Something Wonderful

by Judith McNaught

  Unaware that she had done aught to distress the duchess, Alexandra adjusted herself to the rigid routine of formal living in a ducal mansion. As spring drifted into summer, she continued with her studies and spent her free time wandering about the beautiful grounds or visiting the vast Hawthorne stables where Smarth told her wonderful stories about Jordan as a boy and a young man. Like Gibbons the footman, Smarth was a great fan of Master Jordan, and, within a few weeks, Smarth was completely won over by the charming girl Master Jordan had married.

  For Alexandra, the days were busy ones, but Jordan was never out of her mind. A month after his death, at Alexandra’s request, a small marble plaque, bearing Jordan’s name and dates of birth and death, had been placed—not in the family cemetery, as was usual, but at the far side of the lake at the edge of the woods near the pavilion.

  Alexandra thought the setting near the pavilion pretty— particularly in contrast to the lonely cemetery beyond the crest of a hill behind the mansion. Yet when the plaque had been placed, she was not entirely satisfied. She visited the head gardener, who gave her a few bulbs that she planted just inside the woods. Every few days, she returned to obtain more flowers. But not until she was finished did Alexandra realize she had unconsciously duplicated the little glade where Jordan had once told her she looked like a Gainsborough portrait.

  She loved the place more when she realized it, and spent hundreds of happy hours seated in the pavilion, gazing into the miniature glade and recalling every moment they had spent together.

  Alone in the pavilion, she dwelled with tenderness upon every kindness Jordan had shown her—from buying her a puppy he obviously hadn’t liked, to marrying her to save her from ruin. But mostly she relived the heady sweetness and hungry insistence of Jordan’s kisses, the torturous pleasure of his caressing, wandering hands. When she tired of recalling their real kisses, she imagined more of them in different settings—wonderful kisses that ended in Jordan dropping to his knee, with his hand over his heart, and pledging his undying love to her. The longer she thought of their time together, the more certain she became that he had begun to love her before he died.

  Aided and encouraged by Gibbons’ and Smarth’s exaggerated versions of Jordan’s most minor boyhood braveries and manly skills, Alexandra enshrined Jordan in her heart, endowing him with the virtues of a saint, the courage of a warrior, and the beauty of an archangel. In the rosy glow of her memory, every gentle word he’d spoken, every warm smile, each stirring kiss, was immortalized—and then improved upon.

  It did not occur to her that Smarth and Gibbons might have been blind to his faults or that they would, by unspoken mutual consent, carefully censor from their conversation any activities of his which might have put him in a less saintly light in the eyes of his legal wife. Never once did they mention a certain lovely ballerina or her many predecessors, or the governess who had shared his bed in this very house.

  Based on the glowing stories that Smarth and Gibbons told her, Alexandra naturally assumed her husband had been noted for his bravery, daring, and honor. She had no way of knowing that he was equally well known for his flagrant flirtations, amatory conquests, and scandalous liaisons with women who possessed only one significant social asset in common: Beauty.

  And so, with all the fervor of her eighteen years, Alexandra spent each day practicing at the pianoforte, memorizing tomes on social protocol, rehearsing polite conversation with her tutor, and emulating the manners of the only duchess she had available to use as an example—Jordan’s grandmother. She did it all so that when she went to London, Society would look upon her and find her worthy of Jordan Townsende’s name and reputation.

  And while Alexandra was diligently applying herself to mastering all manner of accomplishments that would have bored a living Jordan to distraction, Nature—as if amused by her needless efforts—casually showered upon her in lavish bounty the one required social asset that would guarantee Society would truly find her “worthy” of Jordan Townsende: Beauty.

  * * *

  Standing at the windows, watching Alexandra gallop down the drive in a bright-blue riding habit, Anthony glanced at his grandmother beside him. “It’s astonishing,” he said wryly. “In one year, she’s blossomed into a beautiful young woman.”

  “It’s not in the least astonishing,” the duchess said with gruff loyalty. “She always had good bones and excellent features, she was simply much too thin and too young. She had not filled out yet—I myself was just such a late bloomer.”

  “Really?” Anthony said, grinning.

  “Indeed,” she primly replied, and then she became somber. “She still brings flowers to lay on Jordan’s plaque every day. Last winter, I thought I’d cry when I saw her wading through the snow with flowers from the conservatory in her arms.”

  “I know,” Tony said somberly. His gaze shifted back to the window as Alexandra waved at them and handed Satan over to a groom. Her glossy, wind-tossed hair was long now, tumbling in waves and curls partway down her back; her complexion was rosy, and her sooty-lashed eyes were glowing like enormous aquamarines.

  Jordan had once mistaken her for a boy, but now her bright-blue riding habit revealed an alluring female form with ripened curves in all the right places. Anthony’s eyes followed the gentle sway of her hips as she walked up the front steps, admiring the easy, long-legged grace of her stride. Everything about her drew a man’s gaze and held it.

  “In a few weeks, when she makes her bow,” Tony thought aloud, “we’re going to have to beat off her suitors with a club.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  LONDON

  ANTHONY,” THE DUCHESS SAID, nervously pacing the length of the drawing room in her silver satin gown. “Do you suppose I made a mistake in not hiring a younger woman to teach Alexandra how to go about in Society?”

  Turning from the mirror, where he had been needlessly rearranging the intricate folds of his pristine white neckcloth, Tony smiled sympathetically at his grandmother’s last-minute panic over Alexandra’s debut tonight. “It’s too late to change that now.”

  “Well, who could possibly be better suited than I to teach her how to behave properly? I am,” the dowager reminded him bluntly, reversing her earlier opinion, “regarded as a paragon of proper behavior by Society, am I not?”

  “You are indeed,” Tony said, refraining from reminding her that he’d told her at the outset Alexandra shouldn’t be taught to emulate a woman of seventy-one years.

  “I can’t go through with it,” the duchess remarked suddenly and sank into a chair, her expression positively dire.

  Tony chuckled at her unprecedented display of doubt and uncertainty, and she sent him a glowering look. “You won’t be laughing a few hours from now,” she predicted darkly. “Tonight, I will attempt to persuade the crème de la crème of Society to accept a female without fortune, family connections, or ancestry to recommend her. The chances for disaster are mind-boggling! I’m bound to be found out and exposed for a trickster.”

  Anthony approached the stricken woman whose blighting eye, razor tongue, and cold demeanor had intimidated Society and her entire family, with the exception of Jordan, for five decades. For the first time in his life, he pressed a spontaneous kiss to her forehead. “No one would dare oppose you by ostracizing Alexandra, even if they suspected her origins. You’ll carry this off without a hitch. A lesser woman might fail, but not you, Grandmama—not a woman of your enormous consequence.”

  The duchess digested that for a moment and then slowly inclined her white head in a regal nod. “You’re entirely correct, of course.”

  “Of course,” Anthony said, hiding a smile. “And you needn’t worry that Alexandra will betray her background.”

  “I’m as concerned about her revealing her mind as I am her background. I can’t think what her grandfather could have been about when he filled her head with bookish nonsense. You see,” she admitted anxiously, “I so wish for her to have a wonderful Season, to be admired for herself, and t
hen to make a splendid match. I wish Galverston hadn’t offered for the Waverly chit last week. Galverston’s the only unmarried marquess in England, which means Alexandra will have to settle for an earl or less.”

  “If those are your hopes, Grandmama, you’re bound to be disappointed,” Tony said with a sigh. “Alexandra has no interest whatsoever in the Season’s amusements or in being admired by any of the town beaux.”

  “Don’t be absurd—she’s been working and studying and looking forward to this for months!”

  “But not for the reasons you evidently think,” Anthony said somberly. “She’s here because you convinced her Jordan wanted her to take her rightful place in Society as his wife. She’s been working all these months for one reason only—that she may be worthy of that honor. She has no intention of remarrying. She told me that last night. She’s convinced herself that Jordan loved her, I think, and she fully intends to ‘sacrifice herself’ to his memory.”

  “Good God!” said the duchess, thunderstruck. “She’s barely nineteen years old! Of course she must marry. What did you say to her?”

  “Nothing,” Anthony replied sardonically. “How could I tell her that, in order to fit in with Jordan’s crowd, she should have studied flirtation and dalliance, rather than drawing-room conversation and Debrett’s Peerage.”

  “Go away, Anthony,” her grace sighed. “You’re depressing me. Go and see what’s keeping Alexandra—it’s time to leave.”

  In the hall outside her. bedchamber, Alexandra stood before a small portrait of Jordan which she’d discovered in an unused room when they first came to London, and which she’d asked to have rehung here, where she could see it every time she passed. The painting was done the year before last, and in it Jordan was sitting with his back against a tree, one leg drawn up, his wrist resting casually atop his knee, looking at the artist. Alexandra loved the lifelike, unposed quality of the painting, but it was his expression that held her like a magnet and made her pulse quicken— because Jordan looked very much as he had often looked when he was about to kiss her. His grey eyes were slumberous, knowing; and a lazy, thoughtful smile was hovering about his mobile lips. Reaching up, Alexandra touched her trembling fingertips to his lips. “Tonight is our night, my love,” she whispered. “You won’t be ashamed of me—I promise.”

  From the corner of her eye, she saw Anthony coming toward her and hastily snatched her hand away. Without taking her eyes from Jordan’s compelling features, she said, “The artist who painted this is wonderfully talented, but I can’t quite make out his name. Who is he?”

  “Allison Whitmore,” Anthony said curtly.

  Surprised by the notion of a female painter and by Anthony’s abrupt tone, Alexandra hesitated, then she shrugged the matter aside and pirouetted slowly in front of Anthony. “Look at me, Anthony. Do you think he would be pleased with me if he could see me now?”

  Stifling the urge to give Alexandra a taste of reality by telling her Lady Allison Whitmore painted that picture while Jordan was indulging in a torrid affair with her, Anthony took his eyes from the portrait and did as Alexandra asked. What he saw stole his breath away.

  Standing serenely before him was a dark-haired beauty wrapped in an alluring, low-cut gown of shimmering aquamarine chiffon the exact shade of her magnificent eyes. It draped diagonally across her full breasts and clung to her tiny waist and gently rounded hips. Her gleaming mahogany hair was pulled back off her forehead, falling in waving swirls over her shoulders and partway down her back. Diamonds nestled in the burnished waves, twinkling like stars on gleaming satin; they lay at her slender throat and sparkled at her wrist. But it was that face of hers that made it hard for Anthony to breathe.

  Although Alexandra Lawrence Townsende was not beautiful in the classic tradition of fair hair and pale skin, she was nevertheless one of the most alluring, provocative creatures he had ever beheld. Beneath her sooty lashes, eyes that could enchant or disarm gazed candidly into his, completely unaware of their mesmerizing effect. Her rosy, generous mouth invited a man’s kiss, yet her poised smile warned one not to get too close. At one and the same time, Alexandra managed to look seductive yet untouchable, virginal yet sensual, and it was that very contrast that made her so alluring—that, and her obvious unawareness of allure.

  Some of the color drained from Alexandra’s high, delicately carved cheekbones as she waited for the silent man before her to tell her Jordan would have been pleased with her appearance tonight. “That bad?” she asked, joking to cover her dismay.

  Grinning, Anthony took both her gloved hands in his and said truthfully, “Jordan would be as dazzled by the sight of you tonight as the rest of the ton is going to be when they clap eyes on you. Will you save me a dance tonight? A waltz?” he added, gazing into her huge eyes.

  In the coach on the way to the ball, the duchess issued last-minute instructions to Alexandra: “You needn’t worry about your waltzing, my dear, nor any of the other social amenities you’ll be expected to perform tonight. However,” she warned in a dire tone, “I must remind you again not to allow Anthony’s”—she paused to cast him a severely disapproving look— “appreciation of your intellect to mislead you into saying anything tonight which could make you appear bookish and intelligent. If you do, you will not take at all, I assure you. As I have told you time out of mind, gentlemen do not like overeducated females.”

  Tony squeezed Alex’s hand encouragingly as they alighted from the coach. “Don’t forget to save me a dance tonight,” he said, smiling into her bright eyes.

  “You may have all of them, if you wish.” She laughed and tucked her hand in the crook of his arm, as unselfconscious of her beauty as she was unaware of its effect on him.

  “I’m going to have to stand in line,” Anthony chuckled. “Even so, this is going to be the most enjoyable evening I’ve had in years!”

  For the first half hour of Lord and Lady Wilmer’s ball, Tony’s prediction seemed to come true. Tony had deliberately preceded them into the ballroom so that he could watch his grandmother and Alexandra make their grand entrance. And it was worth watching. The Dowager Duchess of Hawthorne marched into the ballroom like a protective mother hen shepherding her chick—her bosom puffed out, her back ramrod straight, and her chin thrust forward in an aggressive stance that positively dared anyone to question her judgment in lending her enormous consequence to Alexandra or to consider ostracizing her.

  The spectacle literally “stopped the show.” For a full minute, five hundred of the ton’s most illustrious, languid, and sophisticated personages stopped talking to gape at England’s most respected, most dour, and most influential noblewoman, who seemed to be hovering solicitously over a young lady no one recognized. Whispers broke out among the guests and monocles were raised to eyes as attention shifted from the dowager to the ravishing young beauty at her elbow, who no longer bore any resemblance to the gaunt, pale girl who had appeared briefly at Jordan’s memorial service.

  Beside Anthony, Sir Roderick Carstairs lifted his arrogant brows and drawled, “Hawthorne, I trust you’ll enlighten us about the identity of the dark-haired beauty with your grandmother?”

  Anthony regarded Carstairs with a bland expression. “My late cousin’s widow, the current Duchess of Hawthorne.”

  “You’re joking!” Carstairs said with the closest thing to surprise that Anthony had ever seen displayed on Roddy’s eternally bored face. “You can’t mean this entrancing creature is the same plain, pathetic, bedraggled little sparrow I saw at Hawk’s memorial service!”

  Fighting to suppress his annoyance, Tony said, “She was in shock and still very young when you last saw her.”

  “She’s improved with age,” Roddy observed dryly, raising his quizzing glass to his eye and leveling it at Alexandra, “like wine. Your cousin was always a connoisseur of wine and women. She lives up to his reputation. Did you know,” he continued in a bored drawl, his quizzing glass still aimed straight at Alexandra, “that Hawk’s beauteous ballerina has no
t admitted any other man into her bed in all this time? It boggles the mind, does it not, to think that the day is here when a man’s mistress is more faithful to him than his own wife.”

  “What is that supposed to imply?” Anthony demanded.

  “Imply?” Roddy said, turning his sardonic gaze on Anthony. “Why, nothing. But if you don’t wish Society to reach the same conclusion I’m drawing, I suggest you cease watching Jordan’s widow with that possessive look in your eye. She does reside with you, does she not?”

  “Shut up!” Anthony snapped.

  In one of his typical mercurial changes of mood, Sir Roderick Carstairs grinned without rancor. “They’re about to begin the dancing. Come introduce me to the girl. I claim the right of her first dance.”

  Anthony hesitated, mentally grinding his teeth. He had no justification to refuse the introduction; moreover, if he did demur, he knew perfectly well Carstairs could and would retaliate by cutting Alexandra dead or—worse— repeating the innuendo he’d just made. And Roddy was the most influential member of Tony’s set.

  Tony had inherited Jordan’s title, but he was well aware he did not possess Jordan’s bland arrogance and the unnerving self-assurance that had made Jordan the most influential member of the haute ton. The dowager, Anthony knew, could force the entire ton not to cut Alexandra, and she could guarantee Alexandra’s acceptance by her own age group, but she could not force Tony’s generation to fully accept her. Neither could Tony. But Roddy Carstairs could The younger set lived in terror of Roddy’s biting tongue, and not even Tony’s own set had any wish to become the object of Carstairs’ scorching ridicule. “Of course,” Tony agreed finally.

  With much foreboding, he introduced Carstairs to Alexandra, then stood back and watched as Roddy made her a gallant bow and requested the honor of a dance.