An Inconvenient Beauty

by Kristi Ann Hunter

  “Gossip.”

  “Yes.”

  The two men stared at each other, Colin’s blue eyes boring into Griffith’s, unintimidated despite the vast disparity in social class.

  Griffith sighed. “That is what you do, isn’t it? Gossip and listen and get people to tell you things they had no intention of telling you?”

  “While your confidence in my abilities is rather flattering, I hate to tell you that my vast knowledge is more the result of observation and patience than any actual ferreting out of information.” Colin ran a hand behind his neck. “What exactly are you wanting me to find out?”

  “Something or someone was encouraging these men to keep pursuing Isabella.”

  Colin coughed. “Are you sure it wasn’t Isab . . . er, Miss Breckenridge herself? Women have been known to simply enjoy a great swarm of admirers.”

  “No.”

  Neither spoke for a few moments, and only the swell of orchestra music and the occasionally overloud comment from someone nearby broke the silence.

  Colin coughed. “No, you aren’t sure, or no, it wasn’t her?”

  “Colin, nearly every single man of any significance has spent time paying court to the woman I love.”

  Colin choked on air and went wide-eyed.

  Griffith didn’t stop to let his shocking announcement sink in. “They’re a competitive lot, but they wouldn’t all have stayed in the game unless they thought they had some sort of advantage. I want to know what it was.”

  “Was?”

  He wasn’t even going to dignify that comment with an answer. Right now Griffith was expending a great deal of time and energy to figure out what, exactly, was going on with Isabella. Everything he knew about her family situation in Northumberland would have pointed to her acting in a different manner than she was. Something was going on in her uncle’s house to change that. He had to focus on that part of the problem. Because if he actually began to consider the fact that he might not eventually be the one to win her hand, his brain would become overrun by the ensuing emotional panic.

  “May we keep walking now?”

  Colin inclined his head and took a large leading step toward a group of three young lords. “To gossip we go.” He stopped again. “And why can’t you go gossip without me?”

  “Because I’m not any good at it,” Griffith growled between gritted teeth, knowing what was coming next.

  Colin grinned. “I know. I just wanted to hear you say it.”

  A moment later Colin stopped again. This time within an arm’s breadth of the first man Griffith had wanted to talk to.

  “Why are we stopping now?” Griffith whispered.

  “Because I’m not a septuagenarian matron with a cane who can bust in and take over any conversation she wishes.”

  Griffith had to concede that point and was gratified to know he’d made the right decision bringing Colin in on this fact-finding mission. Griffith dealt very well with people as long as honesty was the most essential element in the communication. Unfortunately he was as awkward with social dances as he was with real ones.

  “We should talk about something,” Colin murmured.

  “Like what?”

  “Anything.”

  “I assume you mean we should talk about anything besides the need to be talking about something.”

  Colin rolled his eyes to the ceiling. “What would you normally be talking about at a thing like this?”

  He’d normally be holing up in a corner until he’d made enough of a presence to get out of a place so full and confining that he could barely breathe without having to apologize for bumping into someone. Which, come to think of it, was a rather brilliant way to start a conversation.

  A grin touched his lips as he shifted sideways. “We don’t need a conversation. We need his attention.” A slight angling on his feet and half a step to the left and Griffith was bumping his shoulder into the other man’s back the way he had done to countless other people in countless other ballrooms.

  “I beg your pardon, Lord Ivonbrook. I’m afraid I misstepped in the crush.”

  The younger man clapped Griffith on the back and made him wince. Not from any sort of pain but from the sheer discomfort of the conversation he was about to enter. “Do you intend to step out onto the dance floor with those moves tonight?”

  As the other man laughed at his own joke, Griffith tried to muster a self-deprecating smile. He must have been fairly successful, because the man didn’t turn and walk awkwardly away.

  “Have you met my sister’s husband, Mr. Colin McCrae?” Griffith gestured toward Colin, and the two men inclined heads in acknowledging bows.

  “Ah, yes, Mr. McCrae. You married Lady Georgina two years ago?”

  Colin sighed and smoothed a hand over his waistcoat. “Indeed I did.”

  Lord Ivonbrook smirked. “She’s a very beautiful woman.”

  “That she is. A beautiful wife is quite a prize for a man.”

  If Griffith didn’t know that Colin was hopelessly in love with his sister, he would have been tempted to deck the man right there in the ballroom. Without actually saying anything insulting, he’d reduced Georgina to little more than a pretty vase to be displayed in the front hall to impress visitors.

  “A prize such as any man can hope to gain.” Lord Ivonbrook lifted his glass of punch in a toast to the sentiment.

  “Oh?” Colin rocked back on his heels. “You have plans of joining the privileged set anytime soon?”

  “I do. Though my path just got a bit more difficult.” Lord Ivonbrook turned to Griffith. “Did you torture him with preconditions and stipulations before he married Lady Georgina? The hassle of marrying off such a popular woman must have had some gains.”

  Griffith tried to take Colin’s lead and smile at the barb, but he didn’t know what to say.

  Colin saved him with a groan. “You’ve no idea what I went through. Is the lady’s father putting you through your paces?”

  “Uncle.” The man shrugged. “He’s a bit out of his tree about it, but it’s a simple thing to do, or at least it should have been. Politics can be a brutal mistress.”

  “I’ve often thought it would be so,” Colin replied.

  “Are you into politics, Mr. McCrae?” Lord Ivonbrook inclined his head in Griffith’s direction. “You’ve a good chance at the House of Commons if you choose to make a run for it.”

  “That would certainly be something to consider. Those green benches are a far cry from the red ones in the House of Lords, though.” Colin gave a self-deprecating laugh.

  “Indeed.” Lord Ivonbrook leaned in. “We recently abandoned a bill they’d passed up to us. All sorts of holes and problems with it. Nearly half the peers had a change to make to the bill before we tabled it. Shame.”

  “Were you in great favor of it, then?”

  The man shrugged, and his gaze began to wander away from Colin to drift over the heads of the rest of the room. “It had some merit. Mostly, its passing would have been convenient.”

  “I have to know,” Colin dropped his voice, as if he were the one imparting a secret, “are you saying there was an additional perk attached to this bill?”

  “Only favor with a certain lady’s family.” Lord Ivonbrook laughed. “Nothing more. I’ve still got my eye on the prize. I just have to find another way to get there.”

  Griffith’s hands curled into fists at the leer that crossed Lord Ivonbrook’s face, but he forced himself to stay silent. Watching Colin was like watching a master artist sculpt clay. A little nudge here, a trim or a cut there, and then you were getting exactly what you wanted.

  Colin shook his head, eyes wide in awe as he turned a bit to the side, angling his shoulder so the three of them weren’t as closed off as they had been before. “That’s a lot to keep track of.”

  Lord Ivonbrook stiffened his shoulders. “That’s why we were born to it.”

  “God knows what He’s doing,” Colin murmured.

  “Indeed He does.” Lord I
vonbrook’s attention was caught by something beyond Colin’s shoulder. “Mr. Harrop, how did your horse do at the race last weekend?”

  Griffith and Colin stepped slowly from the new conversation before setting off in search of the next man Griffith had seen being rather persistent about clinging to Isabella’s skirts.

  “What bill was he referring to?” Colin whispered.

  “We’ve tabled a few recently, but only one with that much discussion. The Apothecary Act was abandoned not too long ago.” Griffith knew Lord Pontebrook had been a very vocal proponent of the act. But would he have actually made it a condition of Ivonbrook’s suit?

  They approached the next man and Colin worked his charms all over again. And with two men after that. The answers they got were forming a disturbing pattern.

  The Apothecary Act had been a hotly contested bill for many years, going back and forth between all the parties involved. For the most part the lords had stayed out of it, waiting on the physicians, druggists, and apothecaries to come to their own agreement. The number of men showing a vested interest in it over the past two and a half months had been rather surprising.

  Griffith looked at the men grouped around Isabella.

  Most of them were young. Nearly all of them were peers.

  Practically the entirety of the unmarried portion of the House of Lords, save himself, was plying her with punch and begging to take her onto the dance floor.

  Colin, who had approached the most recent target on his own, sidled up to Griffith’s side. “That makes five men who’ve hinted that a political loss has made their pursuit of a particular woman more difficult.”

  Griffith didn’t like the idea that was forming in his head. But as he worked every encounter, every conversation, every piece of gossip through the filter of this new information, one conclusion seemed to rise up above all the others. And it nearly made him ill.

  Chapter 31

  “Your Grace.” Gibson, Griffith’s butler, knocked on the wide-open study door with hesitation and a wrinkle of confusion on his forehead. He cleared his throat, and his face dropped back into the stoic lines of a duke’s butler. “Your Grace, there is a woman here to see you. A Miss St. Claire.”

  Griffith surged from his seat, concern for Isabella sending him to the door before his quill had even finished rolling off the edge of the ledger book he’d dropped it on. Despite his resolve, he hadn’t been able to gain any information about why Isabella had turned away from him. All anyone really knew about Lord Pontebrook was that he was a major proponent of the Apothecary Act, which nearly everyone had chosen to abandon.

  Had the loss driven the man to do something unspeakable?

  Griffith’s long legs ate up the passageway between his study and the front hall. He was fairly certain now that Isabella had been brought to London for the express purpose of gaining Lord Pontebrook an audience with men he otherwise wouldn’t have been able to convince. Now that the bill was dead, had he sent Isabella home? Had Miss St. Claire come to tell him if he wanted Isabella he was going to have to chase her to Northumberland?

  It was a logical enough consideration, and he almost ordered his carriage made ready as he crossed to the drawing room.

  On the other hand, he might have simply been another conquest. His steps faltered. What if Isabella was as masterful as Colin, knowing exactly what her target needed to hear in order to do her bidding?

  He pushed open the door with a bit more trepidation, but with less concern that something had happened to Isabella. He was more concerned that, in addition to a broken heart, his pride was about to be shattered as well.

  “Miss St. Claire.”

  She stood, hands clasped tightly in front of her, lips pressed into a thin line. “Your Grace.” She cleared her throat. “Isabella doesn’t know I’m here. In fact she’d be rather furious at me if she knew I’d come. But I’ve had a lot of decisions made for me in the name of protection, and I didn’t like it. I like even less seeing Bella hurting. I’ve come so that you can make your own decision.”

  One eyebrow winged upward. Make his own decision? Hadn’t he done that when he asked Isabella to marry him? What other decision did she need him to make?

  Miss St. Claire shifted on her feet. “My father is a rather obsessed man.”

  “I’m aware.” Griffith crossed his arms over his chest and braced his feet apart. Perhaps Isabella’s cousin was making mountains out of molehills, but her wariness was making Griffith concerned that whatever he was about to hear he wasn’t going to like.

  “My mother and brother died of putrid fever. We were out in Somerset. There wasn’t a physician in the area. Just an apothecary whose position had been passed down for several generations. The medicine he gave them made them worse. By the time the physician could be brought in from Glastonbury, it was too late.”

  This was information Griffith had already been able to learn. The tragic tale was one of the first things he’d uncovered when he actually started asking around about Lord Pontebrook. Sadly, it wasn’t the only tale of such tragedies—which was why the act had gone as far as it had. Of course, there were equally as many stories of people who would have died waiting for a physician to be brought.

  It was easy, however, to see the man’s motivation. But not how it affected Isabella or why it mattered now, ten years after the fact.

  He said nothing.

  Miss St. Claire swallowed, and her hands gripped together tighter.

  “Apothecary reform became my father’s life work. He brought us to London. Stopped letting me spend the summers with my cousin because he couldn’t bear to have me staying in an area so far from a proper doctor. When he started, I think there was actually something noble in his intentions.”

  “And then it became about winning?”

  She shrugged and cast a glance at her maid, who was sitting quietly in the corner with a lump of knitting in her lap. Miss St. Claire’s voice dropped. “I don’t know if it was winning or simply surviving. If he wasn’t working toward reform, he didn’t have a reason to work for anything.”

  “And now?”

  “We’re lucky if he eats.”

  Griffith’s lips pressed into a thin line, and he fought the urge to pace. Whatever had driven Miss St. Claire to come to him, it wasn’t so he could be overrun by his emotions. There was a problem, and she expected him to fix it.

  It was the story of his life.

  And he did it very well.

  “At what point did he decide that Isabella was the perfect bait to lure the necessary votes in the House of Lords?”

  Miss St. Claire’s mouth dropped open in silent question, her eyes widening until he could see traces of white around the brown centers. “You . . . but when . . . ?”

  “Only recently, I assure you.” He fought back the bile that threatened to rise in his throat as his suspicions were confirmed. Griffith inclined his head toward the corner a bit farther from the maid, and Miss St. Claire slowly moved in that direction. “More than one man seemed to think your father was holding out for proof that they cared about Isabella’s well-being enough to ensure she had proper medical care no matter where she was.”

  “Is that what he was telling them?” She shook her head. “We never knew.”

  Griffith couldn’t help but feel a bit betrayed as he faced the fact he’d been trying to ignore—that Lord Pontebrook might have been the creator of the scheme, but Isabella had willingly and actively gone along with it. “What did you know?”

  The question came out harsher than Griffith had intended. Perhaps he wasn’t quite able to remove himself from his emotions in this instance. Still, it was a valid question, and one he felt he deserved to know the answer to, even if it had no bearing on the problem Miss St. Claire wanted him to solve. The problem she’d yet to actually state.

  Miss St. Claire frowned. “Whatever the outcome, I assure you Isabella’s motives were good, Your Grace. She is the eldest of five, and despite her gender she felt a need to protect them wh
en it seemed her father couldn’t. The offer from my father was too good to refuse—paying off her father’s debts and sending her brothers to school.”

  Both things that Griffith could have done for her as well, and would have done without hesitation. The logical thing to do would have been to run from the risk of her uncle’s promise, which hinged on the passing of a bill, to the security of Griffith’s proposal. He understood, even though he didn’t like it, why she’d felt she couldn’t come to him with such a request.

  “Why wait? Isabella is four and twenty, not the nineteen your father tried to pass her off as. Why now? He could have used her years ago to convince someone powerful to help push the creation of the bill along.”

  “Father hadn’t seen her in nearly ten years. But then we passed through Northumberland on our way to the medical college of Edinburgh to try to build support for some of the new adjustments to the bill. We stopped at their farm again on the way home, and four hours later Isabella left with us. Father bought her clothes, jewelry, everything she’d need to be the Season’s most sought-after debutante.”

  It all made a sad sort of sense. Less than four hours for a spirit such as Isabella to make such a monumental decision. Save her family for the price of her reputation. At least her reputation in London, a town she’d never been in and probably never intended to come to again. Even the coldest of people would be enticed by a trade that seemed to cost them so little.

  “I appreciate your honesty.” And he did. Just having answers for the questions that had been building in his head seemed to ease the discomfort in his chest a bit. In some ways, though, the pain dug deeper. “I fail to see, however, your intention in coming here. The act is dead. With the stakes gone, Isabella could have come to me. I proposed to her mere days ago. She can’t believe my feelings for her would change so swiftly.”

  “Isabella used a lot of men this Season, Your Grace. She regrets it but cannot change what has been done. You, however, are different. She refuses to trade on your feelings for her. And if she came to you, even with the best of intentions, she would. Because she loves me, and my father knows it.”