The Sensible Courtship

by Megan Daniel

  A silence followed while the company digested this. Sarah looked around the table at her guests, then looked at Lord Devlin with obvious satisfaction and gratitude. For the first time in several days she felt herself able to relax. With such an interesting, wise, and thoroughly delightful guest as the unexpected Lord Devlin, her party could not fail.

  Francesca found herself surprised at the man’s wisdom and obvious understanding of human nature. Such were the benefits of travel, the benefits she had never been able to have. She really must get to know him all over again—to pick his brain, as it were.

  “Yes, yes,” said Lord Jersey finally. “That’s all very well, but what of these horses of yours, man? Mustangs, you called them? What’s the stock? High-blooded? How heavy can they carry?”

  “What about finesse, Dev?” said Mr. Symington. “Can they take a bullfinch?”

  “How about a double oxer?” added Sir Algernon. “Any good at going in and out clever?”

  It was clear that the conversation had taken a masculine turn. The young hostess nodded to the ladies and rose. They left the gentlemen to their port and cigars.

  4

  While talk of horses and hunting and adventuring in general continued in the dining room, cutting through a rapidly building layer of thick, pungent cigar smoke, the ladies’s drawing room was filled to overflowing with chatter and speculation about one adventurer in particular.

  “He is so excessively handsome,” chirped a very young and eager Miss Hollys. “Do you not think so, Mama?”

  “He will do, Letty. He will do,” answered Lady Poole. “Though I am not at all certain I can wholly approve of him, you know. I am sure I understood him to say that he had actually lived among the aborigines. Very odd behavior, that. Very odd indeed!” The exclamation point caused the necessity of reaching up and righting her puce satin turban and its dancing plume.

  “But only think, ma’am, what he must have learned about life,” said Francesca. “Things one could never learn from books. Things like—”

  The older lady cut her off with a severe frown. “Things that young ladies do not know about or care about, I am sure.”

  “He is just like a hero out of a book,” continued Miss Hollys, her eyes aglow.

  “He’d not thank you to hear himself described as such, I’ll warrant,” put in Lady Jersey with her irrepressible air of no nonsense. “Looks to me to have no flummery about him.” This was high praise from Sally Jersey.

  “Pooh, Sally,” said Roxanna Gordon, a young, beautiful, and very dashing widow in a low-cut crimson demi-robe gilded with diamonds. “What can you know of the mysterious Lord Devlin? Is he not completely unknown to all us ladies? I adore enigmas. Especially such rich and handsome ones.”

  “No, I have never met, Lord Devlin,” admitted Lady Jersey. “But I hardly think, Roxanna, that a gentleman from an old established family, whose uncle was well- known and admired and who has inherited one of the finest titles in the country, can ever be branded a complete stranger amongst us.”

  “And besides,” said Sarah, “he is not entirely unknown to us. Of course many of the gentlemen knew him at Oxford. And Cesca met him on a number of occasions before he left England.”

  All eyes now turned to Francesca. The young Miss Hollys wore a clearly hopeful face that Francesca could be persuaded to tell them all about his lordship. Mrs. Gordon was just as clearly annoyed that any lady present should have better knowledge of Devlin than she did herself. The others were all curious. “Did you really know him, Cesca?” and “How did you come to meet?” floated across the room to Francesca.

  She gave a tiny, disinterested shrug. “It was a very slight acquaintance, I assure you. We had mutual friends, that is all.” Only Sarah, who knew her so well, could detect the trace of embarrassment in her voice, and she wondered at it. Cesca was usually the last person on earth to be embarrassed about anything, especially a gentleman.

  Roxanna Gordon looked at her with narrowed eyes. She was not a particularly perceptive woman, except when it came to her own interests. But she did just think that something in Francesca’s simple statement did not ring true.

  Other questions flew at Francesca, but Mrs. Gordon was quick to turn the discussion away from such a prior friendship. “Such a pity, you know, that Lord Byron could not attend your party, Sarah,” she said. “I am sure his nose would be put completely out of joint by our dashing new adventurer. And about time, too. He is become odiously top-lofty and full of himself of late. That ridiculous business with Caro Lamb making such a fool of herself over him in public.”

  “Ah, but Lord Devlin does not write poetry,” stated Mrs. Pennington, nodding her feathers in total approval of the fact. “At least I sincerely hope he does not!”

  “But he might still fit Caro’s description of Byron,” said Miss Hollys. “You know, ‘Mad, bad, and dangerous to know!’ ” Obviously the idea had great appeal for her.

  “Don’t be foolish, Letty,” said her mother. “He hasn’t a trace of the corsair in him. I am sure he is perfectly respectable, which no one could say about Byron!”

  “Not so respectable, I hope, that none of us will get the chance to play Caro to his Byron,” said Mrs. Gordon with a light laugh. Her eyes glittered with anticipation.

  “Poetry, faugh!” exclaimed Lady Braethon, a trifle behind in the conversation. “It is an easy enough matter to write in verse: rhyming is child’s play, after all. As for Lord Byron’s outlandish ideas, who can say where he gets them? If he were simply Mister Byron, no one would so much as glance at his nonsense. But he is a lord, so every silly miss must romanticize him and every town fribble ape him, and everyone who should have better sense hangs on his every word.”

  “But you must admit, ma’am,” said Francesca with a grin, “Byron does seem made for a romantic hero with those wild dark looks and his limp. And while I don’t suppose Lord Devlin can do anything about his unfortunate blond hair, I do think he might at least have managed a scar to show for all his travels. I don’t quite see how we can make him a hero without one.”

  Lady Braethon gave a hearty guffaw of laughter. A few others tittered. Miss Hollys flushed a deep red. “I know you are laughing at me. I must seem very silly and romantical to you.”

  “On the contrary, Letty,” said Francesca in a kind voice. “We are laughing at ourselves.”

  “I am sure Lord Devlin needs no scar to make him interesting,” added Sarah. “He is an exceedingly handsome and polished gentleman, and I am awfully glad to have him at my party.”

  Mrs. Gordon let out a ripple of laughter. “And no one in possession of forty thousand pounds per annum can ever be uninteresting,” she said, her eyes now shining as brightly as her shower of diamonds. The comment effectively put an end to the conversation. Luckily the gentlemen chose that moment to rejoin their female counterparts, and the tea tray was rolled in after them.

  It was immediately evident from their comfortable expressions that the gentlemen had been well entertained during their absence from the ladies. No doubt Lord Devlin had been regaling them with anecdotes of a somewhat warmer nature than those recounted before the ladies, thought Francesca. She was certain he must have a large store of them.

  She pondered with annoyance her own lack of adventures. Oh, she had not been an absolute dull dog. In fact, in her earlier years she had come close to scandalizing the whole of the ton with her romps. But hampered as she was by her petticoats, so to speak, she had never had Lord Devlin’s rich opportunities to really drink of the cup of life. Her attempts at independence she now saw as little more than childish revolts, silly little intrigues that would have been sordid had they not been so innocent, flirtations with empty-headed rascals in the hope of discovering what all the talk of romance was about. But her heart had always come up empty.

  She had long since thrown in the towel, to use the boxing cant of some of her more sporting beaux, and sunk once again into respectability. She no longer flirted, though the Lord knew the gentl
emen still flocked about her. Indeed, she now had little patience with the ton’s almost total preoccupation with the mating game, however well she might understand its rules.

  Lord Devlin’s eyes moved easily to hers almost as soon as he entered the room. He looked at her speculatively a moment, smiled a brief, almost diffident smile, then turned his attention to Mrs. Pennington, who was tapping his arm lightly with her fan—just as though he were a naughty schoolboy, thought Francesca with disgust— and directing his attention to the nondescript daughter at her side.

  Poor Pris, thought Francesca, looking at the girl. Such a little mouse of a thing, and here was her mother trying to feed her to the lion of the evening. She wondered idly just what sort of a woman would be able to stand up to his lordship and briefly considered taking him on herself. For all her disdain of fashionable flirtation, she was perfectly versed in the art. Her vanity wondered if she could bring him to heel.

  Then she remembered the disastrous results of their last encounter. That had not been flirting, of course, at least not for her. It was something very much stronger that had swept her along—and him too, she had thought at the time. But she had been a fool. He had easily shown her how little his emotions had been engaged. Indeed, she was thankful for it, wasn’t she? In a moment of thoughtlessness she might have thrown away all her hopes and dreams of independence. And she had not really wanted him, after all. Not for a moment. Not under her mask of eagerness. Well, perhaps for only a moment. But she had quickly come to her senses.

  Luckily for her peace of mind, her attention was claimed at that moment by Graham Symington, who took the chair beside her. He was a longtime favorite of hers, for he never tried to flirt with her. “Well, Graham,” she said brightly. “Has our wondrous newcomer

  been regaling you all with delicious stories of Oriental living dolls and buxom Indian maidens?”

  “Naturally,” he replied with a grin of easy friendship. “What else do you suppose gentlemen talk of over their port?”

  “I have always wondered.”

  “Dev is far too good a resource to let pass by. The things he has seen!”

  “I can well imagine,” she answered dryly. “And what he has not seen, he can easily make up. Who is to contradict him, after all?”

  “Not Dev. Why, he’s the soul of honor, Cesca. If Richard Devlin says a thing happened, then you can bet your life on it.”

  “Strange!” came her arch answer. “I have never thought of his lordship as particularly honorable. Interesting, surely, and, oh, many other attractive things, but . . .” She let her voice drift off, remembering a young man who had tempted her into folly, and when she had nearly succumbed, had allowed her to run away and had taken himself off without so much as a by-your-leave, much less an apology or an honorable offer.

  “What sort of bee have you got in your bonnet, Cesca?” asked Mr. Symington. “Dev wouldn’t wound a soul could he help it. Why, at Oxford he was forever calling the rest of us to task for thoughtlessness. Nothing of the rotter about Dev.”

  She did not reply to this for the simple reason that she didn’t know what to say. Instead, she let her eyes rove to where Lord Devlin had just been standing, to see if her imagination could clothe him in the outfit of such a paragon.

  But his lordship had moved on, having dexterously managed to pry himself loose from Mrs. Pennington and her dutiful daughter. Francesca could not resist the impulse to look at Priscilla. Surprisingly, she was still in one piece and even allowed her eyes to rise from their habitual focus on the floor to follow his magnificent figure across the room. Then she caught Francesca’s gaze upon her and quickly returned her eyes to their usual floor- bound position.

  His adventuring lordship now stood listening quietly to the animated conversation of Miss Julia Dalton, an acknowledged Beauty. At twenty, she had been a full two years on the town, and she was not loath to put her vast experience to work to her advantage. Her long-lashed dark eyes sparkled with vivacity, and Francesca could hear her tinkle of laughter ring out at some comment of Devlin’s.

  “Silly little twit,” she muttered to herself.

  “What?” asked Mr. Symington, “I say, Cesca! You haven’t heard a word I’ve been saying.” He followed her gaze. “I see. It’s Dev, of course. I can tell that I shall have to call the fellow out before I’m much older. Uncomfortable when the fellow’s a friend of mine. But there’s nothing else for it. The bleater’s been here less than a day, and he’s turned all your heads already. Not surprising, of course, but I shouldn’t have thought you would fall for his blue eyes,”

  “Don’t be ridiculous, Graham!” she snapped more hotly than she intended. “I am not so easily cozened. I was merely remarking the ridiculousness of everyone lionizing him so. Why, only look! Now Letty Hollys and Jane Magness are at him. I see they have quite cut Julia out. He shall be much puffed up in his own conceit before the evening is through, I doubt not.”

  “Not Dev. Best of good fellows, Dev,” said Mr. Symington. He did not, however, take his eyes off Lord Devlin or, more particularly, off Miss Hollys.

  Very soon, the object of their discussion managed to draw himself away, as though summoned by their talk of him, and presented himself in person before Francesca. “Lord!” he exclaimed, but in a voice only his two listeners could hear. “I’ve half a mind to get on the next boat back to America. If George hadn’t promised me some good hunting, I’d do it, too. I had forgotten how predatory English females can be!”

  As an English female, Francesca thought it her duty to take public exception to such a generalization, even though she tended to agree with the assessment much of the time. Had he thought her predatory five years ago? Was that why he went away so quickly, no doubt in disgust of her? “Really, my lord—” she began her defense of her sex.

  “Oh, you needn’t worry. I didn’t mean you. I know only too well that you have no designs on me, my lady. It is why I have particularly sought you out. I must breathe for a moment before one more young lady tries to flirt with me.” And so saying, he threw himself into a chair beside her, or came as close to doing so as a pair of tight-fitting pantaloons, a strict upbringing, and a very elegant drawing room would allow.

  “Well, old man,” said Mr. Symington, rising to his full lanky six-feet-plus, “if you plan to leave the field open to us lesser mortals for a moment, I’ll just go say a word to Miss Hollys. You know, Dev, if you really wanted to give the rest of us fellows a break, you’d adjourn immediately to the billiard room. Out of sight, out of mind, y’know.” And sketching a grinning bow to Francesca, he crossed the room to the most current object of his affections.

  “Are you so certain that I shall not try to flirt with you, my lord?” asked Francesca. “Such a very eligible and interesting gentleman must certainly be a temptation,” she finished with a nice blend of archness and sweetness and a maidenly flutter of her golden lashes.

  “Don’t you dare to! I shall not be responsible for my actions if you do,” he answered in mock, but only slightly mock, horror. “But I have no fear of it. I know I shall be safe with you.” The elaborate casualness with which he spoke struck her as not quite true. Did it hide a note of bitterness? And whatever did he mean, anyway?

  It had, after all, been he who had abandoned her five years ago.

  “Oh, yes, my lord,” she said. “Quite safe.”

  His blue eyes darkened at her tone. He wondered what he could have said to upset her. “I do wish you would put away all this ‘my lord’ business. I am quite unused to it—no one lordships anyone in America, you know—and I am finding it wearying in the extreme. My friends call me Devlin.”

  “Am I to take that as an offer of friendship . . . Devlin?”

  “Of course. A friend is merely the opposite of an enemy, and I hope we are not that, my lady.”

  “I see no reason why we should be,” she replied coolly, much more coolly than she felt. “And my name is Francesca.”

  “It suits you, you know, in its regalness
. Makes you sound like some cool Italian beauty sitting on the balcony of her palazzo and gazing placidly down onto a Venetian piazza, wondering at the robust antics of the throngs below.”

  She could not keep a gasp of surprise from her lips. Was that really how he saw her? She could not know that he had only this evening been told of the nicknames bestowed on her by the unlucky London bucks she had spumed. “The Ice Goddess” and “The Citadel” were two of the more common. They had replaced “Carefree Cesca,” which had graced her just three or four years earlier.

  “I should hope I am not so far removed from life as that, Devlin. To merely look down upon it like it was a play on a stage.” The words rang hollow in her own ears, for was that not precisely how she had been viewing herself of late, the very reason her life had been so empty?

  “I should hope so too, Francesca,” he said quietly, remembering a bright-eyed, eager girl with a woman’s

  passions, and wondering where she had gone. “I should hope so too.”

  Eyes may say much, but the gaze of these two locked on each other had time to murmur little more than a word before the ripple of laughter that was the calling card of Roxanna Gordon joined in the conversation. “Naughty Cesca!” she chided. “Monopolizing the only truly interesting man present. I have brought you more tea, Devlin, though I don’t imagine you can bear the wishy-washy stuff. I imagine you frontiersmen stick with rum or brandy or some such delightfully masculine drink.”