Her physical reactions surged back. Every one of them.
She plied her fan with a hand that trembled.
‘Admit you have missed me, too,’ he said. ‘And ask me where I have been and what I have been doing.’
Her stomach tied itself into a knot. She’d ached to know where he was, every minute of the last eighteen days, and had tortured herself by imagining what he was doing, and with whom, every single one of those nights. She could not bear it if he confirmed all her worst fears. So she said, primly, ‘Your movements can be of no possible concern to me, my lord.’
‘Ah,’ he said, sitting back and frowning down at the programme, ‘I see.’
He removed his hand from the back of her chair and used it to crush the printed sheet into a tiny ball, while he gazed straight ahead, a muscle in his jaw working. There were a few moments of silence so tense she didn’t quite know what to do with herself. Yet she dared not break it with some inane piece of chatter. Not while Lord Deben had that particularly devilish look on his face. So she just sat and watched out of the corner of her eye, and fanned herself, while he smoothed the programme over his knee. And then began to methodically tear it into tiny strips.
After what felt like an eternity, but was probably no more than a minute or two, Lady Twining climbed up on to the dais and clapped her hands to try to attract everyone’s attention.
‘Honoured guests!’ Conversation became muted. ‘Honoured guests, friends, would you all be so good as to take your seats now, please?’
Those who were about to do readings strode forwards at once, trailing their satellites, taking their places on the front row, or on the edges of aisles. Others began to shuffle forwards more slowly.
Except for one person, who strode to the front of the room and came to a halt before Henrietta.
‘Get up, Hen,’ said Richard, for it was he. ‘And come with me. I am taking you home this minute.’
‘What? Why?’
‘Because Miss Waverley has just informed me that it’s all over town that you’re making a fool of yourself over this blackguard,’ he said, pausing to glower at Lord Deben. ‘And I promised Hubert I’d look out for you. I thought those people you are staying with would have done so, but it’s obvious they’ve been dazzled by his title. Or they just don’t know about his reputation. But I do, Hen. And I won’t stand for it.’
Most of the other guests had taken their seats by now. Lady Twining was shooting the back of Richard’s head a disapproving frown, though since he could not see it, it was having no effect upon him whatsoever.
‘You won’t stand for it?’ Henrietta snapped her fan shut.
‘That’s right,’ he said, grasping her wrist and tugging her to her feet. ‘We are leaving. Now.’
‘Mr Wythenshawe,’ said Lady Twining, loudly. ‘Would you please take your place at the lectern?’
To a smattering of applause, a portly young man climbed on to the dais.
‘Surely,’ Lord Deben said to Richard in that deceptively lazy drawl of his, ‘that is for Miss Gibson to decide?’
‘Precisely,’ said Henrietta.
‘Mr Wythenshawe is to commence our evening’s entertainment,’ said Lady Twining, including Henrietta in the dark look she was shooting Richard’s way, ‘by reading his latest work, “Sylvia by Moonlight”.’
To the background of polite applause, Henrietta tried in vain to extricate her wrist from Richard’s determined grasp.
‘Do let go of me, Richard, you are hurting me.’
‘Now that,’ said Lord Deben, slowly uncoiling himself from his chair, ‘is something that I cannot permit.’
The portly poet laid his sheaf of paper on the lectern and cleared his throat noisily.
Richard let go of Henrietta’s wrist, but only to round on Lord Deben.
‘Who are you to say you cannot permit it? You have no authority over me, my lord.’
‘I claim the right of any gentleman to intercede when he sees a lady being mistreated.’
‘Hark!’ said the poet on the podium, shooting a dagger-like look in their direction.
‘Mistreated? Fustian,’ said Richard. ‘I’m doing the very opposite. I’m here to rescue her, same as any of her brothers would do if they knew the company she’d fallen into. We’ve known each other so long that a little tussle like that between us don’t signify.’
Lord Deben raised one eyebrow disdainfully. ‘You may have known her since she was in the cradle, but that does not mean you can take liberties with her person.’
‘And you would know all about taking liberties, wouldn’t you?’
‘Richard, will you keep your voice down,’ Henrietta hissed. ‘Everyone is staring.’
For they were. Nobody was paying the portly poet on the dais the slightest bit of attention. They were far more interested by the drama playing out on the front row.
‘And you shouldn’t pay any attention to gossip.’
‘Especially not if it originates from the scheming jade I saw pouring her poison into your ears earlier,’ said Lord Deben.
Richard opened and closed his mouth a few times, clearly trying to make up his mind whether to pursue the argument he’d started, or veer off to defend Miss Waverley.
Encouraged by the brief cessation in hostilities, Mr Wythenshaw started up again.
‘Hark!’ he said. ‘The vixen’s tortured cry …’
But Richard had decided where his priorities lay. ‘I don’t believe the bits about you, of course, Hen. I know you wouldn’t demean yourself by chasing after a man,’ he said, making Henrietta blush for shame, since she’d done exactly that in his case.
‘What I do believe is that he—’ he jerked his head in Lord Deben’s direction ‘—might have turned your head with a lot of insincere flattery. Stock in trade of a rake. Shouldn’t have to tell you that sort of thing, but there, you ain’t up to snuff. Not your fault. Led a very sheltered life.’
Henrietta couldn’t help bridling at his assumption that any flattery Lord Deben had poured into her ears must naturally have been insincere. But what was worse was the way he would keep talking to her as though she was about five and needed a nanny.
‘So you think it is your job to rescue me from him, do you?’
‘Well, obviously it is.’
Out of the corner of her eye she noticed Lord Deben’s lips twitch. Well, she was glad he was finding this funny. It was clearly her mission in life to provide him with entertainment.
Her eyes smarting, she let her frustration out on Richard.
‘So, where have you been then,’ she demanded, ‘all these weeks since I have been in town, if you think I am too hen-witted to defend myself from the wiles of all the rakes and rascals who stalk London’s ballrooms?’
‘A man has … a man …’ His eyes flickered guiltily to where Miss Waverley was sitting. ‘That is not your concern,’ he said pompously. ‘The point is that I happen to know that it is downright dangerous to permit a man like that to flirt with you. I can see how you might have been taken in. But it has to stop now.’
She lifted her chin and noticed Lord Deben’s mouth slide into an appreciative grin. In spite of feeling that at that moment she had never come so close to hating anyone, she kept her eyes fixed on Richard.
‘Well, it won’t,’ she said. ‘I shall flirt with whomsoever I wish,’ she said, making Lord Deben’s grin widen to something that looked, had she not known better, triumphant. ‘You do.’
Richard blinked and for a moment his mouth hung open.
Wythenshawe took the opportunity to deliver his next line. ‘Doth echo o’er the moonlit grass …’
Then a knowing look came over Richard, and he said, ‘You’ve been trying to make me jealous.’ He laughed. ‘And I never even knew about it until tonight. Don’t that beat all!’
That remark wiped the smile from Lord Deben’s face. It looked as though he’d realised that this was the man over whom she’d been weeping, the first night they’d met. And now, because
of Richard’s arrogant assumption, he would think she had been using him all along.
No wonder he looked murderous.
‘I have not been trying to make you jealous,’ she denied hotly, for Lord Deben’s benefit as much as to puncture Richard’s over-inflated opinion of himself. ‘I have not spared you a thought for weeks and weeks.’ How could she, when she was completely obsessed with Lord Deben?
‘Of course not.’ Richard grinned. ‘You’ve probably been enjoying yourself immensely, too, while you haven’t been trying to make me jealous. Look, we’ll say no more about it, if you just come along nicely now. I only joined Miss Waverley’s court because it’s the thing to do. See? And as for the other—I’m not angry with you. Not a bit. Can even see how he might have turned your head. After all, a girl like you ain’t used to masculine attention.’
‘A girl like me? What, pray,’ said Henrietta in a dangerously polite voice, ‘do you mean by that, Richard?’
‘You, ah … well, you …’ Richard floundered for a few seconds, which was all the encouragement Wythenshawe needed to shout the next couplet.
While blanket-tossed I sleepless lie,
Pondering Sylvia’s peerless …
‘You ain’t a flighty piece,’ Richard burst out, apparently struck by inspiration. ‘That’s what I meant. And your brothers took good care you weren’t exposed to the wrong kind of men. His kind,’ he said, shooting a dark look at Lord Deben. ‘The kind that will steal an innocent girl’s heart for sport, then toss it aside when he’s sure of his conquest.’
He looked into her eyes with the kind of concern she had once dreamed of seeing.
And then shattered her by saying, ‘Face facts, Hen. It cannot go anywhere. Fellows like him don’t marry country girls with … well, let’s be honest, plain faces.’
This was not news to her. She’d always known Lord Deben would not stoop to marrying her. Yet to have somebody say it to her, in a crowded drawing room so that everyone could hear, was just about the nastiest thing anyone had ever done to her.
From the back of the room she heard someone snigger. She suspected it was Miss Waverley.
For a moment, she was so shattered, she was incapable of making any decisions as to how to handle this.
What did a girl do, when she’d just been completely humiliated in public? Walk out with her chin up? Faint?
But then Lord Deben spared her the necessity of having to do either of those things, by producing yet another handkerchief from his tailcoat pocket with a dramatic flourish, spreading it on the floor and kneeling down on it. On just the one knee.
‘Miss Gibson,’ he said, placing one hand over his heart, ‘if only I could steal your heart, I would consider myself the most fortunate man in London. For mine beats only for you.’
A collective gasp went up from the audience. With a strangled cry, Wythenshawe seized his pages of poetry and stormed from the dais.
Henrietta wanted to weep. Was Lord Deben mocking her? She hadn’t thought he could be so cruel.
But when she looked into his face, there was no trace of mirth. She had never seen him looking so deadly earnest.
A lump came to her throat. This must be his idea of coming to her rescue. He could see Richard had hurt her, publicly humiliated her, and he was trying to mitigate the damage by publicly denying he found her unattractive. And it was very sweet, but what good could it do?
‘Now that’s doing it much too brown,’ said Richard. ‘Don’t listen to him, Hen, he don’t mean it. Doing it for a wager, I’ll be bound.’
‘What a horrid thing to say,’ she said, rounding on him. And, though she’d never aspired to such dizzy heights, she was absolutely sick of Richard putting her down.
‘Why shouldn’t he wish to marry me?’
‘Well, ah, that is, nothing exactly wrong with you, Hen. But—’
‘Since the sight of me on my knees, telling you that my heart belongs to you, is not clear enough,’ Lord Deben interrupted, ‘let me clear up any misapprehension and put it in such plain words that even this chawbacon—’ he shot Richard a look of contempt ‘—could not misinterpret them. Miss Gibson, will you do me the very great honour of marrying me?’
For a moment, everything seemed a bit unreal. But at the back of the room, Henrietta noted the men who’d been sidling off into the card room come pouring back.
And then, as though from a very great distance, she heard Richard saying, ‘She can’t marry you. She’s going to marry me.’
The outrageous statement shocked her so much she recovered the power of speech.
‘How dare you tell such a lie, Richard? We are not betrothed!’
‘As good as. That is, everyone knows you’re going to marry me.’
‘Everyone except me, apparently,’ she snapped. ‘For I don’t recall you getting down on one knee and saying I would make you the happiest man in London if I gave you my heart.’
‘Well, that’s because I’m not such a sapskull,’ he retorted. ‘Anyway, what would be the point? I’ve known for ever that you have no greater ambition than to marry me. And … look, old girl, I admit I’m not ready to settle down quite yet—’
‘Not. Quite. Ready.’ It was no consolation to hear, now, that he’d been thinking of marrying her when he was ready.
He took her so much for granted that while she’d been in London, right before her eyes, and with her full knowledge, he’d joined the set that hung round Miss Waverley, jockeying with them for position as favourite.
Thank heaven she’d had her eyes opened to his true nature. If she really had ended up married to him, he would have treated her with as much consideration as though she were a piece of furniture.
‘But I know that when I am ready I couldn’t do any better than you,’ he added hastily. ‘Oh, come on,’ he blustered, going red in the face. ‘It’s been understood for ever. M’father … your brothers … and then when we kissed, I thought …’
So that kiss had been in the nature of an experiment. To see whether he could stomach the notion of marrying to please his father.
‘You went off to London, thinking your future secure,’ she spat. ‘Thinking you’d conquered me with one paltry kiss. Well, you are correct in saying you could do no better than marry me,’ she said coldly. ‘But I can most certainly do better than you. Lord Deben …’
As she began to turn away from him, Richard seized her by the shoulders and gave her a little shake.
‘Stop right there, Hen. Do not commit yourself to anything in a fit of pique. I admit, I may not have given you as much attention since you’ve been in town as you would have liked, but I thought we’d have our whole lives ahead of us.’
‘You didn’t even have the common courtesy to call on me, as a family friend, never mind accord me the kind of respect the woman you planned to spend the rest of your life with deserves.’
‘At least I didn’t make myself a subject for gossip with indiscreet behaviour, like you did. What do you think your father will say when you get home and he finds out you’ve been making a fool of yourself?’
‘If anyone has been making a fool of themselves this Season, it has not been me. Watching you trotting round at Miss Waverley’s heels like a spaniel has to be the most revolting display of idiocy in which you have ever engaged. And that includes the time you harnessed those poor cows to your father’s gig and they pulled the entire rig to bits in the middle of the high street and tipped you into the midden.’
‘That was for a wager,’ he said. ‘And leave Miss Waverley out of it. She …’
‘She what? Is worth a dozen of me, is that what you were going to say?’
‘No. But perhaps it is the truth. My God, it would serve Lord Deben right if you did accept him.’
‘Serve … him … right?’
While the two of them had been bickering, Lord Deben had remained very quiet. In fact, everyone in the room had gone very quiet, as though they were taking the greatest care not to remind those involved in the brangle
of their presence. At one point Lady Twining had clambered on to the dais, opened and closed her mouth, reached out her hand imploringly, then pulled it back to her chest. And instead of saying anything, she was just standing there, wringing her hands. For there was nothing, in any of the books of etiquette, that covered interrupting a lovers’ quarrel that had turned into a marriage proposal from an earl in the middle of what was supposed to have been a poetry reading.
Henrietta wrenched herself out of Richard’s grip, turning to look at Lord Deben, to gauge his reaction. Did he look like a man who was waiting for the axe to fall? Did he look as though he dreaded what she might say next?
No. He looked completely calm.
For a second.
Just until he smiled at her. A lazy, devilish sort of smile that seemed to be daring her to do her worst.
Chapter Thirteen
Henrietta’s heart began to beat very fast. He’d said nothing on earth would have induced him to marry Miss Waverley. And she was sure nothing would pressure him into marrying anyone, if he didn’t want to. So the fact that he was kneeling at her feet, with that devilishly teasing grin on his face, must mean that he … that he … oh, dare she hope that he actually wanted to marry her?
He’d told her he would have to marry one day. That it was part of his duty. But from the way he’d confided in her, she’d assumed he’d already ruled her out.
But then just now he’d said that while he’d been away from town he’d missed her.
And he’d promised her, once, that he would never lie to her.
Did that mean he’d come to the conclusion that since he had to marry somebody, and he got on with her as much as he was ever likely to get on with any woman, he thought they could make a go of it?
Never Trust a Rake Page 21