by Mary Balogh
She was laughing out loud.
“No, I never have,” she said. “But is this ordinary conversation, Lord Montford?”
“The topic is the weather, is it not?” he said. “Could anything be more ordinary?”
She did not answer, but she continued to smile.
“Ah,” he said, “I understand. You did not mean ordinary at all, did you? You meant dull. Yes, I am capable of dull conversation too, and will demonstrate if you wish. But I must warn you that I may fall asleep in the middle of it.”
“You need not worry about that,” she said. “I would be asleep before you.”
“Ah, an interesting admission,” he said, moving his head a little closer to hers, “and one I may use to my advantage at some future date.”
“You would be unable to,” she said. “You would be asleep too.”
“Hmm. A thorny problem,” he admitted.
“Besides, Lord Montford,” she said, “you cannot make me fall in love with you while I am asleep, can you? And I assume that is what this is all about? This visiting me with your sister? This walking in the park with us?”
“While you are asleep?” he said, moving his head even closer to hers.
And actually, in his attempt to arouse her interest in him, he was arousing himself to no small degree. The idea of making a sleeping woman—all warm and languorous in the depths of a soft mattress —fall in love with him had a very definite appeal. Good Lord!
“Miss Huxtable, you are quite—”
He got no further. They had progressed by this point to a more public part of the park, and the daily promenade had begun—vehicles of all descriptions, horses, pedestrians, all jostling for space on the crowded thoroughfares, all vying for attention. For the purpose was less to acquire air and exercise than it was to see and be seen, to show off new bonnets and new mounts and new beaux, to see and criticize other, inferior bonnets and mounts and beaux. It was the ton at play
And one garishly ostentatious open barouche, which was almost abreast of Jasper and Miss Huxtable, was slowing and then drawing to a halt. Its occupants peered down at them with frowning disapproval—or at him, actually.
Lady Forester and Clarence, by thunder!
He had been hoping to avoid them for what remained of the Season, though it was admittedly a forlorn hope when they had come up from Kent for the precise purpose of displaying their displeasure with him and snatching Charlotte out of his wicked clutches.
He had not even told Charlotte about their arrival in town. Why distress her before it was strictly necessary?
“Lady Forester?” He touched the brim of his hat to the lady He had not called her Aunt Prunella—or even Aunt Prune— since he was a boy. She was no aunt of his, for which fact he would give daily thanks if he were a praying man. “Clarrie? How do you do? May I have the pleasure—”
But apparently he might not have the pleasure of introducing Miss Katherine Huxtable to them—or her sister and brother either.
“Jasper,” the lady said in awful tones and with a swelling of the bosom that he remembered well, “I will see you in my own home tomorrow morning at precisely nine o’clock. Charlotte, step away from that man’s side this minute and come up here to sit beside me. I would have expected you to know better even if your half brother does not. I thought you had a respectable governess.”
“Aunt Prunella!” Charlotte exclaimed with a gasp and a look of open dismay.
“Oh, I say!” young Merton exclaimed at the same moment, indignation in his voice.
“Clarence,” his mother said, “get down this instant and assist Charlotte.”
“You had better stay where you are, Clarrie, old boy,” Jasper advised. “It would be a waste of effort to hop down here only to have to hop right back up again. And you stay where you are too, Char, with Miss Huxtable and the Earl of Merton. You are not footsore, are you?”
“N-no, Jasper,” she said, her eyes as wide as saucers.
“Then you do not need a ride,” he said. “She does not need a ride, ma’am. But thank you for stopping and offering. I shall do myself the honor of calling upon you in the morning, then. I may be four minutes late as the clock in the library, by which I invariably time myself, is four minutes slow. Or do I mean early? I have never quite worked it out. Which do I mean, Miss Huxtable?”
He glanced down at Katherine on his arm.
“Late,” she said. “You would be late. Or willbe late as I suppose it has never occurred to you to have the clock set right.”
“It would be too confusing,” he said. “I would not know where I stood. Neither would my servants.”
“Jasper,” Lady Forester said in tones that clearly had Clarence quaking in his boots and not sure whether he should stay where he was and incur her undying wrath or whether he should hop down and risk Lord Montford’s, “I will not be spoken to thus in your usual insolent vein. Charlotte—”
“Clarrie,” Jasper said conversationally, “you are holding up traffic, old boy. I daresay there are curricles and phaetons and barouches backed up all the way to the gates and out into the street, not to mention other vehicles. You had better move on before this good coachman behind you decides to get down from his perch and knock your hat off. He is already purple in the face. So are his passengers. I shall see you both at precisely four minutes after nine tomorrow morning. Good day to you.”
And Clarence, after a nervous glance back at the vehicles behind him, gave his own coachman the signal to move on.
“Oh, Jasper,” Charlotte said when they were out of earshot, “you will not allow Aunt Prunella to take me away, will you? She would not stop sermonizing from dawn to bedtime. It would be like going to prison. I really do not think I could bear it.”
“There, there, Miss Wrayburn,” Merton was saying, patting her hand.
“I am so sorry,” the elder Miss Huxtable said, sounding deeply distressed, “if my invitation to Miss Wrayburn to come walking with Kate and me this afternoon has caused a problem. Is it because she is not yet out? But even children and young people need air and exercise at some time of the day, surely.”
“I daresay,” Merton said, “it is because I invited myself to come too. I suppose the very highest sticklers might argue that Miss Wrayburn ought not to be seen in company with me until after her come- out. I do beg your pardon, Miss Wrayburn, and yours too, Monty. I did not think.”
“I cannot imagine,” Jasper said, “that even the queen herself could take exception to a young girl strolling in a public park with her brother and guardian and three of his friends, two of whom are ladies older than herself. I will certainly not have any of you chastising yourselves for a nonexistent fault. I shall set Lady Forester right on the matter tomorrow morning. And no, Char, you will not be thrown into the lions’ den with Aunt Prunella and Clarence. Not under any circumstances.”
“But Clarence is one of my guardians,” she reminded him. “He always was pompous and horrible. I hated him when he was a boy and I am sure I still hate him. He has turned downright ugly too. He is fat.”
Which blunt words spelled doom for any courtship Clarence might hope to mount with his cousin.
“We will not bore Lord Merton and his sisters with our private business any longer, Char,” he said firmly “And we had better stroll onward before we invite a wider audience.”
Which they proceeded to do—in a rather deafening silence punctuated by small bursts of bright, stilted conversation.
“This,” Miss Katherine Huxtable said when they arrived back at the gates, loosening her hold on his arm and including the others close behind them in her remarks, “has been a lovely afternoon, has it not? Thank you very much indeed, Miss Wrayburn and Lord Montford, for accompanying us.”
She and her brother and sister were going one way and he and Charlotte were going the other, so they all took their leave of one another with a flurry of cheerful farewells, just as if that damnably melodramatic interruption had not occurred.
And how
many people had witnessed the scene? Not that he cared the snap of his fingers what the gossips might say about him. But there was Charlotte to think about. Good Lord, what the devil had her aunt been thinking of, exposing her thus to the public gaze and censure? She could not possibly have waited until tomorrow morning to read him a scold in the privacy of her own drawing room?
“Jasper,” Charlotte said, her small hand tucked beneath his arm, “what will Aunt Prunella say tomorrow? What will she do?”
“Let me worry about that,” he said, patting her hand. “Or not.”
“But you know what Papa said in his will,” she said, her voice thin and high- pitched with misery
Her father had stated that she must be brought up and housed until her marriage by his sister, her aunt, if her mother should die and there were ever any question of neglect or impropriety in the way Baron Montford handled her upbringing.
“Your papa also appointed three guardians,” he said, “and fortunately Clarence is only one of them.”
“But if Great- Uncle Seth were to take his side,” she said, “then Aunt Prunella would take me away and there would be nothing you could do about it. Oh, I wish now I had stayed at Cedarhurst.”
“ Great- Uncle Seth is too lazy to move out of his own shadow,” he told her. “He has never made any secret of the fact that he resented being named guardian by his own nephew—especially when that nephew had the effrontery to predecease him. I am sorry, Char. I ought not to talk about your papa in that careless way But you need not worry about Great- Uncle Seth.”
“But I do,” she said. “He has only to say the word—” She did not complete the thought.
“It won’t happen,” he said, guiding her across the road and skirting about a pile of manure that the crossing sweep had not yet cleared. “I promise. I’ll go and call upon your great- uncle in person if I must, though he won’t like it above half.”
“Will you?” she said. “Do you think—”
“Let’s talk about something more cheerful,” he suggested, patting her hand. “Do you like the Huxtables?”
“Oh, exceedingly.” She brightened immediately, and then she turned a laughing face his way. “You like Miss Katherine Huxtable.”
He looked at her sharply.
“I like them both,” he said. “They are Merton’s sisters, and they are genteel and charming, not to mention beautiful.”
“But I think you like Miss Katherine Huxtable,” she said with an impish smile from beneath the brim of her bonnet. “You scarcely took your eyes off her while we were walking back through the park.”
“We were conversing,” he said. “It is polite to look at the person with whom you are having a conversation. Did Miss Daniels never teach you that?”
But she only laughed.
“And I think,” she said, “she likes you, Jasper.”
“Never tell me,” he said, recoiling in feigned horror, “that she was looking at me too while we talked. How very brazen of her.”
“It was the way she was looking,” she told him. “But I daresay allladies like you. Are you going to marry one of these days?”
“One of these very future days, perhaps,” he said. “Maybe. Probably Possibly. But not in the foreseeable future.”
“Not even,” she asked him, “if you were to fall in love?”
“I would marry immediately if not sooner were that to happen,” he said. “I would be so startled I would not know what else to do. As startled as I would be if I were to hear that hell had frozen over.”
“I wish,” she said with a sigh, “you were not such a dreadful cynic, Jasper.”
“And what do you think of Merton?” he asked, smiling down at her.
“He is exceedingly handsome and amiable,” she said. “He looks like a god. I daresay everyone is in love with him.”
“Including you, Char?” he asked.
“Oh, no,” she assured him. “I would not be so foolish. It would be like pining for the sun. I shall look for someone altogether more… . possible with whom to fall in love. But not yet. I want to be at least twenty before I marry.”
“Elderly, in fact.” He grinned fondly at her. He had not realized how practical she was, how unsure of herself, how underestimating of her own charms. There was no reason in the world why the daughter of a wealthy baronet, sister of a baron, could not aspire to the hand of an earl.
But definitely not yet.
“Perhaps,” he said, “love will take you by surprise one of these days.”
“I hope so,” she said, smiling brightly at him. “When I am old enough to be quite sure that love is what it is. And I hope it happens to you too, Jasper. Falling in love, I mean.”
“Thank you,” he said, patting her hand again. “But let me see, is it a blessing or a curse you are bestowing?”
She laughed.
“I have an idea,” she said suddenly, gazing up eagerly into his face. “A wonderful idea. Miss Daniels says we should try to add a few more names to the guest list for my house party. I think we ought to invite Miss Katherine Huxtable, Jasper. Oh, and Miss Huxtable too. After all, you will need some congenial company as well as I will.”
“And since I am an elder and those two ladies are el ders too,” he said, “we can congenially entertain one another? About a crackling fire to keep our aged bones warm in July, perhaps?”
“Miss Katherine Huxtable was twenty when her brother succeeded to the title,” she said. “She mentioned it when we were walking to the Serpentine. And that was three years ago. She is not so very old, Jasper, though it is surprising that she is not already married. Especially when she is so beautiful. Perhaps she has been waiting for someone special. I admire her for that.”
“Char,” he said, looking sidelong at her, “you are not matchmaking by any chance, are you? I warn you it is an impossibility.”
“Is it?” She gave him a wide- eyed, innocent look.
He had, in fact, just got exactly what he wanted without having to try very hard at all. Katherine Huxtable still had to accept the invitation, of course.
“Then I will have to play this game too,” he said with a sigh. “If the Misses Huxtable are to be invited, Char, then it would be quite ill- mannered not to invite Merton too.”
She turned her head sharply to face front again until the poke of her bonnet hid her flushed cheeks.
“Oh, would it?” she said. “But I daresay he has far more interesting things to do.”
“Probably,” he agreed. “Let’s find out, shall we?”
And to the devil with the fact that perhaps she really ought not even to be acquainted with Merton yet. What strange gothic notions some people had. Good Lord, Aunt Prunella and her ilk would probably have young girls locked in a high tower with their spinning wheels if they had their way.
9
J A S P E R’S visit to Lady Forester and Clarence the following morning proceeded much as he had expected. He was very careful to time his arrival so that he was knocking on their door at precisely four minutes after nine, and they kept him waiting in the visitors’ parlor for fifteen minutes.
Touché.
He was not invited to sit down when they did arrive.
There followed a tirade—delivered by the lady—in which Jasper was accused of every excess and vice known to man and a few unknown ones too and a demand that he relinquish control of Charlotte to her aunt before she was corrupted beyond hope of reform.
“If she is not already,” Clarence was unwise enough to add.
Jasper had deliberately armed himself with a quiz zing glass for the occasion, an affectation with which he did not usually encumber himself since his eyesight was excellent. He raised it to his eye at that moment and directed it at Clarence, particularly his ostentatiously tied neckcloth. Good God, even a dandy would shudder.
“Perhaps it might be wise, Clarrie,” he said, “to allow your mama to do the talking for you. You would not particularly enjoy having me rearrange that knot at your neck, old ch
ap, although it is in dire need of rearrangement, I must say.”
He lowered the glass before looking politely back at Lady Forester.
And she proceeded to tear apart the good name of Merton and his sisters, who might appear blameless in the eyes of the ton but who did not deceive her, the vulgar upstarts. They certainly did not know how to behave if they had all seen fit to be seen in public with him and—far worse!—in company with a young schoolgirl who had no business being seen in public at all until after she had made her curtsy to the queen.
“And for either one of the sisters to allow Charlotte to walk on the arm of the Earl of Merton was the outside of enough and merely confirms me in my conviction that they are brazen hussies,” she added. “I took quite a nasty turn at the realization that that very young girl in the park was my niece, my dear dead brother’s daughter. Did I not, Clarence? My maid was forced to burn feathers to revive me after we arrived home.”
“It is to be hoped that none of them were your best evening plumes, ma’am,” Jasper said, all concern.
“They are vulgar and quite long in the tooth,” Lady Forester said. “I suppose no real gentleman will have them. And the earl is doing himself no favor behaving as he does. And he is your friend, I understand.”
Jasper bowed and smiled.
“I really must be on my way,” he said. “This has been a delightful half hour, but I have other matters to attend to and so will not, alas, be able to sit down and take refreshments with you. No, no—you must not bother to offer them. Charlotte, by the way, will be remaining at my home and under my protection and her companion’s guidance. Good day to you both.”
He reached for his hat from the table where he had set it down since the servant who had opened the door and ushered him into the parlor had not offered to take it.
“She will not be there for long, Jasper,” Clarence said with spiteful relish. “I called upon Great- Uncle Seth yesterday afternoon after escorting Mama home.”