by Mia Marlowe
“The Most Honorable Phillippa, the Dowager Marchioness of Somerset,” Mr. Hightower intoned from his place beside the open door. “And the Right Honorable Earl of Hartley.”
Rebecca and her family had been announced in a similar way, but the room hadn’t gone still while the butler called out their names and honors, such as they were. Now, she’d have wagered she would have been able to hear a mouse hiccup behind the wall, if any dared invade so grand a place as Somerfield Park.
John didn’t catch her eye or even look for her particularly. He and his grandmother moved toward the first group of guests nearest the door. Conversations resumed around the room, the low drone of an agitated hive.
“The man of the hour,” Lady Chloe said under her breath. “Perhaps you’d do well to return to your family and friends, Miss Kearsey, to wait upon his lordship to acknowledge you. If you’ve any goodwill built up with the dowager, it will dissipate quickly once she sees you with me.”
“Perhaps you give people too little credit. You might be surprised at who will befriend you.”
“With my reputation?”
“For good or ill, reputations aren’t always warranted. A wise person makes their own judgment. But you’re not giving them an opportunity if you push them away at the outset,” Rebecca said. “Lord Hartley has the same habit. He rejects others before they have the chance to reject him.”
“Astute as well as pretty. It’s clear you haven’t rejected him. No wonder he likes you.” The lady cast a sidelong glance at Rebecca that made her feel she was being hoisted into a cosmic scale of some sort. Chloe’s arched brow said Rebecca hadn’t been found wanting. “I hope we’ll have the opportunity to become better acquainted.”
“Depend upon on it.” Rebecca dropped a quick curtsy and left Lady Chloe to rejoin her parents by the fire before John and his grandmother worked their way around the room to them.
No wonder he likes you.
Lady Chloe’s words echoed in her mind. Rebecca still wasn’t sure if the outcast lady was going to be a friend or a foe, but she was grateful for her words.
He likes me.
After their torrent of kisses, after the world-shifting things John had done with her on the roof, after watching the stars fall together, Rebecca hoped for more than mere liking. But with a man like John, who didn’t give his trust easily, who walked warily around anything so ephemeral as a feeling, liking was at least a start.
“I don’t see Lord and Lady Somerset here,” Lady Kearsey said when Rebecca perched on the arm of her mother’s chair.
“Because his lordship is unwell, I believe they are already seated in the dining room,” Lord Kearsey said. “Perhaps we ought to have asked for the same consideration for you, my love. I know how it tires you to walk, and it’s a long promenade to the dining room from here.”
“I don’t wish to be singled out for special treatment,” her mother said. “I’ll be fine.”
Lady Kearsey would be red-faced and blown with effort after walking to the dining room, but she wouldn’t complain. Ignoring her symptoms was her way of coping with her disease. Rebecca wondered if her father’s suggestion that they be seated ahead of the rest of the party was motivated by concern for his wife’s condition or if the opportunity to have private speech with the marquess and his marchioness before the other guests arrived in the dining room was the bigger draw.
“Here they come, Rebecca,” her father whispered when the dowager and John finally headed their way. “Turn on the charm, girl.”
All things being equal, compared to the other wellborn ladies in the room who had the family connections and fat dowries to dangle before Lord Hartley, Rebecca had no chance of charming the new earl. But all things were not equal.
John liked her.
If last night was any indication, he liked her very much.
* * *
John had behaved himself as he squired the dowager around the room. They still weren’t on the best of terms, but the ice had been broken between them. Whatever her culpability in the pain of his childhood, he wasn’t likely to get more of an apology than she’d already condescended to give. As much distance as she’d given him as a boy, she seemed to be trying to make up for lost time by actively trying to shape his adulthood.
She’d find him far less malleable now.
However, the dowager wouldn’t be able to fault his performance at the moment. He greeted each of his guests with the gravity of his station. He even let Lady Somerset have her head as she adroitly maneuvered him away from the group surrounding Lady Chloe that included his Daemon Club friends.
Rebecca and her family were waiting patiently for John and the dowager to acknowledge them. She glanced his way, and their gazes met for the briefest flicker. A sharp pang bit into his chest. It was enough to make him believe in the stories of Cupid and his darts. She was mesmerizing. He had to restrain himself from dashing across the room and catching her up in his arms.
He’d met many lovely ladies already this evening. Several were witty. Plenty of them dripped with precious jewels, hinting at even more generous dowries. One was downright frightening in her intensity; he’d recognized that one as Rebecca’s friend from the museum.
But none made his chest glow the way Rebecca did.
She bent her head to speak to her mother, who was looking very wan despite judicious use of paint. He wondered if there was a way for him to use his newfound wealth and position to arrange for Lady Kearsey to take a cure on the Continent someplace. Surely there was a sanatorium whose treatments would put the roses back into Rebecca’s mother’s cheeks. He’d speak to Richard about it in the morning.
What point was there in being the heir to a marquess if he couldn’t do a little good?
Especially since he was planning to do a great deal of bad in the near future and would need some positives to balance out the scales.
He ached to snatch Rebecca away and shield her, but there simply wasn’t time. He wasn’t going to be able to say more than a few words to her in front of her parents and his grandmother, and none of those words could give her warning of what was to come.
She was wearing long gloves with her pale muslin gown. He wished she weren’t. He wished when he took her hand so very correctly before God and everybody that he could at least brush his lips on her bare knuckles instead of on silk. Maybe he’d even turn her hand over and press a lover’s kiss into her open palm.
John cut off the current debutante before him, who had stuttered through their exchange of pleasantries, by offering the hope that she’d enjoy herself at Somerfield Park. Then he started toward Rebecca with the dowager in tow. The longcase clock chimes interrupted their progress.
“It’s eight o’clock,” Lady Somerset the elder said. “We must cease these greetings and lead our guests through to the dining room.”
“We haven’t met everyone yet.”
“I know, but there’s simply no time. I’ve seen to it that you’ve met the important ones, so the rest will keep until after dinner,” the dowager said in hushed tones. “We must stick to the schedule. Your father cannot bear to be in company any longer than the time we’ve allotted.”
After the disjointed midnight conversation with his confused father, John was surprised they were going to trot out the marquess at all.
“Very well,” he said. “But perhaps there’s time for me to give attention to one more guest without extending the evening for his lordship. Lord Richard, will you do the honors and escort Lady Somerset to the dining room?”
“Delighted.” His half brother stepped up, offering their grandmother his arm. The hand-off was done so smoothly and so publicly, the dowager couldn’t object. “Seymour, I assume I may trust you to see my lady to the same place?”
“Also delighted,” Lawrence Seymour said, “but I can’t promise I won’t try to convince Sophie to run away with me between h
ere and the first course.”
Sophie laughed. “Trust me, Lawrence, you’d be bringing me back before we reached Somerset-on-the-Sea. I’ve a wickedly sharp tongue and wouldn’t hesitate to use it, but I trust you to walk a few hallways with me. Now, John, since your arm is unadorned, who will you take to dinner?”
This was the defining moment of the evening. His choice would signal the front-runner in the dreaded Hartley Hunt and he knew it. Was counting on it. He surveyed the room and read hope in every pair of feminine eyes. The naked trust on Rebecca’s sweet face made his gut burn. This would be tantamount to a declaration.
He set his face like flint and turned away from her, looking for another. There she was, up to her pretty little chin in aspiring swains.
“Lady Chloe,” John said as he crossed the drawing room to her side. The other bachelors around her stepped back to make room for him as if he were the dominant bull in the herd. “Will you do me the honor of accompanying me to supper?”
Chloe sidled up to him and draped herself from his proffered arm. “Why, Lord Hartley, I thought you’d never ask.”
Twenty-one
The wellborn gentleman’s propensity for gambling never ceases to amaze, especially since most wagers are guaranteed ways of exchanging something for nothing. Ladies also have the urge to indulge in games of chance, but they satisfy this need by giving their trust to men…with similar results.
—Phillippa, the Dowager Marchioness of Somerset
Rebecca slipped into her chamber and leaned against the closed door. The snick of the latch released her pent-up frustration, utter bewilderment, and simmering rage. She covered her mouth to muffle the keening that threatened to escape. Her knees sagged. She was surprised they still held her up.
So this is what hell is like—or at least purgatory. Painfully aware of what’s happening but totally unable to change a thing.
Her cheeks ached from the false smile she’d plastered on her face all evening. She’d hidden behind it as if it were a medieval visor, a place of relative safety from which to view the world around her—a world that had been stood on its ear from the moment John offered his arm to Lady Chloe.
Rebecca had been so monumentally stupid. From the first time John demanded—and received!—a kiss from her, he’d played upon her ignorance. He’d amused himself by toying with her on the roof. John had wakened her sensuality and revealed her vulnerability. Only by the slimmest of margins had she escaped total ruin.
She lit the candle on her dressing table. It would be another half hour or so before the maid she shared with her mother came to help her out of her gown. In the meantime, she sat, toed off her slippers, and peeled off her stockings. She balled them in her fists and then threw them as hard as she could. They fluttered to the floor only a few feet away.
She couldn’t identify what she was feeling. She was all hot inside. And miserable. And blaming herself as much as John for her predicament.
The lovely ball gown Freddie had brought for her was still spread across her bed. She had allowed herself the fantasy that, in that gown, she’d so capture John’s heart that he’d defy his family and take her for his marchioness despite her lowly status.
“I’m such a fool.” Her whisper floated up to the cherub-covered ceiling and swirled around the cornices.
There was little point to the gown now, not if John was as obsessed as he seemed to be with Lady Chloe. Tomorrow, she’d beg her parents to take her back to London. They were out of their depth here. All of them. Her father was likely to make a buffoon of himself with the other gentlemen. Her mother never did as well physically outside of her own home. And Rebecca had left a piece of her innocence, given a sliver of her heart to a man who didn’t treasure it on Somerfield Park’s flat roof. She narrowly resisted the urge to fly down the grand staircase, out the big double doors, and down the long lane.
She’d never look back.
She promised herself she would not weep. John didn’t deserve her tears. She would not—
For some reason, her cheeks were wet.
A soft rap sounded on her door. The maid must have finished with Lady Kearsey much more quickly than Rebecca expected.
“Come,” she said, swiping at her face. She didn’t want the maid reporting back to her mother that her cheeks were unaccountably damp.
But it wasn’t the maid. Instead, Freddie poked her head around the door. “Oh, good. You’re still dressed.”
Her friend bustled into the room. “Well, don’t just sit there. Put your shoes and stockings back on. We haven’t much time.”
“Time for what?”
“The Leonids, you little goose. They should still be here tonight and the next if we’re lucky. I’ve commandeered a footman who will lead us to the roof and back down again after a few hours.”
Rebecca had forgotten all about the falling stars. They were less than nothing to her. Unreal. In fact, everything around her, from the flickering light of her candle to her discarded stockings and slippers, seemed as false as stage props on Drury Lane, as if they were pale symbols of things and not the things themselves.
But Freddie was true. She was comfortingly real—and a friend who could be counted upon to be nosy if Rebecca behaved the least out of character.
She decided to take refuge in a lady’s eternal excuse when she didn’t wish to do something. “I’m afraid I have a terrible headache.”
It was almost true. There was a soft pounding behind her left eye.
“Really? Why?” Freddie asked, plopping down on the foot of the bed. “I mean, I could see why I might have developed one, what with the way that horrid Lady Chloe monopolized Lord Hartley all evening, but why you?”
“I suspect several feminine hearts were disappointed this night, but you’re right. I have no reason to be upset over Lord Hartley’s choice of dinner companion.” It was true, and no amount of flutters in her chest would change it. She had no claim on John. She wished he had none on her. “I don’t know why, but my head is pounding.”
“Oh, you poor dear. I have some laudanum in my room. Shall I fetch it?”
“No.” Rebecca never enjoyed the sensation of floating outside her own body that opiates delivered. Besides, she’d heard some people came to need that brand of oblivion, and she didn’t wish to be one of them. “I only need sleep.”
“Of course.” Her friend rose to remove the pink gown from the bed, and hung it in the wardrobe. Freddie hummed to herself as she worked, as if she hadn’t been dealt a setback in her own quest to capture the elusive Lord Hartley.
“You had every right to expect you’d be able to get to know his lordship this evening,” Rebecca said. “Why aren’t you upset about…about the way things went?”
“Because this evening is of no import.” Freddie waved her hand as if she could wave away any obstacle she encountered just as easily. “This is a marathon, not a sprint. Lady Chloe is merely a diversion, a way for his lordship to assert his independence from his family’s wishes.”
“Do you really think so?”
“Of course. Did you see the look on the dowager’s face?” She loosed an un-Freddie-like giggle. Clearly Rebecca’s friend was trying on a new persona in her attempt at a future marchioness’s crown—a flightier, more insipid version of herself. Rebecca wasn’t sure she liked it. If her friend had to be someone other than herself to capture a husband, would it be worth the transformation if Freddie lost what made her unique? “Old Lady Somerset was nearly apoplectic.”
“That’s true.” Perhaps John was motivated by something other than Lady Chloe’s superb figure and very red mouth.
“Where is that abigail of yours?” Freddie demanded. “Never mind. Stand up, dear, and let me help you.”
Freddie made short work of removing her gown and dressing her in her night rail. Rebecca found herself being tucked in before she knew it.
“You don’t need to do this, you know.” Once again, Rebecca suffered a pinch of guilt over the way she felt about John. Not that it would make a smidge of difference to the outcome of the Hartley Hunt. Clearly she was of no import to John, and her feelings one way or another for him wouldn’t change a thing. But Rebecca still felt guilty because she’d never kept anything a secret from her best friend before. “You’re so good to me, Freddie.”
“Pish. It’s not just you. I’m good to everyone.”
In her own brusque way, she was. “Good night,” Rebecca said as she sank deeper into the feather tick. “Oh, do me a favor, will you?”
“Another one?” Despite her words, Freddie paused by the door. “What, dear?”
“Don’t monitor the Leonids tonight. We’ll do it together tomorrow. They’ll still be there.” It would also give Rebecca a chance to make sure that damning little love bower on the roof was made to disappear. Freddie was sure to unravel the reason for those blankets and mattresses.
“All right. I hope you feel better.” Freddie slipped out of the room.
Rebecca stared up at the painted cherubs on her ceiling and wondered why God had sent her such a good friend as Lady Winifred Chalcroft.
And such a bad lover as John Fitzhugh Barrett.
Lover. I have a lover—had a lover.
She must put it in the past tense, even in her own thoughts. She’d never forget that night under the stars, but she also couldn’t allow herself to be silly enough to repeat it.
Of course, John showed no sign of wanting to. He had been too busy laughing and flirting with Lady Chloe all evening.
Her chest constricted as if a heavy weight had been placed upon it. If he ever did want her again, she’d at least have the pleasure of rejecting him. She promised herself that with fervor. A girl had to have some measure of self-respect.
