  Fortunately, because the mere thought of slaying living creatures revolted Ianthe, the squire’s conversation wasn’t entirely limited to the hunt. He could also talk quite knowledgeably about fly-fishing or yachting or pugilism, and could even describe in great detail the most recent occasion on which Tom Molineaux had challenged the champion Tom Cribb, not that he would speak to Miss Loversall of such masculine topics. The elder Miss Loversall, that was. He didn’t wish to speak to the younger Miss Loversall at all.

  Zoe had been too long ignored. Her aunt and Squire Anderley were deep in conversation, and Beau was deep in the dumps, while Baron Fitzrichard contemplated the opera singers through his quizzing glass. Her admirers had departed en masse when the male mezzo-soprano first opened his mouth. Instead of paying attention to the singers, Zoe chose to eavesdrop on her cousin’s conversation. “Tally ho!” she said.

  Impertinent chit! thought Paul, and Fitz also, although the two gentlemen were unlikely to realize that on this one point they agreed. Ianthe said gently, “Zoe, it is impolite to interrupt.”

  Zoe ignored her and fluttered her eyelashes at the squire. “Are you in amours with my aunt, sir?”

  Paul waited for someone to remonstrate with the abominable chit for her boldness, but Beau and Ianthe—and Fitz—were regarding him with as much curiosity as Zoe. “I have a great regard for Lady Norwood,” he said stiffly.

  “You poor man," sighed Zoe. “Loversalls give their all for romance. Just one more romance, one more throw of the dice. And when they are through with dicing, they fling themselves off the battlements like Romola; or drink a fatal dose of poison, like Odo; or visit the menagerie in the Tower, like Casimir, and get eaten by a bear. We are victims of our tumultuous passions.” She slanted a glance sideways at Fitz. “Where is Lord Mannering, do you know?”

  Fitz knew that Nicky should stay as far away as possible from this little vixen. “I’m sure I couldn’t say. M’cousin is performing next. 'Passacalles de primero tono’ from Diego Fernandez de Huete’s Compendia numeroso, volume two, 1704.”

  Zoe turned back to her father, who
was still lost in contemplation of the astonishing discovery that he had passed his prime. Could it be possible that there was truly no life left in the old fellow? Or that a man was limited to a finite number of amours? Surely he had not exceeded his quota at only seven-and-thirty years of age! True, he had been profligate, but he didn’t think he’d been so wasteful as that.

  Zoe poked him with her elbow. “You are not paying attention to me, Beau. I should think that you would be interested to learn that I have fallen in love. It is quite serious! I have all the symptoms of someone who is lovesick.”

  Beau eyed his vivid daughter with a degree of trepidation. “And what might those symptoms be?”

  Prettily, she drooped. “I can think of nothing else. My spirits are very low. I cannot sleep, or eat. I daresay I may even succumb to the vapors soon.”

  Beau might have been more concerned had he not seen Zoe make a good meal that very evening. Not to mention coquetting with the members of her Zoo, who were hovering in the hall outside, waiting for the Italian caterwauling to cease so that they could again converge on her. Encouraged by his silence, Zoe languished all the harder. “Am I not grown pale and wan?”

  Beau admired the roses in her cheeks. “Indeed you are,” he said gravely.

  Zoe tilted her head and looked woeful. “If I cannot have him, I shall wither away on the vine like Cousin Ianthe.” That maligned lady, who with her companions had been listening to this fascinating conversation, closed her mouth with a snap.

  Fitz was astonished to hear such nonsense. “I’ll tell you what it is: the chit needs spectacles! Forgive my boldness, Miss Ianthe, but you ain’t withered the least bit.”

  Ianthe twisted her handkerchief. “Thank you, Baron, for assuring me that I am not yet turned into a prune.”

  So chagrined did she look that Paul was also moved to comment, “Miss Loversall, you look little more than a girl.” Ianthe gave him a grateful glance.