by Mary Balogh
She looked inquiringly at her young charge.
“Oh, but of course he was,” Katherine assured her.
“Of course.” Lady Lyngate smiled. “He is, after all, a gentleman despite his shocking rakehell ways, and he knows how to behave in genteel company. I daresay his reputation is somewhat exaggerated anyway. No one can be quite as wild as he is reputed to be.”
“No,” Katherine agreed.
“This has not been a scold, Katherine,” the dowager assured her. “It has merely been a word of caution from someone older and perhaps wiser in the ways of fashionable society than you. I have only your best interests at heart.”
“I know you do, ma’am,” Katherine said. “I appreciate your concern. It is very kind of you to care.”
“Not at all,” Lady Lyngate said, leaning forward in her chair to pat her hand. “You are missing your family, are you not?”
“Oh,” Katherine said, and to her surprise and embarrassment tears filled her eyes, “yes, I am. I have never been separated from them for so long before now.”
Even when Vanessa had been married to Hedley Dew and living at Rundle Park with him and his family, she had been less than a half hour’s walk away, and one or more of them had walked the distance almost every single day.
The dowager clasped her hand and squeezed it.
“Perhaps,” she said, “Elliott and Vanessa ought to have taken you with them after all. It is not even as though they are to miss all the rest of the Season, is it? They will be back here soon.”
“They wanted me to stay here,” Katherine said, dabbing at her tears with her handkerchief. “They wanted me to stay and enjoy myself. And of course I am doing just that.”
“Of course you are,” the dowager said kindly. “Was Vauxhall as lovely as ever?”
“Oh, even lovelier, ma’am.”
Katherine longed for her sisters and brother with a gnawing ache. Yet she was glad they were gone from town. What would she say to them today? How would she stop herself from blurting out the whole sorry, sordid story to them? She needed time to recover.
It was pointless to ask herself what she had been thinking last evening. She had not, of course, been thinking at all. Or not rationally anyway. It was quite horrifying to realize how quickly and easily she could succumb to the seductive charms of a practiced rake and to the base cravings of her own body.
In her own mind she had even called it love.
She had thought herself gloriously, passionately in love with a dashing, dangerous man.
How gauche of her. How… humiliating!
She would have allowed him…
No, she would not. At every moment she had been about to stop him. She would have done so before it was too late.
No, she would not have done.
It had already been too late.
She had him to thank for the fact that she was not irretrievably ruined today-a fallen woman.
It had all been calculated, deliberate on his part. He had set out quite coldly and deliberately to seduce her. He had arranged to be of her party at Vauxhall, and he had plotted to draw her away from the others and onto that dark, deserted path-and then off it behind a tree. He had planned it all.
How easy she had made it for him. He had stopped only because it was too easy to offer any interesting challenge.
There was a written wager in one of the notorious betting books at a gentlemen’s club. With her name in it. Her name was being bandied about by countless gentlemen of the ton. And perhaps today he would be amusing them all with an account of exactly what had happened.
Only one thought persisted in Katherine’s brain as she sipped her tea and conversed with her hostess. She wanted to go home-preferably all the way home to Throckbridge. She wanted her old life back. It had been a serene and happy one. She wanted to go back there and marry Tom Hubbard, who had asked so many times that they had probably both lost count. But no, Warren Hall would be better. Meg and Stephen were there. And it was in the country, in Hampshire, far away from London.
“We are to be busy during almost every moment of every day for the next week and a half,” the dowager was saying. “It is very gratifying, is it not? And both you and Cecily are swarmed by admirers wherever you go. It should be altogether possible to have both of you happily betrothed before the Season ends and perhaps even married before the autumn. Is there any very special gentleman, Katherine?”
Katherine set down her cup with a clatter and blinked her eyes so that they would not fill with tears again.
“I want to go home,” she said.
She could not bear-she really could not bear the very real possibility that she would see Lord Montford again as soon as she set foot beyond the door. She could not bear to see him again.
Ever.
“Oh, you poor dear,” the dowager said, getting to her feet to come and sit beside Katherine and set a comforting arm about her shoulders. “Of course you do. I have sensed it, but I did not realize just how homesick you are.”
Despite herself Katherine had tears in her eyes again, and they were spilling over to run down her cheeks. She gave one hiccup of a sob.
But she need not have worried, even though it took three days of preparations before she was on her way back to Warren Hall in the comfort and safety of the dowager’s own traveling carriage. Lord Montford did not come calling. Nor did he attend the one evening concert for which Katherine dared venture beyond the doors of Moreland House.
In fact, she did not see him again for three full years.
Jasper’s public admission of utter and abject failure the morning after the Vauxhall debacle was greeted with stunned astonishment by all the gentlemen who were fortunate enough to be present when he made it. The initial silence was soon replaced, however, by delighted rejoicing by those who had wagered against him and by much mirth and hearty back-slapping and commiserations and witty, ribald comments.
London’s most prolifically successful rakehell had been ignobly vanquished by an inexperienced country mouse, who had seen through his ruse in a flash and had led him almost literally down a garden path in Vauxhall, not in order to hurl her virginity at him in eager, panting surrender, but to deliver an eloquent and cutting scold that had forced him to concede that continuing the campaign for what remained of the two weeks would have been an exercise in futility.
The picture of a vanquished Monty hanging his head in mortification before the eloquence of a country virago was too delicious a one not to be revived again and again in male conversation during the coming days. Miss Katherine Huxtable herself soared in everyone’s esteem. A dozen gentlemen declared themselves to be quite in love with her. Two declared themselves forever her slaves. One promised to offer her matrimony before the Season was out.
Jasper, even after the first burst of exuberance had subsided, was the recipient of a chorus of sage advice mingled with mock sympathy, much of it concerned with the sharp decline in certain accomplishments a man must expect to endure once he had passed his twenty-fifth birthday.
“One is well advised to spend half an hour of each day at the mirror in one’s dressing room, plucking out gray hairs,” one not particularly witty wag said.
“And he is not referring to your head, Monty,” someone else added.
“Or one risks finding the ladies discovering one’s gray hairs,” a third voice said, “just when one has launched into the final phase of seduction.”
“And he is not referring to your head, Monty,” the same voice repeated.
And so it went on.
“You may not have to worry about gray hairs, Monty. There may never be a final phase ever again.”
“Of course there will. But he will have to learn to concentrate harder to get it up.”
“And to get it in once it is up.”
“What you really need to learn, Monty, is to spot a country mouse from a mile away and run like the wind in the opposite direction.”
“But the eyesight begins to dim once one p
asses one’s mid-twenties.”
“As do the legs. And other parts.”
“Never mind, Monty, old chap. There is always the church as a career.”
“And the monastery.”
“All of London’s courtesans are going to go into collective mourning, Monty. But perhaps they expected this if they knew your birthday was looming.”
“I can afford to purchase a new pair of boots at Hoby’s with my winnings. You can borrow them, Monty, if you wish, the next time you spot a mouse bearing down upon you looking as if it is about to pounce.”
“How far did you get with her, Monty? I am almost disappointed with my winnings, dash it all. Whose prowess can we believe in if we must lose faith in yours? It is the end of an era, by gad, and it is not just the courtesans who will suffer. There should be a national day of mourning.”
“Black armbands for everyone.”
Jasper took it all with resigned good humor. He had no choice in the matter short of telling the truth, which was even more humiliating than the lie he had told. He did answer the question about how far he had got, though.
“I got absolutely nowhere at all,” he said on a mournful sigh. “I did not accomplish even a squeeze or a tickle or a kiss-not even a peck on the cheek. She did take my arm, it is true, but only so that she could lure me off the main avenue in order to have some privacy in which to read me a scold the like of which I have not endured since I was in leading strings. My ears were all blisters within a minute. They are still ringing. It was all quite, quite lowering, as you might imagine. So lowering, in fact, that I have decided to creep off into the country in order to lick my wounds and rethink my seductive techniques. This is not the end for me. I shall return next year or so, like the phoenix, rejuvenated and better than ever. It is a solemn promise. Gentleman’s honor and all that.”
The vow was greeted with a guffaw of derisive laughter from a few and a rousing cheer of appreciation from most of those gathered about him.
He was quite serious about leaving. He really was going to withdraw to his country estate for a while. He was going to leave London for Miss Katherine Huxtable’s use. He even persuaded himself that his motive was a noble one. It was to save her the pain and embarrassment of risking running into him at every social event she attended for what remained of the Season. If his mind touched upon the possibility that it was just as much to save himself the embarrassment of seeing her, he firmly quelled the thought.
But it was harder to deny the utter humiliation he felt.
She had been his for the taking. He had been within a whisker of taking her. With one forward thrust she would have been his, and his wager would have been won. He would have enjoyed the experience too. So would she. His reputation would have remained intact-indeed, it would have been enhanced.
She would have been ruined, it was true-but that would not have been his concern since she would not be able to cry rape. She had been more than willing.
But he had stopped. He could still scarcely believe that he had stopped.
A crisis of conscience was something quite unfamiliar to him-and it was something he had no intention of cultivating. It would be too deuced uncomfortable and would put far too many restrictions upon his freedom. It had not been conscience that had made him stop but boredom, just as he had told her. Seducing her had been too easy.
He almost believed it, God help him.
He returned home to Cedarhurst Park in Dorsetshire three days after the Vauxhall evening. What he needed, he had decided, was something new upon which to focus his mind and energies, something different, something to alleviate the boredom.
He found that something quite unexpectedly on his own estate, which had run so smoothly and so prosperously all his life under the capable management of three successive and excellent stewards that he had never felt the need to trouble himself over the details. But for the rest of that summer and on into the autumn and through the winter he did just that and surprised both himself and his steward by finding it all rather absorbing. He even discovered that he had ideas.
He would go back to London next year, though. Of course he would. Why would he not? Katherine Huxtable and his strange crisis of conscience and his humiliation before his peers soon receded in memory and became nothing more than ancient history. Indeed, they were soon utterly forgotten.
He told himself so quite frequently.
5
THREE YEARS LATER
MARGARET and Katherine Huxtable did not spend a great deal of time in London. They preferred their quiet life at Warren Hall, their brother’s principal estate in Hampshire.
Margaret managed the household with as much capability as she had shown at their cottage in Throckbridge. Katherine worked with the vicar-and with Stephen’s blessing-to set up a school in the village near Warren Hall under the tutelage of a reputable schoolmaster. She even helped out with the youngest children there sometimes-just as she had at Throckbridge before their fortunes changed.
She was also being courted by Phillip Grainger, a neighbor not many years her senior. She had rejected two marriage offers from him during the past two and a half years and had told him firmly the second time that she liked him exceedingly well but could never think of him as more than a dear friend.
He had pulled a rueful face and assured her that if he could not have her as a wife, then he would have to settle for her friendship. But sometimes he looked at her with more ardor than a friend ought, and sometimes she wondered if she would accept him should he offer a third time. She was twenty-three years old, after all. Most women her age had fixed their choice long ago.
She no longer believed in romantic love.
Oh, yes, she did. She had not become a complete cynic. But she did not believe in it for herself. She had tried-and failed-so many times to fall in love that she had given up even trying. Yet she wanted to be married. She wanted to be settled in her own home. She wanted children of her own. She certainly did not want to be a dependent of Stephen’s all her life.
She could surely have a perfectly happy life with Phillip Grainger. Well, a contented life, anyway-and she suspected that contentment was much underrated. Per haps it lasted longer than the euphoric happiness of romantic love. She liked Mr. Grainger. He would be good to her and their children. But perhaps accepting an offer from him, feeling as she did-or did not-would be unfair to him.
Sometimes she and Margaret went to Rigby Abbey in Northamptonshire to visit their sister Vanessa. She and Elliott no longer lived at Finchley Park. They had moved almost two years ago, after the sudden death of Elliott’s grandfather, the Duke of Moreland. Elliott held the title now.
Their sister was a duchess.
They sadly missed her. They also missed Isabelle, their young niece, who had been born at Finchley Park. They had not yet seen their newborn nephew, Samuel, Viscount Lyngate.
It was partly to rectify that omission that they had decided to spend the last few weeks of the Season in London this particular year. The Duke of Moreland was in town for the parliamentary session, so of course Vanessa and the children were there too.
So was Stephen, who had just completed his studies and had gone straight to London after coming down from Oxford. He had urged his sisters to join him there to help him celebrate. He was almost twenty-one. Soon he would reach his majority and be fully independent of all guardianship. Soon Margaret would be free of the obligation she had taken on at their father’s death eleven years ago to see all her siblings safely to adulthood.
They had been settled at Merton House on Berkeley Square for just one day when Stephen went out to spend the evening with a group of friends. One of them was Constantine Huxtable, their second cousin, of whom Katherine was inordinately fond, though she did not see him often.
Stephen had promised before going out that he would bring Constantine to the house during the evening if the opportunity presented itself. He did not do so, of course-Katherine and Margaret had not really expected that he would. Stephen was
an affectionate and generally attentive brother, but he was also a young man, and young men often forgot everything but the pursuit of their own pleasure when they got together with one another.
Margaret retired early, still tired after their journey to town the day before and a lengthy, busy visit with Vanessa and the children during the day. Katherine read for a while longer and was just on her way upstairs to her room when she heard the front door below being opened and then shut.
She could hear Stephen’s cheerful voice and the butler’s more sober tones in reply. She leaned over the banister to listen, though she could not see down into the hall. And then she heard a deeper voice-Constantine’s.
It was late. They had doubtless been drinking and probably intended to have another drink or two in the library. She ought not to go down. They would not be expecting her, and her appearance might embarrass them. Constantine was sure to be in town for a little while. She would see him tomorrow or the next day.
There was a burst of merry male laughter, more indecipherable chatter, and then silence. They had gone into the library and shut the door.
She would just say good night to Stephen, she decided suddenly, running lightly down the stairs, and greet Constantine before they started drinking again. She would stay only a moment.
The butler had already disappeared. Katherine tapped on the door and opened it without waiting for an answer. She smiled at Stephen, who was at the sideboard pouring liquor from one of the crystal decanters into a glass. He was still youthfully slim and graceful, and his blond hair was still as curly and unruly as ever. But he had developed during the last few years into a confident young man who was going to be devastatingly attractive to the ladies. Indeed, he probably already was.