by Mary Balogh
Mr. and Mrs. Park, she could see, were talking with Barbara, to whom they had just been introduced. Their second son, Hannah recalled, was a clergyman.
It was a very solid arm she had taken, Hannah realized. And it was all clad in black, except for the crisp white cuff that showed at his wrist. His hand was dark-skinned and long-fingered and well manicured, though there was nothing soft about it. Quite the contrary. It looked as if it had done its fair share of work in its time. It was lightly dusted with dark hair. His shoulder was a few inches above the level of her own. He wore a cologne that wrapped itself very enticingly about her senses. She could not identify it.
The music room was indeed still half empty. Entertainments of this nature never did begin on time, of course. They began to stroll slowly about the perimeter of the room.
“And so,” he said, looking down at her, “I am to be consoled for my disappointments, am I, Duchess, by being granted the seat next to yours this evening?”
“Were you disappointed?” she asked.
“Amused,” he said.
She turned her head and looked into his very dark eyes. They were quite impossible to read.
“Amused, Mr. Huxtable?” She raised her eyebrows.
“It is amusing,” he said, “to watch a puppeteer manipulate the strings in order to make the puppet dance only to discover that the strings are not attached.”
Ah. Someone who knew the game and refused to play by its rules—her rules, that was. She liked him the better for it.
“But is it not intriguing,” she said, “when the puppet dances anyway? And proves that he is not a puppet after all, but that he does love to dance?”
“But you see, Duchess,” he said, “he does not like dancing with the chorus. It makes him feel quite … ordinary. Indeed, he quite refuses to be an insignificant part of any such group.”
Ah. He was setting out his terms, was he?
“But it can be arranged,” she said, “that he dance a solo part, Mr. Huxtable. Or perhaps a pas de deux. Very definitely a pas de deux, in fact. And if he proves to be a superior partner, as I am confident he will, then he may be offered the security of exclusive rights to the part for the whole of a Season. There will be no need for any chorus at all. It may be dispensed with.”
They turned to walk along the front of the room, between the shallow dais where the orchestra’s instruments lay and the front row of gilt, velvet-seated chairs.
“He is to be on trial, then, at the start?” he said. “At a sort of audition?”
“I am not sure that will be necessary,” she said. “I have not seen him dance, but I am convinced he performs superlatively well.”
“You are too kind and too trusting, Duchess,” he said. “He is perhaps more cautious. If he is to dance a pas de deux, after all, he must be given an equal chance to try out his prospective partner, to discover if she is as skilled a dancer as he, to discover whether she will suit his style for a whole Season and not very quickly become tedious.”
Hannah opened her fan with her free hand and fluttered it before her face. The music room was still not crowded, but it already felt stuffy and overhot.
“Tedious, Mr. Huxtable,” she said, “is a word not in her vocabulary.”
“Ah,” he said, “but it is in his.”
Hannah might have been offended or outraged or both. Instead, she was feeling very pleased indeed. The word tedious figured largely in her vocabulary—which meant she had just told yet another lie. Barbara would be upset with her if she could hear. Though it was very fortunate indeed that she could hear no part of this conversation. She would expire from shock. Most gentlemen of Hannah’s acquaintance were tedious. They really ought not to set her on a pedestal and worship her. Pedestals could be lonely, barren places, and worship was just plain ridiculous when one was very mortal indeed.
They had turned to walk up the far side of the room.
“Ah,” she said, looking ahead, “there are the Duke and Duchess of Moreland. Shall we go and speak with them?”
The duke was Mr. Huxtable’s cousin, the one who looked like him. They might easily have passed for brothers, in fact.
“It seems,” he murmured as she drew him in their direction, “that we shall.”
The duke and duchess were very polite to her, very chilly to him. Hannah seemed to recall hearing that there was some sort of estrangement between the cousins. But she caught herself in time before censuring them mentally for quarreling when they were family. That would be rather like the pot calling the kettle black, would it not?
She had been right in her earlier assessment. The duke was the more handsome of the two men. His features were more classically perfect, and there was the surprise of his blue eyes when one expected dark. But Mr. Huxtable was, nevertheless, the more attractive of the two—to her, anyway, which was just as well given the fact that the duke was a married man.
“Mr. Huxtable and I are going to be seated now,” Hannah said before the encounter could become too strained. “I am tired after having been on my feet for so long.”
And they all nodded and smiled at one another, and Mr. Huxtable took her to sit in the middle of the fourth row back from the dais.
“It is not a promising sign,” he said, “when a dancer’s feet ache after she has been on them for a mere hour or so.”
“But who,” she said, closing her fan and resting it on his sleeve for a moment, “is talking about dancing? Why have you quarreled with the Duke of Moreland?”
“At the risk of sounding quite ill-mannered, Duchess,” he said, “I am compelled to inform you that it is none of your business.”
She sighed.
“Oh, but it is,” she said. “Or will be. I will absolutely insist upon knowing everything there is to know about you.”
He turned his very dark eyes upon her.
“Assuming,” he said, “that after the audition you will be offered the part?”
She tapped the fan on his sleeve.
“After the audition, Mr. Huxtable,” she said, “you will be begging me to take the part. But you know that already. Just as I know that in your case an audition is absolutely unnecessary. I hope you are a man of great mystery, with more secrets to be revealed than just the cause of your quarrel with your cousin. Oh, I do hope you are. But I fervently believe I will not be disappointed.”
“You, on the other hand, Duchess,” he said, “are very much an open book, are you not? You will have to think of other ways to hold my interest than unfolding all your nonexistent secrets.”
She half smiled up at him from beneath her lashes.
“The room is starting to fill,” she said. “I believe we can expect this concert to begin within the next fifteen minutes or so. Yet we have not talked about anything of any significance yet, Mr. Huxtable. What is your opinion of the weather we have been having lately? Too good too early, do you suppose? We will suffer for this later in the summer? That is the accepted wisdom among many, is it not? What do you think?”
“I think, Duchess,” he said, “that too hot too early is not something that alarms you. You are doubtless of an optimistic nature and expect that there will be more heat to come as the spring turns to summer.”
“I really must be an open book,” she said. “You read me so well. And you must not tell me, Mr. Huxtable, that you are the sort of man who prefers a cool spring in the hope that it will build to a moderate degree of heat during the summer. You are Greek.”
“Half Greek,” he said, “and half not. I will leave you to work out which half is which.”
The chairs in front of them and behind and beside them filled up, and conversation became general among the audience until Lord Heaton stepped up onto the dais and a hush fell in anticipation of the concert.
Hannah let her fan fall on her wrist and rested the fingers of one hand lightly on Mr. Huxtable’s sleeve.
That had all been very intriguing. Having made her point on Bond Street and at the Merriwether ball, she had intend
ed to take one step forward this evening before taking it back the next time she saw him. She had been in no real hurry. The preliminaries could surely be as exciting as the game itself.
But he had refused to allow her to play the game her way. And instead of one small step, she felt as if they had dashed forward at least a mile tonight. She felt almost breathless.
And quite humming with anticipation.
She could not allow him the last word, though. Not this early in their connection. Not ever, in fact.
“I see that Mr. Minter arrived late,” she said when the intermission began an hour later and the audience rose to go in search of wine and conversation. “I must go along and scold him. He begged to sit by me this evening, and I took pity on him and agreed. I suppose I had better sit beside him for the rest of the concert. He is quite alone, poor man.”
“Yes,” Mr. Huxtable said, speaking low against her ear. “I suppose you had better go, Duchess. I might conclude that you were being too forward if you remained.”
She tapped his arm one more time with her fan and bore down upon the unsuspecting Mr. Minter, who probably had not even known she was coming here this evening.
CONSTANTINE’S SPRING MISTRESSES—Monty had once dubbed them that—were selected almost exclusively from the ranks of society’s widows. It was a personal rule of his never to visit a brothel and never to employ either a courtesan or an actress. Or, of course, to choose a married lady, though there was a surprising number of them who indicated their availability. Or an unmarried lady—he was after a mistress, not a wife.
Many widows, he had always found, were in no great hurry to marry again. Though most of them did remarry eventually, they were eager enough to spend a few years enjoying their freedom and the sensual pleasure of a casual amour.
He almost always took a lover for the Season. Rarely more than one, and never more than one at a time. His lovers were usually lovely women and younger than he, though he never thought of beauty or age as a necessary qualification. He favored women who were discreet and poised and elegant and intelligent enough to converse on a wide variety of interesting topics. He looked for a certain degree of companionship as well as sexual satisfaction in a lover.
And this year?
He was standing on the wide cobbled terrace behind the Fonteyn mansion in Richmond—though behind and before were relative terms in this case. The front of the house faced toward the road and any approaching carriages and was really quite unremarkable. The back of the house, on the other hand, overlooked the River Thames, and between it and the river there were the terrace, the wide, flower-bedecked steps, the sloping lawn below them, bordered on one side by a rose arbor and a small orchard and on the other by a row of greenhouses, and another terrace, this one paved, alongside the river. A small jetty stretched into the water for the convenience of anyone desirous of taking out one of the boats that bobbed on either side of it.
And at the moment the back of the house, which might easily claim to be the real front, was bathed in sunshine and a heat that was tempered by an underlying coolness, as one might expect this early in the year. It was all very picturesque and very pleasant indeed.
It had been a bold move on the part of the Fonteyns to host a garden party this early in the Season, long before anyone else was prepared to take such a chance with the weather. Of course, there was a spacious ballroom inside the house as well as a large drawing room and doubtless other rooms large enough to accommodate all the guests in the event of chill weather or rain.
This year there was a new widow in town, and she was quite blatantly and aggressively offering herself to him as this Season’s mistress. If one discounted her very obvious ruse of appearing hard to get, that was. He really had been amused by her behavior on Bond Street and at the Merriwether ball.
At the moment she was doing it again. She was standing on the lawn not far from the orchard, her hand on the arm of Lord Hardingraye, one of her old lovers with whom she had arrived half an hour ago. They were surrounded by other guests, both male and female, and she was giving the group her full attention as she twirled a confection of a parasol above her head. Inevitably it was white, as was everything else she wore. She almost always wore white, though she never looked the same on any two occasions. Amazing, that.
She had not once looked Constantine’s way. Which might mean one of two things—she had not seen him yet, or she was no longer interested in pursuing any sort of connection with him.
He knew very well that neither possible explanation was the real one.
She was determined to have him. And she had certainly seen him. She would not have so studiously not looked at him if she had not.
He was amused again.
He sipped his drink and carried on a conversation with a group of his friends. He was in no hurry to approach her. Indeed, he had no intention of making the first move. If she wished to ignore him all afternoon, he would not leave brokenhearted.
But as he talked and laughed and looked about at all the new arrivals, smiling at some of them, raising a hand in greeting to others, he mulled over the question that had been bothering him for the past three days.
Did he really want the Duchess of Dunbarton as a lover?
He had said a very firm no to that question in Hyde Park, and he had meant it.
Most men would have thought the question a ludicrous one, of course. She was, after all, one of the most perfectly beautiful women anyone had ever set eyes upon, and, if it was possible, she had improved with age. She was still relatively young, and she was as sexually desirable as she was lovely. She was much sought after—an understatement. She could have almost any man she chose to take as a lover, and that did not exclude many of the married ones.
But …
Something made him hesitate, and he was not quite sure what it was.
Was it that she had chosen him? But there was no reason why a woman might not go after what she wanted just as boldly as a man could. When he decided upon a woman, after all, he always pursued her with determined persistence until she capitulated—or did not. Besides, was it not flattering to be singled out by a beautiful, desirable woman who could have almost anyone?
Was it that she was too available, then? Had her lovers not been legion while the old duke lived? Were they not likely to continue to be numerous now that she was finally free, not only of the duke but also of her obligatory year of mourning? But he had never balked at the prospect of competition. Besides, if it turned out that she expected to keep other lovers as well as him, he could simply walk away. He was not looking for love, after all, or anything like a marital commitment. Only for a lover. His heart was not going to be involved.
And she had said in so many words at the Heaton concert that while he was her lover no one else would be.
Was it, then, that she was too much of an open book, as he had told her at the concert? Everyone knew all about her. Despite the bedroom eyes and the half-smile she kept almost always on her lips, there was no real mystery about the woman, nothing to be uncovered a layer at a time, like the petals of a rose.
Except her clothing.
One never knew exactly what a woman was going to look like unclothed, no matter how many times one’s eyes roamed over her clad body. One never knew exactly what she would feel like, how she would move, what sounds she would make …
“Constantine.” His aunt, Lady Lyngate, his mother’s sister, had come up behind him and laid a hand on his arm. “Do tell me you have not been down by the river yet. Or, if you have, do lie about it and tell me you will be delighted to escort me there.”
He covered her hand with his own and grinned at her.
“I would not be lying, Aunt Maria,” he said, “even if I had been down there a dozen times already, which I have not. It is always my pleasure to escort you anywhere you wish to go. I did not know you were in town. How are you? You grow lovelier with every passing year and every newly acquired gray hair. More distinguished.”
He was no
t lying about that either. She was probably close to sixty years old and a head-turner.
“Well,” she said, laughing, “that is the first time, I believe, I have been complimented on my gray hair.”
She was still very dark. But she was graying attractively at the temples. She was Elliott’s—the Duke of Moreland’s—mother but had never cut their acquaintance just because her son rarely talked to him. Neither had Elliott’s sisters.
“How is Cece?” he asked of Cecily, Viscountess Burden, the youngest of them and his favorite, as he led his aunt off the terrace and down the broad steps to the lawn. “Is her confinement to be soon?”
“Soon enough that she and Burden have remained in the country this year,” she said, “much to the delight of the other two children, I am sure. What a good idea it was to set up tables on the terrace down there. One may sit and enjoy refreshments and be right by the water.”
They proceeded to do just that and sat for ten minutes or so before being joined by three of his aunt’s friends—a lady and two gentlemen.
“You will take pity on me, if you will, Lady Lyngate, and if your nephew can spare you,” the single gentleman said after they had all chatted for a while. “We came down here to take out a boat, but I have always had an aversion to being a wallflower. Do say you will make up a fourth.”
“Oh, indeed I will,” she said. “How delightful! Constantine, will you excuse me?”
“Only with the greatest reluctance,” he said, winking at her, and he watched as the four of them climbed into a recently vacated boat and one of the men took the oars and pushed out into the river.
“All alone, Mr. Huxtable?” a familiar voice asked from behind his shoulder. “What a waste of a perfectly available gentleman.”
“I have been sitting here waiting for you to take notice and have pity on me,” he said, getting to his feet. “Do join me, Duchess.”
“I am neither hungry nor thirsty nor in need of rest,” she said. “Take me into the greenhouses. I wish to see the orchids.”