And her settlements.
Chapter Four
“You’ve seen Lady Canmore at her worst,” Jonathan Tresham said, “and your protective instincts were stirred. That’s not the same thing as”—he waved a hand in circles—“that other nonsense that can afflict a man in the presence of a woman.”
“You’re in my light, Tresham.” Grey had appropriated the Earl of Bellefonte’s woodworking shop for purposes of repairing Mrs. Beauchamp’s harp. Like most repair jobs, this one was proving more complicated than it had seemed at first glance. At least in Bellefonte’s workshop, Grey was surrounded by the scents of varnish, beeswax, and sawdust, which he associated with honest industry and rural pursuits.
Tresham shifted, taking up a stool farther down the workbench. “When I said your financial circumstances were not that bad, I didn’t mean you could flirt with whomever you pleased.”
“A gentleman can always flirt with whomever he pleases, provided he’s doing so within the bounds of friendship and good manners. Where is my—? You moved my awl. If you value the present arrangement of your features, don’t touch my tools.”
The harp needed reconstruction, from the soundboard to the pegs to the strings. The wood itself was in adequate condition, but the glue, screws, and strings were beyond salvation. To make music, a harp needed resonance, and resonance required sound construction.
“When you flirted with the Arbuckles at a musicale,” Tresham said, “nobody thought anything of it. They are well dowered, though one can’t exactly have an intelligent conversation with them, which leaves flirtation.”
“I expect one has never attempted to have an intelligent conversation with them. Hand me that—” Grey swiped a soft cloth from Tresham’s end of the bench. “I did not flirt with the Arbuckles. They flirted with me, or tried to. They doubtless found the task very uphill work.”
“While Lady Canmore made you laugh, in public, more than once over nothing more than a hand of whist. She’s not a sweet young thing, she isn’t wealthy, and—one hesitates to mention this when sharp objects are at hand—she might not be able to provide you an heir.”
Grey considered the pieces strewn about on the bench before him. He would have to put in hours of work to restore the harp, hours when he ought to be squiring Lady Antonia about, plowing through his steward’s reports, or getting himself introduced to… What was her name? Quintet, Quotient, Quixote? Ah, Quinlan. That was it.
“What do you know of Miss Sarah Quinlan?”
Tresham spun on his stool, like a small boy bored with his lessons. “Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch'entrate. Even I didn’t consider her.”
Abandon all hope, ye who enter herein. Dante’s inscription over the gates of hell. “Unkind words to say about a young lady, Tresham.”
“She is not a kind young lady. Her papa’s an iron nabob, she’s pretty, and she has no siblings to keep her conceit in check.”
Siblings surely did perform that office. “Some people attribute the same factors to the aristocracy—endless self-importance, arrogance, vanity.”
Lady Canmore wasn’t vain, self-important, or arrogant. When she made a droll observation, nobody’s dignity suffered, nobody’s feelings were hurt.
“What is this?” Tresham asked, picking up the pile of letters, invoices, and reports Grey had brought with him.
“Correspondence. Quaint English custom. Perhaps, having kicked your heels in France for so long, you’re not acquainted with it. A man travels up to Town to enjoy the stink of London and bask in the gossip and buffoonery of his peers. To ensure he brings all of his rural troubles with him while he navigates the ballrooms and bridle paths, the king’s mail kindly delivers bundles of problems, miseries, and laments from home.”
Grey rubbed the cloth across his tin of beeswax and ran the rag over a carved piece of maple wood that would form a part of the harp’s shoulder.
“The king’s mail is very efficient,” he went on, “if the objective is to plague a fellow no matter where in Britain he finds himself. I’ll take that lot of bother to my club when I’m finished planning this repair.”
“You are trying to change the subject,” Tresham said, leafing through Grey’s letters. “Lady Canmore is not a suitable parti, given that a titled man ought not to engage in trade, and you have many younger siblings who will expect your support as they embark on professions. Lady Canmore plucked your heartstrings when Lord Davington insulted her, and now you think you’re smitten. The wounded dove has ever—”
Grey pitched the rag at Tresham’s handsome head.
“Davington not only insulted her, he assaulted her. Tore her clothing and made lewd advances. Why you did not lay him out flat on the carpet, I will never know.”
“Are all the men from Dorsetshire so violent? I was tempted, but the ladies were present.”
“The men from Dorsetshire with six younger brothers learn that a certain brevity of expression, such as that afforded by a few blows, can save a lot of wasted time and noise when a contentious matter must be settled. Give me back my rag.”
Tresham tossed it back and resumed sorting papers. “One generally puts correspondence in date order, Casriel.”
“No, one does not. The various botherations arrive in date order, and then one sorts them in order of priority. My brother steward reports every lame lamb, loose-boweled calf, and discontented tenant to me, though my brother Hawthorne is on the premises at Dorning Hall to deal with the lot of it. The solicitors provide only monthly updates, but their letters convey the state of my funds and thus merit immediate notice.”
“About Lady Canmore…”
Tresham was newly married and therefore an expert on everything. Babies, courting, the funds, flirting… Grey would trust Tresham with his life, but in his present mood, he could not trust himself to go a few rounds with Tresham at Jackson’s.
“Fortune-hunting does not agree with me,” Grey said. “Friendship with a sensible, mature, pretty woman as I navigate the business of ending my bachelorhood seems a harmless comfort amid many tribulations.”
“You ask about Miss Quinlan,” Tresham said. “She’s tribulation in a ballgown. Her store of conversation is limited to inane questions about ices at Gunter’s, which is a lure to get you to invite her for an outing there. She might inquire about your favorite season of the year. When you reveal to her what you typically do and where you will be during that season, she can plan to attend the same house party, for example. If you disclose a favorite composer, she’ll learn something he’s written for a soprano or for the pianoforte, and they all apparently wrote for both.”
The old wood took the wax well, though several more applications would be required. “Miss Quinlan sounds pragmatic and determined.”
Tresham tidied up the letters, tapping them into a neat stack against the worn and pitted bench.
“And shall you cuddle up to all that pragmatism and determination for the next twenty years? Shall you offer it a big, friendly kiss on the cheek each evening? You might muss her hair and be banished to the dressing closet for months.”
“I have been sleeping in the dressing closet, so to speak, since I came down from university. It’s no great hardship.”
Tresham set aside the papers. “That is unnatural, Casriel. You’re in your prime, a vigorous specimen, and marriage is designed to be an intimate undertaking, at least in the early years.”
Perhaps this lay at the bottom of Grey’s discontent. “My marriage need not be very intimate—I have a half-dozen brothers who are also vigorous specimens—but it must be lucrative.”
“So you’ll take a mistress?” Tresham inquired casually. “Use Miss Quinlan’s settlements to live separately from your own countess?”
“Don’t be distasteful. Many couples live apart for much of the year, and you are wrong about Lady Canmore.”
Putting the harp together would take days, because the project could proceed only at the pace allowed by the old wood. Grey would much rather spend his time w
ith the harp than dancing attendance on well-dowered young ladies.
“In what regard am I wrong about the countess?” Tresham took the top letter from the stack, a literary peregrination from Dorning Hall’s land steward that Grey had been avoiding for two days.
“I did not see Lady Canmore at her worst when Davington so grievously disrespected her, Tresham. On the coach ride home, she was shaken, of course. What woman expects to be criminally assaulted at a Mayfair ball? But she was… ferocious, dignified, articulate, and altogether impressive. You won’t have to call Davington out if he returns to England. Her ladyship will draw his cork with a quip and a cut direct.”
Such a woman wouldn’t disdain a man’s company because he’d been in the shearing shed all morning, sweating, swearing, and wrestling indignant sheep. She wouldn’t be cowed by a lot of unruly brothers-in-law, and she’d easily earn her welcome among the gentry whom Grey called neighbors.
“This is serious,” Tresham muttered, staring at the letter.
“Her ladyship and I have a warm friendship,” Grey replied, closing the tin of beeswax. “Our dealings are not serious, and we are agreed they cannot become serious.”
“I wasn’t referring to your flirtations,” Tresham said. “Your dower house has burned to the ground, Casriel. Nobody was hurt, and no other buildings were damaged, but the dower house is a complete loss.”
Grey snatched the letter from him and began cursing in French, English, and Latin.
“Your lordship is preoccupied today,” Addy observed. The earl did not appear bored—Casriel was too well mannered to evidence boredom in a lady’s company—but neither was his mood tease-able.
“I am returning to Dorset in the morning.”
Hence the restlessness that lay more in his gaze and his tone of voice than any movement or mannerism.
“Have the charms of London paled already, my lord?”
The occasion was a picnic styled as a Venetian breakfast and thus held in the afternoon. Thank heavens the weather had accommodated the hostess’s plans. Small groups of guests lounged about the lawn in wicker chairs and on blankets. A string quartet lilted through Haydn on the terrace.
Addy had been surprised to find Lord Casriel outside the conservatory, listening to another peer’s harangue regarding the Irish question. She’d been even more surprised—and pleased—to accept the earl’s invitation to admire the roses.
“London’s greatest charms are limited to present company,” he said, “and Hyde Park on a sunny morning.”
Addy examined her escort more closely, noting faint lines of fatigue around his eyes and the beginnings of grooves bracketing his mouth. He had apparently offered her honesty, which in its way was more flattering than flirtation.
“You are homesick,” she said. “Heaven knows I grow homesick for Surrey. I sometimes tell the maple at the foot of my garden how badly I miss an honest forest. All we have in London are the lone specimens permitted to give shade, provided their roots don’t disturb any walls or foundations. Hyde Park is an exception, but it’s often a crowded exception.”
“And noisy,” Casriel muttered, “and heavily scented with coal smoke, and yet, homesickness is not what sends me back to Dorset. My dower house was struck by lightning and is a charred ruin. The storms in Dorset are magnificent, though from all accounts, it hadn’t even begun to rain.”
“Hence the fire was unchecked by a handy downpour. I am so sorry. Let’s sit a moment, shall we?”
The garden was peaceful, the roses not quite in their glory. An occasional precocious bloom waved gently in the sun, though most buds were yet furled. Casriel found a bench in the shade and—surely this was a coincidence—out of view of the house and lawn.
“Tell me about your dower house, my lord.”
He stretched out long legs and rested an arm along the back of the bench, a man settling in to weave a story.
“We played hide-and-seek in the dower house by the hour as children, and when my grandmother was alive, we learned the tea ritual in her parlor. She taught us manners and made it a game, or not a one of us would be received in polite society. My sister Jacaranda and I learned to dance in that parlor, while my grandmother called the steps from the pianoforte.”
“Happy memories, then.”
“For the most part. Grandmother could be very articulate regarding a boy’s lapses in decorum, but by nature she was loving and merry. She gave me my first harp and insisted Papa hire a proper music master when I began to show an affinity for the instrument. She died the year I went to public school.”
His first harp, his first dancing lessons, his first course in manners… No wonder Aunt Freddy’s company appealed to him.
“I hope that harp survived the fire.”
He crossed his legs at the ankles. “I sold the harp. It was an antique, more beautiful in appearance than in musical ability. The proceeds went to repairing the dairy and the laundry on our home farm.”
A valuable harp, and one that had to have carried sentimental weight. Let that be a warning to any woman setting too great store by casual friendship.
“Did you replace your first instrument with another?”
“We still have a great harp in our music room at Dorning Hall. My sister Daisy occasionally plucks out an air. She lives not far from the family seat. My brothers call upon her when I’m in need of a lecture, and Daisy obliges over tea.”
Casriel missed this sister, he missed Dorning Hall. The wistfulness with which he spoke of them was as plain as the grass growing up through the brick cobbles of the garden path. Relentless, and both obvious and easily overlooked by passersby.
“If you travel to Dorset, will you return to London, my lord?”
“I must.”
Addy waited, because this was a conversation between friends, not vacuous small talk. Clearly, Casriel had considered abandoning London altogether and had scolded himself out of the notion. For him, she was disappointed. For herself, she was pleased.
“I attended this gathering,” he said, “because the thought of truly fresh air, fragrant with the scents of the garden and field, appealed strongly, also because Tresham agreed to introduce me to Miss Sarah Quinlan.”
Pain lanced through Addy, useless and undeniable. “Miss Quinlan is very pretty.” An Incomparable, though would Miss Quinlan have earned that appellation without incomparable settlements? Without youth, which promised many fertile years to whomever she married?
“Dorset is prettier.”
Addy laughed. “You are a squire in earl’s clothing. Maybe that’s what I like about you. I was raised in a country vicarage, and I miss it sorely. I knew who I was there, didn’t have to convince anybody of my status, over and over. Beneath my finery, I’m a vicar’s hoyden of a daughter, not some widowed countess with a Mayfair abode.”
“At heart, you are a delightful woman. Have you no dower property of your own?”
Every rose has its thorns. “The current titleholder is my husband’s younger twin brother. They were not cordial. Shall I introduce you to Miss Quinlan?”
Perhaps Casriel wasn’t that eager to meet Miss Quinlan of the gorgeous settlements. He stayed right where he was, as did Addy.
“Is that unusual, for twins to be estranged?” he asked.
Addy never discussed this aspect of her marriage. Not with her friends, not with Aunt Freddy, not with the maple at the foot of the garden.
“For twins to be at daggers drawn is unnatural, I think. I told my husband as much, but on this point, he could not be swayed.”
“I cannot fathom estrangement from a sibling. Did their father divide them?”
Perceptive man. “Emotionally, geographically, every way he could. From the time they left the nursery, the old earl treated Roger as the heir and Jason as an upper servant. I gather the boys were close once, but that ended when Roger was sent to public school, and Jason remained at home with the occasional tutor. Jason did not accept his fate passively, and thus the competition began.”
Though Jason made a conscientious earl, and Addy’s refusal to occupy the dower house was not for lack of an invitation from the current countess.
“My brothers compete,” Casriel said, “but in the face of a threat, they become a Roman guard of shared fraternal honor. All for one, and so on, until there’s only one biscuit left, and then it’s back to fisticuffs and insults.”
“You miss them, and their fisticuffs and insults.”
Addy caught a whiff of his lordship’s shaving soap as he reached past her to snap off a white rosebud. “I will miss you when I’m back in the wilds of Dorsetshire, though Dorset hasn’t any real wilds. We have some dramatic seacoast, but the rest of the county is tame by the standards of any self-respecting adventurer.”
Addy took the rose, though the bloom should be put in water. “You’re flirting again. That suggests the loss of the dower house is a setback, not a tragedy. How will you explain your absence from Town?”
He resumed frowning, which was easier for her to bear than his flummery. “The loss of the dower house is a considerable setback. For the past ten years, if we had coin to spare, I spent it mostly on restoring the dower house.”
“Are you giving up on your quest, then?”
“My quest?”
“To find a bride.”
“Why would I give up…? Damn. I take your point. No prospective countess worth her coronet should favor the suit of an earl without a dower house. I could fall off a haystack next summer, and then where would she be?”
He climbed haystacks, which in some parts of Britain were piled higher than houses, though they weren’t nearly as sturdy.
“What purpose will a trip to Dorset serve, my lord? Surely your family and your staff have the matter in hand.”
This question occasioned a brooding glance. “My brothers have penned letters, warning me not to come around, kicking at the wreckage and muttering. They claim I’m needed here more, particularly if Sycamore bides in London.”
A Truly Perfect Gentleman Page 6