Three Weeks With Lady X

by Eloisa James

  But when he had informed Laetitia about Rose and the dower house, she had nodded instantly. “My mother is . . . difficult,” she said, her voice barely above a whisper. He knew what she was really saying: she needed him to rescue her, and he would.

  “Where is Lady Xenobia?” Rose asked now.

  “She’s in the house, I expect,” Thorn said. “Would you like to see her?”

  Rose nodded vigorously. “I know that she will want to see the progress that Antigone has made.”

  Thorn glanced at Fleming.

  “Lady Xenobia will undoubtedly join you in the dower house, Miss Rose,” the butler said. “For a visit.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  Miss Laetitia Rainsford was supervising as her mother’s maid packed Lady Rainsford’s trunk for transport to Starberry Court. This was not because Abigail needed supervision but because her mother insisted, and Lala had learned long ago that it was easier to do as her mother willed than try to resist it.

  “Take care with that gown,” Lady Rainsford said, from where she reclined on a day bed across the room. “That is Valenciennes lace on the sleeves.”

  Abigail already knew that, and always took care. But Mama liked to catalogue the valuable things in her possession. Almost as much as Mama liked to catalogue her ailments. But not quite as much as Lala liked to make unkind comments in the back of her head, where no one could hear them.

  It was a sin, and she knew it. She nodded, and said, “Yes, Mama,” and watched as Abigail painstakingly folded the gown between lengths of white silk to keep the lace from snagging or wrinkling.

  “I’m still unsure about this visit,” her mother said fretfully. “A bastard, to call a spade a spade! My daughter marrying a child of shame. Who would have thought it? Not I, not when I was the most beautiful woman in the ton, and I chose your father to wed.”

  “Mr. Dautry is the son of the Duke of Villiers,” Lala ventured to say, not for the first time, nor even for the tenth.

  “Who is as scandalous as his offspring,” her mother said, raising a hand limply in the air and letting it fall. She had applied a paste of cucumber and fuller’s earth, guaranteed to eradicate all wrinkles, to her face that morning. It had dried solid, and now it had begun crackling like the bed of a dried-out pond.

  “Your father should be appalled at the very idea of linking his blood with such an immoral man as Villiers, let alone a bastard slip from the tree.”

  Abigail had finished the gown and was placing a last layer of silk on top before closing the trunk’s lid. “Papa is quite impressed with Mr. Dautry’s holdings,” Lala reminded her mother. She had been repeating two concepts over and over: “duke” and “wealth.”

  But she dared not utter any of the things she’d like to say, which included pointing out that no one considered her more than a pretty face, if not a dunce. And that her father was weary and gaunt with anxiety about money. And that he needed Lala to marry quickly, and not cost him another season.

  Frankly, her mother should have been kissing Mr. Dautry’s feet. It was a miracle she’d met Mr. Dautry, given that he hadn’t attended the usual events of the season. He’d never seen her stumbling along in a conversation, trying to find the right words, trying to come up with something witty or even merely fitting, and failing. She would try to say something, and her face would begin to feel tight and she could feel color creeping up her neck.

  But Mr. Dautry didn’t seem to expect her to be clever, which made it all easier. He was so interesting that she found herself actually paying attention to what he said.

  He wasn’t a man she would have selected if she’d been given a choice. She liked men who were far less aggressive and masculine. For almost two years before she’d debuted, she had been infatuated with their vicar, who had a slender, intelligent face and no hair on his head at all. She attended church so regularly that her mother started calling her Goody Two-shoes.

  “Dautry is rich,” her mother said fretfully. “But who would have thought that I, I, would have to sell my daughter in the open marketplace to a bastard with a purse of gold? My exquisite daughters should have been snatched up by the highest in the land the moment they debuted.”

  “Mariah had four excellent offers,” Lala reminded her, ringing the bell to summon footmen to collect the trunk.

  Her mother’s clayey face cracked into a smile at the memory. “Yes, Mariah is a true beauty. What a wonderful season she had! Everyone was whispering about her, casting wagers about who she would accept . . .”

  Lala didn’t know why there had been any speculation: her father had simply accepted the largest offer for Mariah’s hand. Unfortunately, he didn’t think that any of the men who had proposed to Lala had offered adequate recompense for her beauty. Instead, he held out for a better offer—and then the season was over.

  The very thought of having to endure another season made her heart pound. If Mr. Dautry didn’t marry her, she’d have to go through all of it again, knowing everyone was whispering about her, not because she was beautiful but because they thought she was a simpleton.

  She had even overheard some girls giggling and calling her “a spoony Sally.” She hadn’t entirely understood what they’d meant—who was Sally?—but it was obviously no compliment.

  Abigail opened the bedchamber door and stood back, letting the footmen fetch Lady Rainsford’s trunk. It would be sent on immediately, allowing the gowns to be aired and re-ironed before they followed tomorrow afternoon.

  “I just wish you would be a little more vivacious, Lala,” her mother went on, taking no notice of the men’s presence. Lady Rainsford was not one to notice servants unless she wanted them to do something for her. “Though to be fair, it’s hardly your fault that you’re daft, but you could do something about your hips.”

  Lala clenched her teeth and willed herself not to cry. It would be ridiculous to get teary simply because two footmen were watching.

  “It gives you such a lubberly air,” her mother went on relentlessly. “I swear it would be easy. If you would just stop eating for a couple of weeks, you could have the same slim figure as your sister. We wouldn’t be scraping the bottom of the barrel like this, lowering ourselves to visit the house of a by-blow.”

  “The Duke of Villiers will attend the party, Mother,” Lala said, adding with some desperation, “and I’m certain that he will be greatly offended if you allow your feelings about his son to be evident.”

  “No one can say that I’m not the soul of tact,” her mother said, with a blithe disregard for the truth. “Abigail, I’ll thank you to shut the door after the footmen. There’s a draft coming in that will likely go to my lungs and finish me off before I manage to get my last daughter off my hands.”

  She swung her legs from her bed and pointed to her silk wrapper. Lala draped it around her mother’s bony shoulders.

  “I should like a tisane, brewed with a touch of honey. Meanwhile, it is time for you to take a brisk walk around the park. Three times a day, remember, and you haven’t even been out of doors today. It’s already ten in the morning. Laziness is the downfall of your figure.”

  Lala had been dancing attendance on her mother since daybreak, but she bit back a comment. There was no point. No point.

  She kept repeating that to herself until she was out the door and heading to Kensington Gardens.

  Chapter Seventeen

  I need a bonnet,” India told her maid, Marie, after Fleming conveyed Rose’s wish that she pay a visit to the dower house. She never went out of doors with a bare head; it was one of the rules she had read in a book about being a lady. In the absence of maternal advice, she had practically memorized the book at an early age.

  A short time later, she was walking down a gravel path, cursing herself for having chosen such an elegant—and thus tiny—hat. The warm breeze was already teasing her hair out of its place; she could feel tendrils around her neck. And with her hair, that meant the whole thing would fall apart by the time she reached the dower house.


  She was about halfway to her destination when she encountered Thorn and Rose, strolling hand in hand on the path. Thorn held a child’s hoop in his other hand.

  “Lady Xenobia,” he said, quite as if he hadn’t been sitting on her bed a mere hour ago. “It’s a pleasure to see you.”

  Rose curtsied and said, “It’s a pleasure to meet you again, Lady Xenobia.”

  India wrenched her eyes away from Thorn’s face—he was the sort of man who commanded all one’s attention—and looked down at the child. Of course, she was still wearing mourning black.

  But this time India saw no resemblance to Thorn. Instead, she saw grief lingering in Rose’s eyes. She knelt down and said, “Good morning. How is your friend Antigone this morning?”

  “She is not a friend,” the child replied with dignity. “She is my doll, but I pretend that she is my ward.”

  “I gather that Antigone has lost her mama and her papa,” India said. “I’m sorry. She looks very elegant in her beautiful pelisse, although perhaps a little sad.”

  “She hasn’t had a mama for a long time,” Rose said. “But she is lucky to have me. That makes her lucky, lucky as a lark.”

  “My mother and father died as well,” India said, responding less to Rose’s reply than to the emotion in her eyes. “I still miss them. It does get better, though it never really goes away.”

  Rose’s lips pressed together in a way that India recognized: she, too, had realized quite young that crying didn’t help.

  “I see that Mr. Dautry is carrying a hoop,” India said. “Are you very good at rolling it?”

  “No,” Rose replied. “I do not have the control to make it stay up. I told Mr. Dautry this, but he bought it anyway.”

  “I am quite adept with a hoop,” India said, straightening up. “Shall we try together? We can leave Antigone with Mr. Dautry. Do you have the dowel? Excellent! Now we must find a nice flat bit of path, because even the faintest bump will send it spinning off into the grass.”

  “Antigone and I shall find our way back to the dower house and await you,” Thorn said gravely.

  By the time she and Rose bowled their way back to the dower house, India’s hair had tumbled down her back, and her cunning Italian shoes were pinching her toes. But never mind: Rose’s cheeks were pink, and she was talking so much that India hadn’t said more than a word for the last five minutes.

  India limped up to the front door and pushed it open, ushering Rose in before her. The entry led directly into a small, cozy sitting room, where they found Thorn reading a newspaper.

  Rose ran to him, leaned against his knee, and told him of her last, triumphant bowl, in which the hoop had rolled all the way down the path until a tiny rock had sent it askew. He put the paper aside immediately, wrapped an arm around her, and bent his head to listen. It was such a tender scene that India’s heart caught.

  Characteristically, Thorn hadn’t stood up as she entered, the way a gentleman ought. Instead, he looked her over, then drawled, “It looks as if you ran around the house three times backwards, India.”

  Rose said in an urgent whisper, “Mr. Dautry, you must rise in the presence of a lady.”

  “That is just what I was thinking,” India said, unpinning her little hat.

  “Are you sure she’s a lady?” Thorn asked, rising. “She’s all pink in the face, and her hair is a mess. In fact, she looks a fright.” His eyes were alight with teasing laughter. “Dear me, Lady Xenobia. Please don’t tell me you’ll try to seduce Vander with that gown. You look like an old maid put by in lavender.”

  “That is a most objectionable comment,” Rose exclaimed, before India could say anything. “What’s more, it’s not enough to stand up; you must also bow.”

  “I generally don’t bother,” he said carelessly. “And Lady X knows it. I promise I’ll be gentlemanly around Laetitia, however.”

  “Mr. Dautry hopes to marry Miss Laetitia Rainsford,” Rose told India, putting her hoop to the side. “I have been trying to give him the benefit of my advice, because my tutor was quite knowledgeable about matters of deportment and rank.”

  “To my dismay, I’ve discovered that my ward could hire herself out as a governess tomorrow,” Thorn said. “Lady Xenobia, your face is as red as a tomato, if you don’t mind my saying so.”

  “It’s hot outside,” India said, frowning at him as she took a seat. “And before Rose feels the need to correct you again, I’ll point out that it’s quite impolite to compare a lady to a vegetable or, indeed, make her feel inadequate in any way.”

  Thorn dropped into a chair. “Why should you feel inadequate merely because you are an attractive shade of red?”

  Rose looked from Thorn to India. “I am going to put my hoop away in my room. I shall ask Clara to bring some lemonade, Lady Xenobia.”

  “You have charge of a very interesting little person,” India said, after Rose left.

  “She’s a dowager duchess in the making.” Thorn stretched out his legs and put his clasped hands behind his head. “Seriously, India, is that what you intend to wear tomorrow?”

  “And if I am?”

  “I thought we had agreed that you should entice Vander, otherwise known as the future duke?”

  India stared at him. Somehow they’d fallen into a relationship that she’d never imagined having with a man, not ever. Perhaps it was like a brother and sister. Except . . . occasionally she glanced at him and he was so handsome that it made her shiver all over. “Do you speak to your siblings this way?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Do they find you as maddening as I do?”

  He grinned at her, and her annoyance went up two more notches. She, who had learned to keep calm in the face of domestic chaos, was always losing her temper around him. It was infuriating.

  “My siblings adore me.”

  “Odd,” she said flatly.

  “Let’s discuss your gown. It’s more interesting.”

  “Why don’t we discuss what you will wear instead?” She looked him over, nice and slow, to make her point. “Lady Rainsford will not appreciate that woodsman look you’ve adopted.”

  “I shall throw on some decent clothes tomorrow. At the last minute.” When Thorn was amused, his voice dropped and took on a rough edge that made him sound even less gentlemanly.

  “Rose looks much better,” India said, changing the topic to something less provocative. “Less drawn and less frightened.”

  “I force her to eat apple tart for breakfast,” Thorn said. “Though what she really likes are Gunter’s ices. Every afternoon.”

  India smiled at him.

  “What did I do to deserve that?” Thorn asked, looking both quizzical and completely unmoved.

  “Anyone would be happy to see how well you care for your ward,” India said. “Your mother would be—” She broke off, realizing she had no idea who Thorn’s mother was or what she would like.

  “Never met her,” Thorn said promptly. “She was an opera singer, and presumably not maternal by nature, given that she left me behind with Villiers—clearly not a model father.”

  “Oh.”

  “What was your mother like?” he asked.

  An image of the marchioness flashed through India’s mind, her hair long and free, dancing naked under the moon. What was there to say? “She was quite original.”

  “From what I’ve heard, she was mad as a March hare.”

  “An unkind assessment,” India said. She raised her chin defiantly.

  “I investigated your background after I knew you would be around Rose,” he explained. “Before that, I had decided that anyone calling herself Lady Xenobia was obviously a crook, so I didn’t bother to inquire about your antecedents.”

  “You’re not the first to have deduced that from my name,” India conceded.

  “What father names his child Xenobia, instead of Margery or Blanche?”

  She hesitated.

  “I’m guessing that madmen are not as parental as one might wis
h,” he said, leaping into the silence.

  “My mother had a tendency to forget I existed,” India heard herself saying. She’d never told anyone that uncomfortable truth. It wasn’t just that people would feel sorry for her; keeping silent made it feel less real. “But she did love me,” she added. She always told herself that.

  “My mother did not feel the same toward me,” Thorn said easily. “According to my father, she thought I was a pretty baby, though. I looked better in those days, or she had a temporary flash of maternal feeling.”

  “She left you in a warm, safe place where you would be cared for.”

  “There is that.”

  He had his arms stretched across the back of the sofa, and he was so good-looking that India’s heart skipped a beat. It was stupid, but there was something wonderful about the way he had made himself into Rose’s father. He would never leave behind a child of his.

  “My parents died in London,” she went on. “But I didn’t know they were there or why they had left home. They had neglected to tell me they were leaving.”

  His eyes darkened. “Did you think that they had abandoned you altogether?”

  “I wasn’t sure.” It was a relief to put it into words. “Sometimes they would leave home, but they generally told me where they were going, and they’d never been gone for three whole days.”

  “You never found out what they were doing in London?”

  She shook her head. “No one knows. My father was driving the curricle because we didn’t have a coachman, and he went off Blackfriars Bridge. From what they told me, he tried to rescue my mother.”

  “Neither of them survived?”

  She swallowed, feeling the same old lump of grief going down her throat again. “He wouldn’t have wanted to live without her.” It was stupid, stupid, stupid, to feel that her father should have wanted to live for her. Half the time he didn’t even remember she was alive.

  Thorn reached out and grabbed her wrist. Then he pulled her forward, and she toppled onto his lap.