by Edith Layton
Well, he amended, smiling to himself, not peculiar so much as improper. He seldom had anything to do with young ladies of the ton, knowing very well that two dances and a kiss were equal to a declaration in their society, and he’d sooner, he often thought, find a drab from the streets than a debutante of the ton in his marriage bed. Since neither would’ve had a chance to know him very well before they nipped under his coverlets, both would be there only because of his money, and at least, he reasoned, the tart would be better at what she’d do there. He didn’t care for deceit, having had a surfeit of it in his youth, and so he also avoided society’s sportive married ladies. And as he’d neither lie nor make promises he’d no intention of fulfilling to fill his bed, this streak of perverse puritanism narrowed the field of potential partners for him alarmingly. But he’d discovered the particular field left for him to cultivate was ever ripe and always held a rich harvest: an obliging female might always be found with whatever color hair, or for that matter, anything else, he fancied, for the right price.
But his life was cluttered with blond persons at the moment, he thought, pleased with himself now that he found his difficulties amusing, and, finding himself amused, decided that what he’d needed all along had been distraction. He reasoned that since such a little bit had worked so well, more would be even better, since, locked up in his house celibate all these weeks with that tempting little Miss Logan, he’d absolutely lost his clear sense of judgment.
He’d come to know her scent the way a fox can sense its dinner wafting on the wind, and he’d felt the ends of his fingers ache every time he’d helped her to her seat at the table or brushed his hand against her skin at some other insignificant moment. She was blond, of course, and supple and sweet-breasted and full of laughter, and he’d been yearning for her like a boy. Even more dangerously, he’d discovered, just as her brother had boasted, she had wit and courage, education and charm. And of course, naturally, she loved Julian to distraction, or thought she did, and who could blame her?
At first he’d avoided her for Julian’s sake, and then for his own, for only a fool would seek love where there was such clear infatuation for another, worthier man. Then too, he wasn’t precisely seeking “love” either, or at least not the sort that was the only kind she could supply, being moral, proper, and conventionally raised. But he’d given up avoiding her when he saw her take note of it, and had seen the quick hurt register in her eyes. Now, of course, the problem was worse. For him, he amended, only for him, for she might still have a chance for happiness with Julian; because of her looks, or her money, or the spite of Lord Moredon, those two beautiful dreamers might yet be joined.
The last tollgate before London came into view, and Warwick gave up his brooding. He’d been uneasy and strangely vexed with himself these past days, for he seldom got caught up in other people’s affairs and yet had allowed himself to get completely tangled in Julian and Susannah’s lives and hopes. He had never been a romantic dreamer such as Miss Logan so evidently was, and he scarcely knew her well enough to really love her, even if he believed himself still capable of that mythical tender passion. Unlike Julian, he was far too old for infatuation; he believed he always had been. But he was well acquainted with sexual obsession. Too well, he thought on a frown. But at least he knew what he was suffering from, and so knew what cure to take. He might be able to help the others too.
Distraction was what was clearly necessary for them all. They’d all been pent-up for too long to have any perspective. Julian’s misfortunes had thrown them too closely together. Their host had already proposed one remedy for them, and was resolved to take another for himself. Miss Logan would soon have a ball to attend, Julian would shortly leave the house again, and for himself, he’d seek out some new female immediately, one who could give him surcease from his impossible desires through satiation of his real ones.
He relaxed as his horses, only two this time, and only real ones, took him through the streets of London toward his home. Everything seemed simpler now. Doing Julian’s errand had done him good; he hadn’t appreciated, until the weight had dropped from his shoulders, exactly how bedeviled he’d been. But when he’d begun reminiscing about his childhood he’d realized how low his spirits had sunk, and when he’d thought of a resolution to his problems, he’d felt free again. The country air had cleared his head.
He’d lusted after the girl; she fancied Julian. Nothing could be more natural in either case. He needed a woman, Julian needed a fortune, and she… Ah well, he thought, familiar desires now ascendant, that was her problem, and not his.
That evening, Mr. Jones bade his two houseguests a good night shortly after dinner, and neither noted that he didn’t retire to his rooms, but left the house instead. Nor did either of them note how jauntily he said his farewell, nor how eager he was to be away. For the Viscount Hazelton was himself eager to get to his rooms and pen several messages. The majority of them were various notes to sundry devious people of his acquaintance, all to ensure that the one important message was delivered. And that one was addressed to the Lady Marianna Moredon: asking if she were going to attend the Swansons’ gala ball.
Miss Susannah Logan scarcely noted that her host had gone so precipitately, and for once she hardly was aware that Julian had left her side rapidly as well. For she’d only just discovered that very day that for all her lacks, her chaperon had one marvelous asset: she knew fashion as well as she did not know most of the things that happened around her. So there were fashion plates to study, and a dress to be gotten up, one that would make her look splendid, make her look fitting, and most important, make her look as though she belonged at her first fashionable party, the Swansons’ gala ball.
Mr. Warwick Jones made his way in leisurely but determined fashion down several twisting streets far from his elegant town house. The house he eventually entered was more expensively gotten up than his own, although far less tastefully. But the young woman he purchased there was tasteful enough to suit his most exacting standards, for she was fair-haired and well-endowed with what he’d been seeking. If she had no conversation, he was content, for he asked for none; it was enough that she smiled a great deal and grimaced at appropriate moments, when she was supposed to. He supposed that to be her training, never realizing that his own early training had made it impossible for him to be less than a superior lover—a man who believed himself to be repellent to women being a man who’d always have to see to their pleasures, even the ones bought only for a night’s relief, before his own.
Long after he’d been admitted to the house and the young woman he’d purchased there, he finally made his way, far less jauntily, home again. He’d gotten exactly what he’d paid for, but discovered to his annoyance that temporary satiation had nothing to do with satisfaction. And so he decided that he’d have to take some other route to more permanent gratification, and would likely have to go to the bother of setting up a mistress. He believed, as he lay awake in his own bed again pondering the problem, that for the sake of his own restored serenity that would have to be soon—definitely before he had to escort his disturbing young guest to an evening’s festivities, and so certainly before the night of the Swansons’ gala ball.
9
Susannah studied herself in the long looking glass for a very long while. It wasn’t that she was in love with her image so much as it was that she wanted to memorize the way she looked just now, after her maid and her chaperon had left her to herself. They’d told her again and over again how well she looked, and how perfectly dressed she was for the night. She continued to gaze at her reflection in order to assure herself that she might leave her room confident her appearance was perfectly in order. Then, if anything were said, or if any doubts assailed her after she’d gotten to the ball she was being taken to, she’d know at least that the fault didn’t lie in what people could see of her, but rather in what they thought of her actions or personality.
She stared into the glass. A worried-looking, fashionably dressed y
oung woman met her troubled eye. But there was nothing in her gown or hair or form that could be singled out for censure. She saw a deceptively simple, high-waisted grass-green India muslin gown with a series of flounces at the hem of the skirts, the dress tied beneath the breasts with a darker green riband. The puffed sleeves had a myriad of tiny gold and yellow flowers appliquéd upon them, as did the borders of her skirt, so that in all, she thought, the gown reminded her of a spring garden. Her hair was done up with small real flowers, all echoing the gold, yellow, and green theme. The contessa had pronounced Susannah too old to wear classic debutante’s white, and yet too young for black, it was too late in the season for brown, and it was too bold for her, as an unknown, to make her appearance in poppy red, thus vetoing all the colors that her charge had selected for herself. It was also too warm for velvet, satin was too overbearing, and silk too sensuous, her chaperon had insisted. And so she wore the simplest gown of the most undemanding hue, and Susannah thought at last, turning from her reflection to draw on her long lime gloves, she supposed it would do.
It did more than that, although she couldn’t see it. For all she gazed so long at herself, she never noted the way the color brought out all the subtle tints in her fair complexion, nor did she see how the soft and pliant material draped itself about her shapely limbs so as to accentuate them in the latest fashion, as well as the time-honored fashion of classic sculpture. It was as well that she’d been too busy wondering about color and material to take sharp note of how low the gown was cut, or of how much of her white bosom was bared above it, or of how simple it was to see, in that deceptively simple gown, how her breasts were high and full and buoyant as they rose above her slender waist. And she was so busily inspecting each tiny flower that had been set into her hair, she’d never realized how even the smallest buttercup seemed vulgarly blatant beside the masses of pale curls that had been coaxed to spill like charming froth around the confining riband of her new upswept hairstyle. Nor did she see how her host started when he saw her, for once completely shaken from his urbane pose, because by then she was gazing at the Viscount Hazelton and saying, just as she thought it, that she’d never seen anyone look so splendid, no, not ever.
He wore only standard gentleman’s evening wear, and so he told her, laughing at her compliment and turning it back upon herself immediately. But it was true that the dark black jacket and black pantaloons, high white hose and high white neckcloth all set off his athletic form to perfection, even as the stark colors highlighted his golden hair, making it look as though a ray of sun had come out at night solely to illuminate him and pick him out from the common run of men. With his slate eyes and fair skin, the only other color to be seen was in his waistcoat, which was a welter of small golden flowers.
“Warwick lent me his finest feathers.” Julian grinned. “Well, at the least, his finest waistcoat, since he insisted on my getting my own new evening wear for tonight, my old jacket having been lost in the wars”—he grimaced, remembering the night he’d worn that jacket last—”so to speak. But here, you’ll wound him if you don’t butter him up. I haven’t seen him dress so fine for ages, and if no one notices the effort at least, he’ll sulk.”
When Susannah looked at last upon her host, where he stood smiling lazily, watching her, she noted that he did look very fine, exceptionally so, and if she hadn’t been so startled by Julian’s transformation, why, she’d have said so at once, and so she said it now. Warwick’s evening clothes fitted him to perfection as well, and something in the way he comported himself, something in the set of his wide shoulders above his lean body, and the carriage of his head above his snowy neckcloth, gave him a look of easy command, the look of antique princeliness. His waistcoat, as he begged Susannah to note, suddenly becoming more the fop every moment to amuse her and cut off her stream of compliments, was a medley of silken embroidered blue and green flowers—now, wasn’t that superior to Julian’s mere golden weeds?
She laughed, as he wished, and never mentioned that the color matched his dark blue eyes, for he was too busy explaining that very fact to her with a great show of wounded feelings because she hadn’t commented on it immediately.
“But I was too dazzled to speak at once,” she protested. Then she began to compliment him so fulsomely that he took another tack and began to repay her in such flowery phrases that Julian fell to laughing and joined in with him. Soon they were all complimenting each other outrageously, with the words “Venus,” “Adonis,” “magnificent,” and “gorgeous” flying so fast that when the contessa arrived in the hallway to join them, and they began to tell her how well she looked, she could have been pardoned for taking their praise of her new lavender gown and turban for mockery, if she were the sort of woman who ever found mockery in anything. As it was, she took it with a curtsy, as she was supposed to do, and then mentioned the time, and allowed her host to assist her with her wrap. At that Susannah’s laughter stilled and she felt her palms grown damp and her heart pick up its beat, and she looked so suddenly stricken that Julian began joking about her competing with the Swansons’ lovely daughters to put her at her ease, and Warwick, as he helped her on with her pelisse, said softly, “You cannot fail to enchant them, this will be a joyous evening for you, you’ll see.”
But she remained very quiet as the coach took them the few streets to the Swansons’s town house. As they waited in the long coach line for their chance to be set down in front of the house, she found it difficult to swallow, much less speak. Somewhere out there, she was thinking, somewhere beyond the flare of the footmen’s torches, somewhere in that grand and stately house where all the lights were burning bright, somewhere beyond that great and gaping door through which all the elegant people were entering, lay the world she’d only ever dreamed about. The world of gently bred people, the select few, the educated, wealthy, and mannered that her training had prepared her for, and her birth had kept her from. Until now.
As the carriage finally pulled up to the door and stopped in its turn, Warwick and Julian looked down to her white face and then over her bent head and directly into each other’s eyes. Each nodded, though no word was spoken.
And so when the butler gave their names to the announcer hired for the evening and he intoned: “The Viscount Hazelton, Mr. Warwick Jones, Miss Susannah Logan,” to the company in his best stentorian tones, all the assembled guests looked up. They saw, paused at the top of the stair to the ballroom for their inspection, two elegant gentlemen with one beautiful young woman between them, with one of her gloved hands upon each gentleman’s arm. And since it was such a wide and turning staircase, they then could see them walk in just so, three abreast, as though the gentlemen could not, either one of them, bear to part from her.
Conversation picked up again after that, and from the tone of it the gentlemen knew their entrance had made no little stir. Even as they bent over the hand of the latest Swanson debutante (this one, they noted sadly, no better-looking than any of her sisters, and from the tone of her stilted greeting, no wiser either), they could hear the whisper “Who is she?” repeated so many times that Warwick swore later the force of the wind from it disarranged his hair and almost blew his cravat askew.
Punch and orgeat were being served, and as Warwick went to fill his guest’s cup, he told Lord Leith that she was his guest—newly come to the city, he assured the Marquess of Bessacarr—and yes, absolutely uncommitted, but only as of yet, he warned the Baron Bly. Thus assured of having at least some few gentlemen he considered worthy of the name with her name on their minds, he delivered a cup of watered wine to Susannah, and stayed by her side as Julian made sure other curious gentlemen heard her name right.
The Swansons always began their dancing late—some wits claimed that this was because they wanted to be absolutely sure the gentlemen were foxed enough to have filled up their daughters’ dance cards before they let the music begin. This was unfair; enough gentlemen knew their duty to their hosts, no matter how unfortunate the Swanson girls were in the
ir appearance, to fill up their cards even before they grew tipsy enough not to care whom they danced with. The music was delayed because Lady Swanson knew the most successful soirees ended late, and so, she always vowed, then hers would too. It made little difference to her that her social evenings lasted so long, not because of all the enjoyment the guests couldn’t bear to part from, but because they knew they wouldn’t be fed until the dancing was done, and they refused to go home hungry.
Thus no one ever came to the Swansons’s soirees on time, and as no one wanted to be the first to arrive either, the glittering company continued to assemble, milling and chatting in informal fashion as the night went on. Several gentlemen engaged the viscount and Mr. Jones in conversation, and were dutifully introduced to Susannah, but as they couldn’t dance or dine with her as yet, and as she knew none of the guests beyond introductions, she had little to say as she stood and watched the crowd of fashionable persons. She was glad of the babble and distraction, since she was so awed by all the magnificent-looking people she doubted she could have managed a coherent word to them, much less a full conversation. All the words she’d been tossing about in jest with Julian and Warwick earlier seemed applicable to these elegant persons. Seeing them in the flattering glow of candlelight, burnished by her daydreams, and glorified by the fact that she was actually among them at last, they were all of them, indeed, gorgeous and magnificent, to her.
