Chapter 3
Caro’s elfin face puckered for an instant, and Ashley knew he had wounded her with the unintended insult that had been startled from him. But she recovered before he did, saying with a little smile that did not hide the pain in the big gray eyes, “Yes, I am she. Quite shocking, is it not?”
In truth it was, but only because Ashley, in his wishful thinking, had endowed her with perfection. Now, having seen her, he longed to turn the curricle about and return immediately to London. There was no way on earth he would ever offer for her.
Nor would his father want him to. The viscount’s lips tightened in unhappy contemplation of the horror with which the earl, who held such exalted notions of who would be an acceptable future countess of Bourn, would react to this strange little waif.
Nevertheless, it had been most unforgivably rude of Ashley to have hurt her with his faux pas. Trying to smooth it over, he said hastily, with his most winning smile, “Not shocking, only surprising. I have never before had the pleasure of a lady of rank tumbling out of a tree into my arms.”
“I am sure it was no pleasure, and I am not a lady,” she said matter-of-factly. “Aunt Olive says I shall never be one even though the title is mine by courtesy of birth. I fear that she is right, too. I am always saying and doing things a lady should not.” Caro’s gray eyes were suddenly defiant. “The truth is, I do not want to be a lady. I have not the smallest interest in feminine accomplishments. I don’t care a button for setting a fine stitch or singing prettily, which would be impossible in any event because I cannot carry a tune. And I am too plainspoken to flatter eligible young men and to flirt with my useless fan. You cannot conceive how excessively tiresome being a lady is.”
Ashley, striving to keep his expression grave, said sympathetically, “Now that you have explained it to me, I can see how it might be.”
“And it is worse now that we have guests. It is so unfair. While the men go out riding or play billiards, I and the other females are relegated to the morning room. Not that they mind. But I do!”
“Surely you would not care for billiards.”
The gray eyes flashed. “I am an excellent player, good enough to beat Papa half the time! But Aunt Olive has banned me from the billiards room while we have guests because she says ladies of the first respectability do not enter such premises. Why, I ask you, should ladies not enjoy the same pleasures as men? It is excessively unfair!”
Ashley, despite quavering lips, agreed solemnly, “Indeed it is, Lady Caroline.”
“Pray, do not call me that! I hate it! Not only am I not a lady, but no one calls me Caroline except my aunt and her daughters.”
In his preoccupation with his unconventional companion, Ashley had quite forgotten his horses, and they had taken advantage of their master’s inattention by stopping. Belatedly realizing this, he urged them on.
As the curricle rolled forward, Caro confided, “This has been the most wretched summer of my life. Aunt Olive, for all she says it is impossible, is determined to turn me into a proper young lady like her daughters, and I have been prohibited from doing everything I like.”
He smiled gently at her woebegone countenance. “Surely not everything?”
“Everything,” she said vehemently. “I am not allowed to ride bareback or to climb trees or to swim in the river. I cannot even walk in the park unless I am accompanied by a footman!” Her voice rose indignantly. “A footman, when I know every nook of Bellhaven better than anyone except Papa! Have you ever heard such nonsense?”
“How very vexing,” Ashley agreed, a glint of laughter in his eyes. Lady Caro might be a hopeless ineligible for marriage, but her candid conversation delighted him. “I do not, however, recall a footman attending you in the tree.”
Caro laughed, a light, melodious little trill that Ashley found charming. When her gray eyes were alight with laugher and mischief, as they were now, they were quite beautiful.
“What an exceptional child you are,” he observed.
The laughter immediately faded from her face, and she drew herself up indignantly. “I am not a child. I am seventeen.”
He started to speak, but she cut him off. “I know I do not look it. I am so small. You cannot conceive what a trial it is to have to look up to everyone you talk to except children. Sometimes I think my neck shall have a permanent crick in it. I should so like to be tall and willowy like Emily Picton, but I fear I never shall be. My mama was tiny, and Papa says I take after her. Except that I don’t really, for she was very beautiful, and I will never be beautiful either.”
Ashley looked at Caro’s wistful little face. It was quite taking when it was animated. She might never be beautiful, but with guidance on how to accentuate her good points, she could be very striking.
“I think you will be very pretty, though,” he consoled her.
“What a hum!” she scoffed. “My eyes are too big, my face is too thin, and my complexion is too brown.”
“But you have a charming little nose and chin and a delightful mouth, especially when you smile,” Ashley said, carefully enumerating her good points.
“Are you telling me a whisker, or do you truly think so?” she asked eagerly.
He was moved by her obvious pleasure at his compliment. “I truly think so,” he said gently, unconsciously reaching out to brush away a long brown strand of hair that had drifted over her face. Its texture was as fine as silk. No wonder it was so flyaway.
“My worst fault is my tongue,” she confessed. “My aunt says I must always say whatever pops into my head no matter how outrageous it is, and she is right, but I cannot seem to help it. She blames it on my having lived such an isolated life with Papa. He is a recluse, you know. Aunt Olive insisted that Papa invite guests here this summer so that I could be exposed to other young people in society and learn how I should speak and act.” The gray eyes grew thoughtful. “At least that is what she told Papa, but I think her real reason was to try to catch husbands for Grace and Jane—those are her daughters.”
Ashley smiled, suspecting that Caro had read her aunt’s motives rather better than that overbearing lady would have liked. He observed gently, “Clearly you have not yet learned to curb your tongue.”
“It is very hard,” she confessed woefully, “and now Aunt Olive has decreed that I must do so while our guests are here.” She gave a lugubrious sigh. “I do not know how I shall manage that.”
“Nor I,” Ashley said with amusement. “What prompted such an onerous decree?”
“Two things, neither of which merited such an edict,” Caro replied heatedly. “Lord Sanley behaved shockingly to Meg, one of our maids, and she threatened to complain to Papa. He had the audacity to tell her that if she dared do so, he would see that she was turned out without a reference! The poor thing was terrified. She is only sixteen. I found her crying her heart out in a linen closet and made her tell me what was wrong. I was so angry that when I saw Sanley at dinner last night, I told him that if he dared to bother her again, it was he who would be turned out!”
Ashley strove heroically against succumbing to the laughter that threatened to overwhelm him. What he would have given to have seen Sanley’s face when he received Caro’s ultimatum. Vinson doubted that his lordship, the duke of Upton’s heir, had ever before been called to task over his well-known propensity for lechery among the lower orders. Sanley’s claim as Ashley’s chief rival for the title of prime catch on the marriage mart rested on his enormous expectations rather than on any inherent charm. Although he was handsome enough, he was notoriously high in the instep and never put himself out to be pleasant.
Caro complained, “It seems to me exceedingly unjust that it should be I, rather than he, who is sunk below reproach.”
“True,” Ashley responded gravely. “It was Sanley who did the pinching.”
Caro smiled approvingly. “I knew that you were a man of superior understanding.”
His superior understanding led Ashley to query tactfully, “What other i
nsignificant thing put you in your elders’ black books?”
“Well,” she confessed, “I heard this dreadful creaking when we were all together in the drawing room after dinner last night. I was seated on a settee next to Sir Percival Plymtree, who was going on at great length about the most recent party at Carlton House.”
“He would,” Ashley muttered. Sir Percival, said to be the second wealthiest man in the kingdom after Sir Fletcher Roxley, was an incessant name-dropper and a malicious gossip. Considering himself top of the trees, Sir Percival was notorious for his extravagant dress and toilet. No man wore more ostentatious colors, fabrics, and jewels or higher heels than Sir Percival, who was short in stature. Although a corpulent fop, he considered his physique excellent. Determined to maintain this fiction, he laced himself in with a determination that made Ashley wonder how he could still breathe.
“I was excessively perplexed by the creaking,” Caro said. “Then it occurred to me that I heard it whenever Sir Percival leaned forward, which he must do, for he wears such excessively high, stiff collars that he cannot bend his neck. At last, I asked him what was causing that strange creaking. He replied quite uncivilly that I was imagining it.” Indignation kindled in her gray eyes. “I knew very well that I was not! So I pointed it out whenever it occurred. And he was finally forced to confess that he was wearing a corset. Can you imagine, a corset?” she asked, clearly scandalized. “I thought that only women were foolish enough to torture themselves so. When I told him that, he got excessively red, indeed, rather purple in the face, and informed me that his is a Cumberland corset, identical to the one the Prince Regent wears. I was never so shocked. Our ruler wears a corset!”
Ashley lost his battle to maintain his sobriety and dissolved into uncontrollable laughter.
“I am happy that you find it amusing, for Sir Percival and Papa did not, and my cousins and Mary Milbank acted excessively shocked.” Her little face was suddenly perplexed. “Though why they should I do not understand, for when none of the men were about, they said worse things about him. I believe that if one is not willing to say something to another’s face, one should not say it behind his back!”
“A highly laudable but uncommon sentiment,” Ashley said dryly. As uncommon as Caro herself. Levisham’s house party, thanks to his daughter, promised to be far more entertaining than Ashley could have imagined.
Caro’s head drooped. “Now Aunt Olive says that I have sunk myself beneath reproach in the eyes of our guests and, worse, that I have mortified Papa.” She frowned in dismay. “I would not do that for the world.”
“Of course you would not,” Ashley smoothed, “and I would wager that your papa understands that.”
“Do you think so?” she asked, brightening.
“I do,” he assured her.
They rode quietly through a wood of beech and oak, with leaves occasionally dripping onto the curricle’s occupants, but Caro seemed not to notice.
“What is your dog’s name?” Ashley asked.
Her eyes widened in surprise. “How did you know I had a dog?”
He glanced in the direction of her skirt.
Looking down, Caro brushed hastily at the muddy paw prints on it. “Dandie was excessively happy to see me this morning,” she explained. “Aunt Olive banished him to the stable until our guests leave, and the poor thing is so lonely there. Do you like dogs?”
“Yes.”
Her eyes gleamed approvingly. “I knew that you would. I wish that you were one of our guests. You are far more interesting than any of them.”
“I am flattered. How did you decide that I was not a guest?”
“You have no baggage and no servants,” she replied promptly. “All the men arrived with valet, groom, and at least one traveling trunk. Besides, your coat is too modest.”
Ashley thought ruefully of the extortionate sum he had paid Weston for his “modest” coat.
“Although, in truth,” Caro continued thoughtfully, “I much prefer the way you dress. Both Sir Percival and Lord Sanley look excessively ridiculous in their high, stiff collars with points that threaten their eyes. And they spend hours tying their neckcloths. Papa says that they go through so much linen in trying to tie them properly that he may have to hire another laundress.”
“Have any of your elegantly dressed guests captured your fancy?”
Caro looked at him as if he were an escapee from a lunatic asylum. “No, nor I theirs, but it does not signify, for I plan to devote myself to Papa and never marry. Which is just as well, for I am sure no man would want to wed a plain little stick like myself, except perhaps for my fortune.”
Self-deprecating young ladies who voluntarily rejected marriage were as rare in Ashley’s experience as those who climbed trees, and he asked curiously, “Why do you hold marriage in such particular aversion that you want to become an ape leader?”
“Why are spinsters called that?” she inquired. “I asked Papa once, but he said he did not know.”
“It is said that their punishment after death for failing to increase and multiply is to lead apes through hell.” He grinned at her. “So beware of what fate awaits you. Surely it would be better to marry.”
“You are quizzing me. I don’t believe such nonsense, and you don’t either.”
“No, of course not,” he admitted, “but what has given you such a distaste for marriage?”
“A woman has no rights once she is married. They are as helpless as Sanley thought poor Meg would be against his word. Everything a wife has becomes her husband’s to control, even her children. It is excessively unjust.”
The curricle emerged from the damp shade of the woods into the bright sunshine where a quarter of a mile ahead of them Bellhaven sparkled in the light.
Caro turned her eyes, hot with outrage, toward Ashley. “I shall not place myself at the mercy of a husband who may turn out to be a drunkard like Mr. Burk, who is always in his cups. Or a wastrel like Sir John Wesley, who lost his estate and his wife’s fortune at the gaming table. Or a brute like Mr. Potter, who beats his poor Clara even though she is the sweetest little thing. Then there is Amelia Coleberd, who brought a great dowry to her clutch-fisted husband and is required to dress herself and her children in hand-me-downs that she begs from her relatives.”
Ashley, rather horrified by this unhappy catalogue of wifely suffering, said, “I collect these must be neighbors.”
Caro nodded.
“Not all men are monsters. Nor are they always to blame for the troubles in a marriage,” he said, feeling compelled to defend his sex.
Her little chin tilted defiantly. “The only marriage that I would consider is one like Lady Fraser’s, whose husband leaves her here in peace while he resides in London with his mistress.”
“Surely you are jesting,” Ashley protested.
“I am not,” she replied emphatically. “Are you married?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
Her blunt question so took him by surprise that he was betrayed into retorting, “I have known no lady as complaisant as you.”
The big gray eyes were innocently uncomprehending. “What do you mean?”
He had no intention of telling her and said hastily, “Only that you are a most unusual chi—young lady.”
“I rather think that I must be,” she said thoughtfully. “My cousins, Grace and Jane, talk of nothing but clothes and catching a husband with an impressive title and fortune. They fawn over Lord Sanley even though Mercer Corte is far handsomer and nicer, too.”
“And does not pinch maids either.”
“No, he does not! He is in love with Emily Picton, and she with him. I cannot imagine how anyone could be in love with Lord Sanley. He is so languid and puffed-up and humorless. He expects others to entertain him while making no effort of his own.”
Yes, Ashley thought, this naive innocent had read Sanley’s character to a nicety. “Have your cousins set their cap for Sanley?” he asked hopefully. If that were the cas
e, they might leave him alone.
“Oh, no, he is only their second choice, but one of them will have to settle for him because they both want to rivet the same man. To hear them tell it, he is the most dashing, divinely handsome man in all England.” Caro’s gray eyes sparkled mischievously, and Ashley was again struck by what a taking creature she could be at such moments. “I think it shall be excessively diverting to see which of them wins him. My wager is on Grace, for she is the beauty of the family. I own that I have a lively curiosity to see a man who so impresses my cousins, for they are excessively critical of everyone else. However, Mary Milbank disapproves of him because she says that he is well known to have rakish tendencies.”
“How shocking,” Ashley exclaimed with a commendably straight face. “Surely that must concern your cousins.”
“Not at all. They say they prefer a man who makes love charmingly. For myself, I cannot imagine anything so repulsive as being kissed by him or any man. Can you?”
“I confess that I should not like it at all,” Ashley replied with a smile, “but I think my aversion is more understandable than yours.”
They were almost to Bellhaven’s great portico now, and Ashley slowed his chestnuts to the most sedate of walks in an attempt to prolong his diverting conversation with Caro. “Who is this repulsive gentleman that you could not imagine kissing?”
“Viscount Vinson.”
The viscount burst out laughing as he thought of the rather numerous ladies who had welcomed his repulsive kisses.
“Why are you laughing? Do you know him?”
“Very well. I fear I am he.”
Caro was rendered speechless for what Ashley suspected might have been the first time in her life.
Finally she protested, “But you said that your name was Ashley Neel.”
“And so it is, just as your papa is George Kelsie as well as the marquess of Levisham.”
Lady Caro Page 3
