by Лорен Уиллиг
“Eligibles?” demanded Miles, following Henrietta into their little corner and tripping over a small gilt chair in the process. “You mean this lot?”
Charlotte smiled and scooted over, making room for Miles to stand next to Henrietta. Scorning the chair and the equally dainty benches, Miles chose instead to prop his broad shoulders against the pale blue silk of the wall, towering comfortably over his wife and her friends.
Penelope pulled her chair away, too, but not to make room. Penelope made no pretense of her feelings about her best friend’s marriage. In anyone else, her attitude would have been called sulking. In Penelope, it was more like a slow smolder. If looks could char, Miles would have long since gone up in flames.
“They have no charm, no conversation, and most of them have no chins,” put in Penelope caustically. “Other than that, it’s been just scrumptious.”
“They’re not the most inspiring collection of humanity,” Charlotte admitted. “I’m not sure why Grandmama chose them.”
“Because,” said Penelope, “all the good ones have already been taken. All we’re left with are the louts and the lechers. Usually in the same package.”
Miles’s ears perked up. “Do you need any help keeping the lechers at bay?” he asked Charlotte. “I’m told I loom rather well.”
He looked immensely cheered at the prospect of enlivening his stay at Girdings with a spot of intimidation.
“As much as I appreciate the offer, I don’t think it will be the least bit necessary.” Charlotte looked down at her modest gown of silver net over green satin. It had seemed so pretty at the modiste’s — and that was just what it was. Not alluring, not seductive, just pretty. She sighed. “I need a little less go hence and a little more come hither.”
“That depends on whom you’re hithering,” declared Henrietta.
Miles crinkled his nose. “Hithering?”
Henrietta waved that aside. “Is there anyone the least bit hitherable in this assemblage of gargoyles?”
Charlotte betrayed herself with a quick glance across the room to the spot where Robert stood, exchanging pleasantries with Sir Francis Medmenham. She hadn’t needed to look around the room to ascertain where he was; she just knew, the same way an astronomer knew the position of stars in the firmament. Over the past eight days she had become something of an adept on the subject of Robert. If he were a university topic, she would qualify for an advanced degree.
Henrietta’s hazel eyes narrowed shrewdly. “So that’s the way the land lies.”
“There isn’t any land there,” said Charlotte regretfully. “Not even a very small island.”
“Island?” Miles echoed.
Henrietta understood instantly. “You don’t know that.”
“He calls me cousin.”
“Well, you are his cousin,” interjected Miles. “What is he supposed to call you? Spot?”
Finding himself the recipient of two outraged female glares, Miles backed up, both physically and metaphorically. “Not that you have any. Spots, that is. It’s just a figure of speech.”
“I understand,” said Charlotte generously. She hadn’t forgotten all the times Miles had saved her from her usual post by the wall by sacrificing himself for a dance. It had all been at Henrietta’s behest, of course, but Charlotte loved both of them all the more for it, Henrietta for ordering and Miles for obeying, and both of them for caring enough for her to try to pretend it was otherwise.
“We need to minimize your cousinly qualities,” mused Henrietta.
“How can you minimize her cousinliness when she is his cousin?” demanded Miles. “You have many talents, Hen, but I don’t think you can go about lopping the limbs off family trees just like that.”
“It’s a matter of metaphysical cousindom,” said Henrietta loftily.
Charlotte intervened before Miles could point out that cousindom wasn’t a proper word. “Even if we weren’t cousins, it still wouldn’t matter. One can’t engender warmer feelings where they don’t otherwise exist.”
“Rubbish,” said Henrietta, sounding eerily like her mother. “It’s not a matter of engendering warmer feelings, but of directing his attention to them. It’s as simple as that.” She tilted her head up at her husband. “Isn’t it, darling?”
Miles winced at the memory. “Simple isn’t quite the word I would have used.”
“Simple-minded, more likely,” muttered Penelope, just a little too loudly.
“They don’t call me Clever Pete for nothing,” said Miles cheerfully.
Penelope regarded him balefully. “They don’t call you Clever Pete.”
“I know,” said Miles imperturbably. “I just like the sound of it.”
Charlotte considered the merits of this. “Wouldn’t you have to be Clever Miles?”
Miles shook his head. “It just doesn’t have quite the right ring to it.”
“There’s a reason for that.” Penelope tossed back half of her glass of wine in one long swig.
Charlotte had managed to “misplace” Penelope’s last glass while Penelope was dancing, but Penelope was rapidly making up for lost time. Penelope had always been a bit wild — or, as disapproving chaperones put it, fast — but since Henrietta’s marriage, she had thrown herself into the pursuit of her own ruin with single-minded efficiency. Sometimes, Charlotte felt as though she were trying to slow down a runaway carriage by clinging to the boot.
Henrietta leaned forward, effectively lodging herself between Penelope and Miles. “I want to know more about Charlotte’s duke.”
“Charlotte doesn’t have a duke,” said Charlotte. Since that hadn’t come out quite as effectively as it had in her head, she added, “Well, I don’t.”
“Don’t you?” said Penelope, lounging back in her chair like a dangerous jungle cat. The glass in her hand was quite, quite empty.
“No, I don’t,” Charlotte repeated, twitching the gauze overlay of her skirt. “Just because — ”
Coloring, Charlotte broke off.
“Aha!” Henrietta jabbed a finger in the air. “Just because what?”
Penelope cast her eyes up to the intricate plasterwork on the ceiling, reciting in a monotone monologue, “Long walks together, domestic interludes at the breakfast table, tête-à-têtes in the library . . .”
“It was hardly a tête-à-tête!” protested Charlotte in a fierce whisper, desperately craning her neck in the fear someone might have heard. “We simply happened to be alone in the same place at the same time.”
“Same place. Same time. Alone.” Penelope ticked the words off on her fingers. “How else would you describe a tête-à-tête?”
“Exactly as it sounds. Head-to-head. And ours weren’t. They were quite properly on opposite sides of a table.”
“Hmm,” said Penelope.
Miles pushed back his chair with an exaggerated scraping sound.
“Right,” he said, holding up both hands and backing slowly away. “I know when I’m not needed. I’ll be in the card room if anyone wants me.” He dealt Charlotte an avuncular pat on the shoulder. “Best of luck with your duke, old thing.”
“I don’t have a duke,” repeated Charlotte. It sounded less and less convincing each time she said it. It would save her considerable time and energy to embroider the phrase on a sampler and hang it around her neck. “This is beginning to sound more and more like a game of cards,” she added, to no one in particular.
“Don’t be silly,” said Henrietta. “That would be kings, not dukes, and we don’t have any of those here.”
“Just jacks,” put in Penelope, her lip curling as her gaze made the circuit of the men scattered about the room. Neither Charlotte nor Henrietta was under any doubt as to what she meant. The jack was also commonly known as the knave. “We have plenty of those.”
“Well, Martin Frobisher, surely,” said Henrietta, surveying the assemblage. Charlotte would never forget the memorable occasion where Martin Frobisher had attempted to make an improper suggestion to Henrietta and
been rewarded with a sticky stream of ratafia all down the front of his new jacket. He had never tried that again. At least, not with Henrietta. “And Lord Henry Innes. They’re as thick as thieves. And I’ve heard all sorts of stories about Sir Francis Medmenham, but other than that . . .”
“Don’t forget our duke,” added Penelope.
Charlotte didn’t like the way Penelope’s lip curled as she said it. “Robert isn’t like them.”
“No?”
“No,” said Charlotte vehemently. It was one thing for Penelope to put on worldly airs, but quite another for her to insinuate untruths about someone she barely knew. Penelope didn’t know him; she did.
“He hasn’t been back in the country long enough to do anything appalling. Has he?” asked Henrietta with interest. “Unless you heard something about his time in India.”
Penelope nodded in the direction of Sir Francis Medmenham. “Just look at the company he keeps.”
“What other company is he meant to keep?” argued Charlotte, as much for herself as for Penelope. “They’re the only ones here.”
Penelope just shrugged. It was amazing how much innuendo Penelope could pack into one small shrug.
Charlotte’s chin lifted stubbornly. “I don’t see why you need to be so cynical about everyone. Especially about Robert.”
“Dear Charlotte. Dear, innocent Charlotte,” said Penelope condescendingly, “if you had been out on as many balconies as I have, you would be a cynic, too.”
“Well, who told you to go out on all those balconies?” said Henrietta tartly. “That’s just asking for trouble.”
“But I do it so well.” Stretching sinuously, Penelope rose from her chair. “Speaking of which, I promised Lord Freddy a dance. You’ll have to carry on the duke-hunting without me.”
With a backwards twitch of her reticule in farewell, she turned her back on her friends and began to move away. Henrietta exchanged an alarmed look with Charlotte behind her back.
“Pen?” Henrietta called.
Penelope stopped where she was and angled her head over her shoulder, her very stance a challenge. For all her bravado, she looked very alone and strangely vulnerable as she looked back at Henrietta.
Henrietta forced out a smile. “No balconies.”
Penelope’s habitual mask of indifference clamped down over her features. “It’s too cold for balconies. Alcoves, on the other hand . . .”
“Are an equally bad idea,” finished Henrietta, but Penelope was no longer there to hear her.
“Blast,” said Henrietta.
Charlotte squeezed Henrietta’s arm. “She will come around, you know. In time.”
“I know,” said Henrietta, but she didn’t sound as though she meant it, and there was an unhappy expression on her face as she watched Penelope swagger across the ballroom.
Charlotte could feel the mirror of it on her own face. It hurt her to see Penelope hurting so, and to know there was nothing she could do about it. It wasn’t as though she could fill Henrietta’s place for Penelope. As much as she knew Penelope did care for her, and as fiercely as Penelope would defend her if anyone were ever to threaten her, they had never quite spoken the same language. It was Henrietta to whom Penelope had always turned, Henrietta who knew how to jolly Penelope out of her bad moods, and persuade her out of her more ridiculous schemes. But Henrietta, as Penelope saw it, had chosen Miles over her and that was the end of that.
“It’s just that she doesn’t like change,” Charlotte tried to explain, knowing how inadequate her efforts were.
Henrietta twisted indignantly in her chair. “But I haven’t changed.”
She might not have, but her situation had, and for Penelope, that was much the same thing.
Since there was nothing else Charlotte could say, she did the only thing she could do. She squeezed Henrietta’s hand. “She will come around.”
Henrietta made a moue of annoyance indicative of extreme dissatisfaction. Shaking her thick brown hair like a horse swatting off flies, she twisted around in her chair, scanning the ballroom. “Enough of this. Where’s your duke?”
Charlotte’s duke (although he would have been very surprised to hear himself referred to as such) was busy trying to look like a bored man of the world.
At least part of that was accurate. He was certainly bored. Standing around ballrooms evaluating the charms of the ladies and criticizing other gentlemen’s cravats had a very limited appeal. The card room appealed even less. Robert had never really seen the point of wagering one’s wages on the turn of a card. Perhaps that was because, for him, they had been wages. He had earned them. These bored young bucks of the ton, with their allowances and their constant excursions into what they called “dun territory,” were a complete mystery to him, as exotic as the elaborate multiarmed goddesses in the Indians’ temples.
After ten days of attempting to win their confidence, Robert was developing an extreme allergy to idleness. His enforced inactivity itched like a rash. Give him a river to be crossed, an enemy to be run through, even a ledger to be balanced, something simple and straightforward that one could do and get done, as opposed to this prolonged game of tricking confidences out of the unwary. Tommy had been no help; he was too busy yearning after Miss Deveraux. Without his cousin’s company over the past ten days, he probably would have run screaming out into the gardens of Girdings. Only his walks and conversations with Charlotte had provided a modicum of distraction from the distasteful exercise in amateur espionage.
It was, he realized, not unlike the roles they had played twelve years before, when dancing attendance on his shy little cousin had provided a welcome escape from the sordid arguments between their elders.
But they weren’t children anymore. And he wasn’t the only one to have taken notice of Charlotte.
Next to him, Medmenham trained his quizzing glass on the small figure in silvery green silk. “The little Lansdowne is in excellent looks tonight.”
Given that Medmenham had assessed all of the women in the room — most of them unfavorably — at some point in the evening, the remark should not have filled Robert with the fervent desire to pluck the quizzing glass out of his hand and stomp it to smithereens under his heel. But, then, none of those other women was his responsibility.
His very innocent, very defenseless responsibility, who was indeed wearing a very becoming dress.
Her hair had been pulled back from her face in a series of curls that seemed more golden than usual against the silvery green of her dress, making her look like an earthbound Christmas angel. Her cheeks were pink and her eyes bright as she carried on an animated conversation with her recently arrived friend.
As Robert watched, Charlotte’s friend said something that made Charlotte look up. Catching his eye, she cast him a slightly sheepish smile and quickly looked away again, her cheeks even pinker than before.
“Yes, she is,” Robert said shortly.
Medmenham’s glass remained trained on Charlotte. “Well dowered, I suppose?”
Robert had no idea. “Naturally.”
Medmenham let his quizzing glass dangle from one finger. It swung slowly to and fro, light glinting off its surface. “Excellent,” he said.
Robert forced his hands to unclench, finger by stiff finger. “I hadn’t realized you were in search of a wife, Medmenham.”
From society’s standpoint Medmenham was everything that could be desired in a husband. He had five thousand pounds a year, a baronetcy, and at least three properties of which Robert knew: the infamous Medmenham Abbey, a hunting box in Melton Mowbray, and a sugar plantation in the West Indies. He was young, personable, and undeniably clever. Charlotte needed someone clever, or at least someone who could understand her vocabulary, a requirement that ruled out a good three quarters of the ton. It wouldn’t be a brilliant match for a duke’s daughter, but it would be a respectable one.
At least, it would be, if Medmenham were the least bit respectable. Somehow, Robert just couldn’t see marrying off hi
s only cousin to an amateur diabolist, no matter how many sugar plantations he owned.
Being the head of the family was far more complicated than he had realized.
Medmenhem regarded him with the casual scorn he reserved for his closer acquaintances. “You really have been out of the country too long. Why do you think we were all dragged out here? It’s not for the rural amusements, that’s for certain.” The way Medmenham’s glass dipped towards a country-bred squire’s daughter made it quite clear just which rural amusements he was referring to. “The Dowager has been trying to market the little Lansdowne for years now.”
“I hadn’t realized that’s what they were calling it now.”
“We, my dear Dovedale, are men of the world. Why call a spade anything but what it is?”
“Because by another name it might smell sweeter,” countered Robert.
Medmenham pursed his lips, an expression that made him look disconcertingly like Charles II, only without the long wig.
“An interesting point. Our senses are so often led by our expectations. Take the red-haired chit over there.” His glass angled towards Miss Deveraux, who was dancing down the line with Lord Frederick Staines. “Her features are commonplace enough, but she has flash and flair. We expect beauty from her and therefore we find it.”
Robert didn’t, but if Medmenham chose to redirect his attentions to Charlotte’s friend, that was perfectly all right with him. From what he’d seen of Miss Deveraux, she could take care of herself. She already had poor Tommy on a very short string, following along after her looking like a whipped dog hoping to be tossed a treat. Personally, Robert didn’t see the attraction.