The Lady Most Likely...

by Julia Quinn

  So she looked up, and it was written in his eyes.

  “Do you love me, Georgie?” he asked.

  “So much,” she said, her voice breaking.

  “Then marry me. Because I love you as much. I promise to be more cautious while training horses. I’ll take care. And meanwhile, we’ll love each other for as long as we can, and that’s all that matters.”

  Mr. Bucky Buckstone, whose fields ran right around the pond, and who had discovered a great mud-colored horse cropping his wife’s pansies, stopped short, his mouth falling open. There was no limit to what the gentry was up to these days. There they were, naked as the day they were born, right in his field.

  He watched for a moment, but when the pair sank down into the grass, he turned the horse’s head away and started back the direction he’d come.

  “I know who you are,” he told Richelieu. “You belong to that earl as is visiting the great house, and I’m guessing it’s him who’s back there in my field. Lucky for the earl that it’s me who’s found you and not some others around here.”

  His ears had turned a bit red, and he walked fast. As he told Mrs. Buckstone a few minutes later, there were no limits to some people’s nerve. And even when she reminded him of a certain incident that happened twenty-three years ago, on a warm summer night when he came a-courting, he wouldn’t budge.

  “That was us,” he said stubbornly. “Them’s gentry.”

  Mrs. Buckstone laughed and picked up another sheet. It was washing day, and she was pinning clean linen to the line. “And why shouldn’t the earl be doing some pole-work in a field, same as any other of God’s creatures?”

  Bucky had no clear answer for that, so he just shook his head again and took Richelieu round the side of the house for water.

  Chapter 26

  Lady Georgina, soon to be Georgina Dunne, Countess of Briarly, was dreaming. A little boy with a headful of chestnut ringlets and eyes of pure mischief was running about her bedchamber, shrieking at the top of his lungs. He was riding a broom, and even as she watched, he swept a teacup from her dressing table.

  She was calling to him, trying to get him to stop before he broke something—because he always broke things—and loving him so much that her heart ached with it, when she suddenly woke from the dream.

  Waking tends to happen when very large male bodies land on one in the middle of the night. Especially when that male has a hand under one’s night rail before one has even shaken off the dream.

  And then the dream slipped away, because, well, Hugh was nuzzling her neck and making hungry sounds, and his hand …

  That hand!

  Of course one couldn’t remember a dream, in the midst of all that.

  “What are you doing here?” Georgie gasped. “Hugh, you shouldn’t!”

  “I should,” he said, and his voice was not one to be argued with. “Everyone in this dratted place is finally asleep. I thought Finchbird would never retire.” Then Hugh returned to what he was doing, and by then Georgie had lost the will to fight, as they say of beleaguered countries.

  And she had forgotten her dream.

  Which explains why the said Lady Briarly kept staring at her baby son, Gage Willet Dunne, some nine months later and saying, “I just can’t explain it; I feel as if I’ve already met him, as if I’ve known him forever.”

  The babe’s proud papa, who leaned over and kissed his son, then his wife again, shook his head. “I’ve never seen anyone with a look like that, Georgie. Just look at him. He looks as naughty as can be. Now I was an angel when I was a babe, but this one …”

  But that would happen nine months later. On this particular September night, the earl had thrown his future wife’s night rail clear across the chamber before he remembered something that he really had to do. So he raised his head, and said, “Excuse me, darling.”

  Georgie looked down at him with a sound somewhere between a squeak and a gasp, and said, “Please don’t stop what you were doing.”

  “I must. I have to give you something.” He dropped a kiss on her thigh. Then he climbed out of bed and walked across the room.

  “You’re naked!” she exclaimed, apparently noticing this for the first time.

  “Of course I am,” Hugh said, lighting a lamp on her dressing table. “A gentleman never hops into a lady’s bed with his boots on. Christ, it’s cold tonight.”

  Georgie had rolled onto her side, and now she was propped on one elbow, watching him. Her gorgeous red hair fell in swirls over her breasts, and he was struck again with the sense that she was too beautiful for him. For someone like him.

  But then he looked at her face, and the wanton, enchanting little pout on her lips that told him, clear as day, that no one had ever given her pleasure the way he did.

  So he got back under the covers next to her and pulled the sheet over both their heads. There, in the warm cave created by their bodies, lit by a soft golden glow from the one lamp, he said firmly: “I love you.”

  Georgie smiled, and the joy in her eyes made his heart sing. “I love you too,” she whispered. “Are we going to make love under the sheet? You’re so romantic, Hugh.”

  They were under the covers because he thought certain important parts of his anatomy were in danger of freezing off, but he didn’t see the point in disabusing her if she thought he was being romantic. “I’d make love to you anywhere,” he promised, meaning it. “Even in a pile of snow.”

  Then, with a typical lack of finesse, he added, “I didn’t have this with me in the morning.” He picked up Georgie’s hand and slid the ring over her finger.

  “Oh,” she breathed.

  “I suppose it’s old-fashioned,” he said, realizing suddenly that his mother’s ring might not be exactly au courant. It held a circle of diamonds surrounding a rose imperial topaz.

  But Georgie’s eyes shone. “It’s beautiful, Hugh. It’s the most beautiful ring I’ve ever seen. Was it your mother’s?”

  He nodded and dropped a kiss on her nose. “My father gave it to me after she died, and told me that I should give it to my wife.”

  A tear rolled down her cheek, and he kissed it away. “That’s the most lovely thing that I ever heard,” she said, her voice choking.

  “She would be very happy,” Hugh said. “She would like you, Georgie.” But then he wanted her to stop crying, so he just rolled on top of her and set about distracting her.

  He was very good at that sort of thing.

  So good that Georgie didn’t really have a chance to examine her ring until the next morning, and she was still peeking glances at her hand as she strolled into the breakfast room. It was quite late, and most of the party had retired to the drawing room.

  In fact, Caroline and Piers were the only people left at breakfast, and since Caroline leapt to her feet and cried, “There you are!” it was clear that they had been sitting in front of chilly toast and lukewarm tea, waiting for her.

  Georgie couldn’t stop her smile. “I slept a bit later than normal,” she said, coming around the table to sit next to Caroline.

  “I imagine—” Caroline cried, but then her voice broke off. “Oh, Piers, look, my brother—my mother—that’s—oh, Georgie, I’m so happy for you!”

  It wasn’t until later that Caroline said something that Georgie never forgot as long as she wore that ring, which was the whole of her long and happy life. “This is just what my father would have wanted,” Caroline said. “I do wish he was alive to see it. He was disappointed when you fell in love so quickly, and in your first season. And he wasn’t happy when you married Richard though, of course, I never said as much to you.”

  “He wasn’t?” Caroline said, rather startled.

  “It had nothing to do with Richard, but he thought you were just the person who might be able to keep Hugh from retreating into the stables. He always felt that Hugh took our mother’s death the hardest, and you helped somehow, during that awful time. Something happened that made him think the two of you would be perfect together.
”

  She didn’t say any more, and Georgie didn’t enlighten her. But for the rest of her life, whenever anyone mentioned swimming, the Countess of Briarly always looked at her husband with a secret smile—the smile that kept him out of the stables.

  Epilogue

  Carolyn led the way into the old-fashioned theater, chattering as she went. “You see?” she said, waving her champagne glass at the stage. There had been a great many toasts in celebration of her birthday at supper. “The first Finchley marquess built it specifically for one of Queen Elizabeth’s progresses around the country. She loved theater, you know. I can’t say it’s been used much since then, but I hope that when we have children, we’ll use it more often.”

  Her husband looked down at her with the sort of doting expression that Hugh used to hate and now was pretty sure was settling permanently onto his face as well. “I’ve put you in Queen Elizabeth’s spot, darling,” the marquess said. “On the stage.”

  “Oh!” Carolyn exclaimed. “That’s the chair from the blue parlor.”

  “The one that’s in the portrait of Queen Elizabeth sitting on this very stage,” Finchley said proudly. “You are going to sit in the place of honor. Because it’s your birthday.” And he leaned over and said something into Caro’s ear that Hugh couldn’t hear, but he had a fairly good idea what it was because Caro turned pink, and her husband dropped a kiss on her nose in a way that was absolutely forbidden in polite society.

  It made him think about what he’d do for Georgina’s twenty-fifth birthday, and her thirtieth, and her fiftieth, and her seventieth, for that matter. He looked down at her, and his smile must have said something, because her cheeks turned rosy, and she said, “Hugh! Stop that!”

  Meanwhile, his sister was creating havoc, of course. “No, I don’t want to be up there on the stage by myself, Piers,” she was saying. “I want you with me. And I want Georgina as well, because she and Hugh are just engaged, so they should be celebrated.”

  “For that matter, Miss Passmore and Lord Charters are in the same situation,” Hugh pointed out.

  “And I am very happy to announce that Miss Peyton has accepted my hand in marriage,” came the deep voice of Captain Neill Oakes.

  “A veritable riot of Cupids must have infested the house,” Hugh muttered to Georgina.

  “Regrets?” she said, grinning up at him.

  “Never,” he said, unable to keep his voice light. “Never.” And then he kissed her too, because if one’s host is breaking societal rules, one might as well follow suit.

  “All newly betrothed couples shall join me and Finchley on the stage,” Caro announced, clapping her hands and gesturing to the footmen, who scurried from the sides, carrying seats.

  Hugh flagged down a little sofa and snuggled Georgie next to him. Gwendolyn tried to hang back, shaking her head, but Alec managed to talk her into a chair to the side. And Kate was sitting on Captain Oakes’s lap, which was distinctly improper—except they were all so used to seeing him toting her about that it seemed natural. Something wrong with her ankle, Hugh thought. In the end, they all sat in a semicircle ringing the stage, with their backs to the audience.

  There was a hum of anticipation in the audience.

  “You did tell Lord Finchley that we’re not responsible for this performance, didn’t you?” Georgie whispered.

  “You’ll have to call him Piers now. You’re part of the family,” Hugh said. The very idea brought him dangerously close to kissing her again. But since they were actually sitting on the stage, with a good twenty gentlefolk down below surveying them as if they were the performance itself, he restrained himself.

  There was a series of pops to the side of the room, and footmen spread across the stage, and through the audience, offering brimming glasses of champagne.

  The Marquess of Finchley rose. “May I offer a final toast to my wife, in whose honor we are all assembled?”

  Hugh had already had rather more champagne than he cared for; he was fond of a good port rather than this airy, feminine stuff. But he drank anyway.

  Plus, Georgina raised her glass silently—not to Carolyn, but to him.

  “What?” he whispered, bending close.

  “To you,” she said.

  Something thumped in the area of his chest, and he finished off his glass, thinking how lucky he was. A footman promptly filled all their glasses again.

  At that moment, Mr. Lear walked onto the stage. He was wearing a suit of yellow velvet, with something that vaguely resembled a halo around his head. If halos tipped drunkenly to the side and hung over one ear.

  “So these are the newly betrothed couples!” he said, giving a bawdy smile to the four couples seated on the edge of the stage.

  “One of which is married,” Carolyn said cheerfully.

  “Ah, Lady Finchley.” Lear bowed so low that his halo lurched dangerously. He straightened quickly, grabbing it with his right hand. “It is with the deepest respect that I offer you the condolences of everyone in my troupe.”

  There was a moment of silence. Piers seemed about to say something when Lear corrected himself. “Congratulations! Not condolences! Congratulations!” He continued. “We are most happy to present the merry tragedy of Pyramus and Thisbe, often played before royalty and always adored. The characters are myself, in the character of the Moon, a fierce lion, and the two gentle lovers, fair Thisbe and handsome Pyramus.”

  “Excellent,” Carolyn cried, clapping her hands again. “I hope you don’t mind if I say that aloud. It feels quite different to be on the stage rather than down below.”

  “We welcome commentary of all sorts,” Lear said. “Though we find clapping the most congenial.”

  Everyone dutifully clapped as Lear withdrew. A moment later, he reappeared, holding a lantern in his hand. He was followed by a young girl, wrapped in a purple mantle that was around a foot too long for her, who tripped into the center of the stage. She struck a pose. “This is old Ninny’s tomb. Where is … my love?” It was immediately clear that Thisbe, unfortunately, was no great actress.

  A lion entered, roaring. At least, Hugh thought it was a lion, given its rather furry appearance and its throaty roar.

  “Oh!” shrieked Thisbe, running from the stage.

  Hugh took a look around the circle. Everyone was staring at the stage in horror. The costumes were dreadful, and the acting was worse. Georgina looked up at him in desperate entreaty. He had to do something.

  “Well roared, Lion!” he called, lifting his glass in a salute to the players. He nudged Georgie, who looked startled, then blurted out, “Oh! Well run, Thisbe.”

  Hugh glanced around the circle again. Everyone appeared nonplussed, except for his sister, who was smiling beatifically. She was holding out her hand for another glass of champagne.

  “Well shone, Moon,” Carolyn called, sounding a little tipsy. She looked up at her husband. “Truly, the Moon is very graceful.” She turned to Gwendolyn, seated on her other side. “Didn’t you think that was a graceful moon?”

  “No,” Kate said, from the other side of the stage.

  Captain Oakes clapped a hand over her mouth.

  The Lion picked up Thisbe’s cloak in its mouth and shook it about with a good deal of emphasis before padding off the stage.

  “The barn cat couldn’t have done a better job,” Kate said.

  Her betrothed gave her an approving glance.

  Pyramus pranced from the wings, wearing a magnificent curly wig that made him look like a poodle. “Sweet Moon, I thank thee for thy sunny beams,” he said. “I thank thee, Moon, for shining now so bright.” Having got the courtesies out of the way, he struck a pose. “For, by thy gracious, golden, glittering gleams, I … I …” An agonized look crossed his face. “O dainty duck! O dear!”

  Gwendolyn turned to Alec. “Where did the duck come in?”

  “There is no duck,” Kate said flatly.

  Oakes started laughing, but Pyramus had snatched the mantle and fallen to his knees. “St
ained with blood,” he informed the audience. “I am crushed, concluded, quelled!” There was a pause as everyone tried to figure out what he was talking about. “Thisbe must be dead,” he told the audience in a faintly scolding tone.

  “Ohhhh,” Carolyn said, finishing her glass. “Thisbe’s dead. That’s awful. Poor Thisbe.”

  “Poor duck,” Kate said dryly.

  “Poor us,” Alec put in.

  “Come death, thou faithful friend,” Pyramus roared, obviously trying to override his audience.

  “Can’t come soon enough,” Captain Oakes said.

  “I find myself pining for the duck,” Gwendolyn said. “Poor duck.”

  Georgie pulled Hugh’s ear down to her lips. “Just when did Gwendolyn turn out to be so witty? My impression was that she was too shy to utter a word.”

  Carolyn turned to Gwendolyn. “What duck?” she said, utterly befuddled. “I don’t see a duck!”

  Her husband gestured for some more champagne. “Don’t worry, dear. If you want a duck, I’ll get one for you later.”

  She looked delighted.

  Pyramus pulled himself away from contemplation of Thisbe’s cloak and drew out his sword. “Come, tears, confound,” he cried. “Out, sword, and wound the left breast of Pyramus. Ay, that left breast where his heart doth hop.”

  He stabbed himself. In fact, he stabbed himself more than once, which seemed to make Georgie nervous, so Hugh took advantage of the moment to pull her closer. “I love the breast where your heart hops,” he whispered into her ear. “And the other one too.”

  “Thus die I, thus, thus, thus,” Pyramus shouted, falling in a heap of flailing limbs. Hugh nodded to Alec, acknowledging a hearty death scene. When they were boys, they used to regularly fight duels, and Alec, in particular, could stretch his death to at least five minutes.

  Pyramus clearly understood the value of a protracted death. He started up from the floor, and shouted, “Now am I dead,” before collapsing again.