by Julia Quinn
Sarah winced. That had not been her finest moment.
“And then tonight . . .” His lips moved into a seductive smile. “Well, you did mention poison.”
She leveled a flat stare in his direction. “You should mind your tooth powder.”
He chuckled at that, and a little electric thrill jolted through her veins. She might not have got the best of him, but she had definitely scored an acknowledged point. Truth be told, she was starting to enjoy herself. She still disliked him, only partly on principle, but she had to admit that she was having, perhaps, just the tiniest amount of fun.
He was a worthy adversary.
She hadn’t even realized she wanted a worthy adversary.
Which did not mean—good God, if she was blushing at her own thoughts she was going to hurl herself out the window—that she wanted him. Any worthy adversary would do.
Even one without such nice eyes.
“Is something wrong, Lady Sarah?” Lord Hugh inquired.
“No,” she replied. Too quickly.
“You look agitated.”
“I’m not.”
“Of course,” he murmured.
“I’m—” She cut herself off, then said disgruntledly, “Well, now I am.”
“And here I hadn’t even been trying,” he said.
Sarah had all sorts of retorts to that, but none which would leave him without an obvious parry of his own. Maybe what she really wanted was an only slightly less worthy adversary. Just enough brains to keep it interesting, but not so much that she would not always win.
Hugh Prentice would never be that man.
Thank God.
“Well, this looks like an awkward conversation!” came a new voice.
Sarah turned her head, not that she needed to see the speaker to recognize her identity. It was the Countess of Danbury, the most terrifying old dragon of the ton. She had once managed to destroy a violin with nothing but a cane (and, Sarah was convinced, sleight of hand). But her true weapon, as everyone knew, was her devastating wit.
“Awkward, yes,” Lord Hugh said with a respectful bow. “But growing less so with each passing second now that you are here.”
“Pity,” the elderly lady replied, adjusting her grip on her cane. “I find awkward conversations to be very diverting.”
“Lady Danbury,” Sarah said, dipping into a curtsy, “what a lovely surprise to see you this evening.”
“What are you talking about?” Lady Danbury demanded. “This should be no surprise at all. Chatteris is my great-grandnephew. Where else would I be?”
“Ehrm,” was all Sarah got out before the countess demanded, “Do you know why I made my way across the entire room, specifically to join the two of you?”
“I cannot imagine,” Lord Hugh said.
Lady Danbury shot a sideways glance at Sarah, who quickly put in, “Nor I.”
“I have found that happy people are dull. You two, on the other hand, looked ready to spit nails. Naturally I came right over.” She looked from Hugh to Sarah and then said plainly, “Entertain me.”
This was met with dumbfounded silence. Sarah stole a look at Lord Hugh and was relieved to see that his usual bored expression had been cracked with surprise.
Lady Danbury leaned forward and said in a loud whisper, “I have decided to like you, Lady Sarah.”
Sarah was not at all certain this was a good thing. “You have?”
“Indeed. And so I will give you some advice.” She nodded toward Sarah as if granting an audience to a serf. “You may feel free to share it at will.”
Sarah’s eyes darted to Lord Hugh’s, although why she thought he might come to her aid she could not say.
“Our current conversation notwithstanding,” Lady Danbury continued imperiously, “I have observed you to be a young lady of reasonable wit.”
Reasonable? Sarah felt her nose wrinkling as she tried to figure that out. “Thank you?”
“It was a compliment,” Lady Danbury confirmed.
“Even the reasonable part?”
Lady Danbury snorted. “I don’t know you that well.”
“Well, then, thank you,” Sarah said, deciding this was an excellent time to be gracious, or at the very least, obtuse. She glanced over at Lord Hugh, who looked mildly amused, and then back at Lady Danbury, who was eyeing her as if she expected her to say something more.
Sarah cleared her throat. “Ehrm, was there any reason you wished me to know of your regard?”
“What? Oh, yes.” Lady Danbury thumped her cane on the ground. “Despite my advancing age, I forget nothing.” She paused. “Except occasionally what I’ve just said.”
Sarah kept her face fixed with a blank smile and tried to tamp down a gnawing sense of dread.
Lady Danbury let out a dramatic sigh. “I suppose one can’t reach the age of seventy without making a few concessions to it.”
Sarah suspected that seventy missed the mark by at least a decade, but there was no way she was going to make this opinion public.
“What I was going to say,” Lady Danbury continued, her voice dripping with the long-suffering tones of the endlessly interrupted (despite the fact that she was the only one who had been talking), “is that when you expressed surprise at my presence, which we both know was nothing more than a feeble attempt to make conversation, and I said, ‘Where else would I be?’ you should have said, ‘Apparently you don’t find polite conversation very diverting.’ ”
Sarah’s lips parted and hung there in an astonished oval for a full two seconds before she said, “I am afraid I can’t follow you.”
Lady Danbury fixed her with a vaguely aggravated stare before saying, “I had told you that I found awkward conversations to be very diverting, and you said that nonsense about being surprised to see me, then I quite rightly called you foolish.”
“I don’t believe you called her foolish,” Lord Hugh murmured.
“Didn’t I? Well, I thought it.” Lady Danbury thumped her cane on the carpet and turned back to Sarah. “At any rate, I was only trying to be helpful. There’s never any point spouting useless platitudes. Makes you seem a bit like a wooden post, and you don’t want that, do you?”
“It really depends on the location of the wooden post,” Sarah replied, wondering how many wooden posts one might find in, say, Bombay.
“Well done, Lady Sarah,” Lady Danbury applauded. “Keep sharpening that tongue. I expect you’ll wish to keep your wits about you this evening.”
“I generally wish to keep my wits about myself every evening.”
Lady Danbury gave an approving nod. “And you—” She turned to Lord Hugh, much to Sarah’s delight. “Don’t think I’ve forgotten you.”
“I believe you said you forget nothing,” he said.
“So I did,” Lady Danbury replied. “Rather like your father in that regard, I expect.”
Sarah gasped. Even for Lady Danbury, this was audacious.
But Lord Hugh proved to be more than her match. His expression did not change in the least as he said, “Ah, but that is not the case at all. My father’s memory is relentlessly selective.”
“But tenacious.”
“Also relentlessly.”
“Well,” Lady Danbury declared, thumping her cane on the carpet. “I expect it’s time to call him off.”
“I have very little control over my father, Lady Danbury.”
“No man is without all resources.”
He tipped his head in a tiny salute. “I did not say that I was.”
Sarah’s eyes flicked back and forth so fast she was getting dizzy.
“This nonsense has gone on long enough,” Lady Danbury announced.
“On that point, we are in agreement,” Lord Hugh replied, but to Sarah’s ears, they were still sparring.
“It is good to see you at this wedding,” the elderly countess said. “I hope it portends peaceful times to come.”
“As Lord Chatteris is not my great-grandnephew, I can only assume that I was invi
ted out of friendship.”
“Or to keep an eye on you.”
“Ah,” Lord Hugh said, one corner of his mouth sliding into a wry curve, “but that would be counterproductive. One would assume that the only dastardly deed for which I might need monitoring would involve Lord Winstead, who, as we both know, is here at the wedding.”
His face resumed its normal inscrutable mask, and he regarded Lady Danbury unblinkingly until she said, “I believe that is quite the longest sentence I have ever heard you utter.”
“Have you heard him utter many sentences?” Sarah inquired.
Lady Danbury turned to her with a hawkish expression. “I’d quite forgotten you were there.”
“I have been uncharacteristically quiet.”
“Which brings me to my original point,” Lady Danbury declared.
“That we are awkward?” Lord Hugh murmured.
“Yes!”
This, predictably, was met with an awkward pause.
“You, Lord Hugh,” Lady Danbury declared, “have been abnormally taciturn since the day you were born.”
“You were there?” he queried.
Lady Danbury’s face screwed up, but it was obvious she appreciated an excellent riposte, even when directed at her. “How do you put up with him?” she asked Sarah.
“I rarely have to,” Sarah replied with a shrug.
“Hmmph.”
“She has been assigned to me,” Lord Hugh explained.
Lady Danbury’s eyes narrowed. “For someone so uncommunicative, you’re quite pithy this evening.”
“It must be the company.”
“I do tend to bring out the best in people.” Lady Danbury smiled slyly and swung around to face Sarah. “What do you think?”
“Without a doubt you bring out the best in me,” Sarah proclaimed. She’d always known when to say what someone else wanted to hear.
“I must say,” Lord Hugh said in a dry tone, “I find this conversation diverting.”
“Well, you would, wouldn’t you?” Lady Danbury retorted. “It’s not as if you’ve had to tax your brain to keep up with me.”
Sarah felt her lips part again as she tried to sort that one out. Had Lady Danbury just called him clever? Or was she insulting him by saying that he hadn’t added anything of interest to the conversation?
And what did it mean that Sarah had to tax her brain to keep up with her?
“You look perplexed, Lady Sarah,” Lady Danbury said.
“I find myself fervently hoping that we will soon be called in to supper,” Sarah admitted.
Lady Danbury snorted with amusement.
Emboldened, Sarah said to Lord Hugh, “I believe I have begun to pray to the butler.”
“If there are to be replies, you’ll certainly hear his before anyone else’s,” he said.
“Now this is more like it,” Lady Danbury announced. “Look at the two of you. You’re positively bantering.”
“Bantering,” Lord Hugh repeated, as if he could not quite grasp the word.
“It’s not as entertaining for me as an awkward conversation, but I imagine you prefer it.” Lady Danbury pressed her lips together and glanced about the room. “I suppose I shall have to find someone else to entertain me now. It’s quite a delicate balance, you know, finding awkwardness without stupidity.” She thumped her cane on the carpet, hmmphed, and departed.
Sarah turned to Lord Hugh. “She’s mad.”
“I might point out that you recently said the same thing to me.”
Sarah was sure there were a thousand different responses to that, but she managed to think of precisely none of them before Iris suddenly appeared. Sarah clenched her teeth. She was still very annoyed with her.
“I found her,” Iris announced, her face still grim with latent determination. “We are saved.”
Sarah could not find enough charity within herself to say something bright and congratulatory. She did, however, nod.
Iris gave her a queer look, punctuated with a tiny shrug.
“Lord Hugh,” Sarah said, with perhaps a bit more emphasis than was strictly necessary, “may I present my cousin, Miss Smythe-Smith? Formerly Miss Iris Smythe-Smith,” she added, for no reason other than her own sense of annoyance. “Her elder sister was recently wed.”
Iris started, clearly only just realizing that he’d been standing next to her cousin. This did not surprise Sarah; when Iris had her mind set on something she rarely noticed anything she deemed irrelevant.
“Lord Hugh,” Iris said, recovering quickly.
“I am most relieved to hear that you are saved,” Lord Hugh said.
Sarah took some satisfaction in the fact that Iris did not appear to know how to respond.
“From plague?” Lord Hugh inquired. “Pestilence?”
Sarah could only stare.
“Oh, I know,” he said in quite the jolliest tone she’d ever heard from him. “Locusts. There’s nothing like a good infestation of locusts.”
Iris blinked several times, then lifted a finger as if she’d just thought of something. “I’ll leave you, then.”
“Of course you will,” Sarah muttered.
Iris gave her an almost imperceptible smirk, then made her departure, snaking fluidly through the crowd.
“I must confess to curiosity,” Lord Hugh said once Iris had disappeared from view.
Sarah just stared ahead. He wasn’t the sort to let her silence stop him, so there didn’t seem much need to reply.
“From what dreadful fate did your cousin save you?”
“Not you, apparently,” Sarah muttered before she could control her tongue.
He chuckled at that, and Sarah decided there was no reason not to tell him the truth. “My cousin Daisy—that’s Iris’s younger sister—was trying to organize a special performance of the Smythe-Smith Quartet.”
“Why should that be a problem?”
Sarah took a moment to phrase her query. “You have not attended one of our musicales, then?”
“I have not had the pleasure.”
“Pleasure,” Sarah repeated, tucking her chin back toward her neck as she tried to choke down her disbelief.
“Is something wrong?” Lord Hugh asked.
She opened her mouth to explain, but just then the butler came in and called them in for supper.
“Your prayers are answered,” Lord Hugh said wryly.
“Not all of them,” she muttered.
He offered her his arm. “Yes, you’re still stuck with me, aren’t you?”
Indeed.
Chapter Seven
The following afternoon
And so the Earl of Chatteris and Lady Honoria Smythe-Smith were joined in holy matrimony. The sun was shining, the wine was flowing, and judging by the laughter and smiles at the wedding breakfast (which had long since metamorphosed into a wedding luncheon), a good time was being had by all.
Even Lady Sarah Pleinsworth.
From where Hugh was sitting at the head table (rather by himself; everyone else had got up to dance), she was the very embodiment of carefree English womanhood. She spoke easily to the other guests, she laughed often (but never too loudly), and when she danced, she looked so bloody happy it nearly lit the room on fire.
Hugh had once liked to dance.
He’d been good at it, too. Music was not so very different from mathematics. It was all just patterns and sequences. The only difference was that they hung in the air instead of on a piece of paper.
Dancing was a grand equation. One side was sound, the other movement. The dancer’s job was to make them equal.
Hugh might not have felt music, the way the choral master at Eton had insisted he must, but he certainly understood it.
“Hullo, Lord Hugh. Would you like some cake?”
Hugh looked up and smiled. It was little Lady Frances Pleinsworth, holding two plates. One had a gigantic slice of cake, the other a merely enormous one. Both had been liberally frosted with lavender-hued icing and tiny candy violets. Hug
h had seen the cake in all its glory before it had been cut; he had immediately begun to wonder how many eggs such a gateau might have required. When that had proved an impossible calculation, he’d started thinking about how long it would have taken to make the confection. Then he’d moved on to—
“Lord Hugh?” Lady Frances said, cutting into his thoughts. She lifted one of the plates a few inches higher in the air, reminding him of why she’d come over.
“I do like cake,” he said.
She sat down next to him, setting the plates on the table. “You looked lonely.”
Hugh smiled again. It was the sort of thing an adult would never have said aloud. And precisely the reason he’d rather have been chatting with her than anyone else in the room. “I was alone, not lonely.”
Frances frowned, considering that. Hugh was just about to explain the difference when she cocked her head and asked, “Are you sure?”
“Alone is a state of being,” he explained, “whereas lonely is—”
“I know that,” she cut in.
He regarded her. “Then I’m afraid I do not understand your question.”
She cocked her head to the side. “I was just wondering if a person always knows when he is lonely.”
Budding little philosopher, she was. “How old are you?” he asked, deciding that he would not be surprised if she opened her mouth and said she was actually forty-two.
“Eleven.” She jabbed a fork into her cake, expertly picking the icing from between the layers. “But I’m very precocious.”
“Clearly.”
She didn’t say anything, but he saw her smiling around her fork as she took a bite.
“Do you like cake?” she asked, delicately dabbing the corner of her mouth with a napkin.
“Doesn’t everyone?” he murmured, not pointing out that he’d already said he did.
She glanced down at his untouched plate. “Then why haven’t you eaten any?”
“I’m thinking,” he said, his eyes sweeping across the room and settling on the laughing form of her eldest sister.
“You can’t eat and think at the same time?” Frances asked.
It was a dare if ever he’d heard one, so he hauled his attention back to the slab of cake in front of him, took a huge bite, chewed, swallowed, and said, “541 times 87 is 47,067.”