Entering the dining room, however, startled him out of his romantic daze. Above the mantel hung a large and—to say the least—peculiar painting: a fair-haired angel in midflight, black robe flowing, black wings spread, a bloodied sword in her hand. Far below her on the ground, a man lay facedown in the snow, a red rose in full bloom next to him.
Vere was not the only guest who remarked on the unusual and unsettling painting. But the general cheer of the gathering was so pervasive, and Miss Edgerton’s person so agreeable, that the guests, to a one, chose to ignore the obvious theme of death the painting evoked.
Miss Edgerton said grace. Vere prayed that Fortune would look kindly upon him. May he walk the fine line between lovable dimness and outright idiocy and walk it well.
“Miss Edgerton,” he said, as soup was laid down, “would you happen to be related to Mortimer Edgerton of Abingdon?”
“No, indeed, Lord Vere. My late father’s family hails from Cumberland, not Berkshire.”
There was such delight and warmth in her voice. Her eyes sparkled. Her attention was wholly and wholeheartedly centered on him, as if she’d waited her entire life for him. He wanted to propose this minute and take her away. Let someone else worry about Edmund Douglas.
At the farther end of the table Lady Kingsley set down her water glass quite loudly. Vere clenched his hand about his spoon and forced himself to proceed. “What about old Mortimer’s brother, Albemarle Edgerton. Are you related to him?”
This was where her good cheer would first falter. But she would think that he was jesting or had made a silly blunder. She would give him the benefit of the doubt.
Her merriment, however, dimmed not at all. “Not Mr. Albemarle Edgerton either, I’m afraid.”
“Their cousins the Brownlow-Edgertons in the next county? You must be related to them.”
Now there could be no mistake. Now she would see that he was not only below average in intelligence but hadn’t a clue of his below-average intelligence. But she only radiated pleasure, as if he’d inquired whether Helen of Troy had been a direct ancestress of hers.
“Not at all, no. But you seem to know them very well. Are they a very grand family then?”
Had she understood anything he said? How could she not react at all? It was human to respond to clearly recognizable stupidity with at least a pause. Where was her pause?
“Indeed, I do know them very well. And I was sure you must have descended from one of them. Truly wonderful people; a shame neither old Mortimer nor his brother ever married. And their cousins were all spinsters.”
At the beginning of the evening he could not have imagined that he would intentionally tip over into overt asininity. But he had not been able to help himself.
She nodded earnestly. “All the more reason they should have had children.”
No pause. No wavering. Not a single sign that she noted his absurdity.
He took a sip of his soup to buy himself some time to think—and found that he couldn’t. His head was in a state of paralysis. This was not how it was supposed to proceed.
And he could not—nor did he want to—understand what it meant.
He took two more sips of the soup, which seemed to have come directly from the Thames, and glanced surreptitiously her way. Her outward poise and perfection slew him. What was wrong with her on the inside? How could she carry on a conversation with him as if there were nothing at all the matter with him?
His eyes lit on the painting behind her.
“The artwork, is it Raphael’s Deliverance of Saint Peter?” He was going to provoke a reaction if it killed him.
“Do you think so, sir?” she asked evenly, her eyes wide with an admiration he most certainly had not earned.
For a moment he had considered—indeed, nearly hoped—that perhaps she was a dimwit herself. But she’d gone overboard with the flattery of her gaze.
She was angling for him.
It wasn’t something that never happened. He was a wealthy, titled man and from time to time a girl with five Seasons under her belt and no other prospects would try her hand at him. But he, fool that he was, had not believed it possible that she would join the ranks of opportunists.
“Well, Deliverance of Saint Peter has an angel and a man,” he said.
She looked behind herself a moment, turned back to him, and said happily, “And so does this one.”
Oh, she was good. So very good. Were he truly an idiot he would be thrilled.
Well, he had been truly an idiot this night, hadn’t he? One smile and he had been ready to pledge his undying love.
How could he have been so stupid? Why had he been so quick to conflate a devious woman he’d known for all of five minutes with the uncomplicated girl of his dreams? They were not one. They had never been one.
Miss Edgerton glanced at him. She smiled again, a smile luminous enough to serve as God’s own desk lamp. Almost immediately he felt it—the glee, the exhilaration, the swell of contentment. And in the next second, unchecked dismay.
A childish, illogical part of him did not understand that she was a smooth, clever actress. It saw only the same smile that had made him ecstatic before.
“Won’t you tell me more about your friends the Edgertons?” she asked.
Her question angered him—her question, her smile, his stupid inability to separate truth from illusions. He’d never before tormented the women who tried for his hand—they were usually a bumbling lot, dispirited and largely ashamed. Miss Edgerton, however…glossy, confident, cunning Miss Edgerton did not require such tender sympathy from him.
He canted forward slightly. “Why, certainly,” he said. “I can go on for hours.”
* * *
He went on for hours—no, days. Decades, possibly. Elissande’s face wrinkled and sagged with the passage of time.
The Edgertons of Abingdon, the Brownlow-Edgertons of the next county, the Edgerton-Featherstonehaughs of the next other county, and the Featherstonehaugh-Brownlows two counties over. They were a family with numerous branches and offshoots and Lord Vere was intimately acquainted with every last leaf on the blooming tree.
Or so he believed.
As he traced the descent of the family, not a single person whom he mentioned more than once managed to stay the same. Daughters became sons; sons became grandsons; a couple who’d had twelve offspring suddenly became childless. Women who had never married were subsequently referred to as widows. One particular boy was born on two separate occasions and then died once in London, once in Glasgow, and—as if that weren’t enough—one more time five years later in Spain.
And Elissande tried and tried to deny it.
When he’d come through the drawing room door, she had been enraptured. Not only was he handsome, he was strapping. She hadn’t known until that moment that she wanted some size in a man: He absolutely embodied the part of her knight, her bulwark, her fortress.
He seemed to feel precisely the same way, stopping in his tracks when he saw her for the first time. Then, for as long as they were in the drawing room, he’d looked at her as if she were air, water, and poetry…
And Aunt Rachel’s evening sitting in the water closet had proved fruitful! Elissande could not have asked for a more auspicious omen. She’d arrived to dinner vibrating with an almost fearful euphoria, the gongs of Destiny loud in her ears.
He was as handsome up close as he was from a distance, his features impeccably chiseled: neither too rough-hewn nor too refined. His eyes were a beautiful blue, almost indigo in the candlelight. And his lips—goodness, his lips had made her feel shy for no reason she could articulate.
Until they’d sat down at the table and those lips had started to move. He made distressingly less sense the more he talked. And the more distressed she became, the more engrossed she made herself appear and the more brilliantly she smiled—a lifelong reflex she could not stop all of a sudden.
He was her hope. He was her chance. She was desperate for their conversation to right itself,
for his blunders to prove but a case of bad nerves. But the request to hear more about the Edgertons—she’d thought that speaking of people he knew and enjoyed would help—what a ghastly mistake on her part. Instead of family anecdotes, he unleashed a skull-scrapingly painful recitation of massacred facts on births, marriages, children, and deaths.
Even so, she’d hoped things might improve, until Lionel Wolseley Edgerton kicked the bucket for the third time, at which point her hope also gave up the ghost.
She smiled at him. Why not? What else was there for her to do?
“Have I told you the Edgertons’ motto?” he asked, after a beat of silence.
“I do not believe so.”
“Pedicabo ego vos et irrumabo.”
On her other side, Lord Frederick coughed, a hacking fit of it, as if he’d choked on his food.
Without a care in the world, Lord Vere rose, strolled to his brother, and struck him a few times between his shoulder blades. Lord Frederick, red-faced, muttered a word of thanks. Lord Vere ambled back to his own seat.
“‘We too have scattered arrows.’ Isn’t that what the Edgertons’ motto means, Freddie?”
“I—I believe so.”
Lord Vere scratched himself in his armpit and nodded in satisfaction. “Well, there you go, Miss Edgerton. I’ve told you everything I know about the Edgertons.”
She was glad of the numbness his genealogical treatise had produced in her. She couldn’t think. Therefore she couldn’t quite feel the horror of knowing she’d made the worst mistake in her life.
But the marquess was not yet through with her. “It has just occurred to me, Miss Edgerton: Is it not somewhat inappropriate for you to be hosting so many of us gentlemen by yourself?”
“Inappropriate? With Lady Kingsley in attendance every step of the way?” She beamed at him, even as she sawed energetically at the venison on her plate. “Of course not, my lord. Besides, my aunt is also in residence.”
“She is? I’m sorry. I must have forgotten meeting her already.”
“It’s quite all right, sir. You haven’t met her. Her health is frail and she is not strong enough to receive callers.”
“That’s right. That’s right. So it’s just you and your widowed aunt in this great big house.”
“My aunt is not widowed, sir. My uncle is very much alive.”
“He is? I apologize for my mistake. Is his health frail too?”
“No, he is away.”
“I see. Do you miss him?”
“Of course,” she said. “He’s the heart and soul of this family.”
Lord Vere sighed. “I aspire to that. One day I should also like my niece to say that I’m the heart and soul of my family.”
It was the moment Elissande was forced to conclude that Lord Vere was not only an idiot, but an idiot of staggering proportions.
“I’m sure she would.” She mustered a reassuring smile. “I’m sure you will be a wonderful uncle, if you aren’t one already.”
He batted his eyelashes at her. “My dear Miss Edgerton, you smile so divinely.”
Her smiles were her armor. They were a necessity. But of course, a man like him wouldn’t know the difference.
So she let him have another one. “Thank you, my lord. You are so very kind and I’m so very glad you are here.”
* * *
Lord Vere at last turned to talk to Miss Melbourne on his other side. Elissande took a sip of water to calm herself. Her head was still numb, but the sinking sensation in her stomach was already quite horrible.
“I’ve been studying your very intriguing painting, Miss Edgerton,” said Lord Frederick, who’d been quiet most of the evening. “But I can’t seem to quite identify the artist. Would you happen to know?”
Elissande regarded him warily. Idiocy was something that ran in the family, wasn’t it? But he’d asked a reasonable question and, as much as she wanted to crawl under a blanket and douse herself in laudanum, she could not leave him without an answer.
“I’m afraid I’ve never inquired into it.” The paintings—there were three on the same theme—had always been there. And she’d always done her best to ignore them. “What’s your guess?”
“My guess would be someone from the Symbolist School.”
“What is the Symbolist School, if you don’t mind my asking?”
Because the Symbolist School could not be explained in isolation—it was related to but distinct from the Decadent Movement, which arose in reaction against Romanticism’s unquestioning embrace of nature—Elissande soon became aware that Lord Frederick was very well versed in art, especially art of their time.
After three courses of Lord Vere’s escalating inanities, it was a relief and a pleasure to encounter conversation that was intelligent and to the point. When she’d had something of a preliminary grounding in the ideas and motifs of the Symbolist School, she asked Lord Frederick, “What do you think, then, of the symbols in the painting?”
Lord Frederick set down his utensils. “Does the painting have a name?”
“It’s called The Betrayal of the Angel.”
“That’s interesting,” said Lord Frederick, leaning back in his chair to better study the canvas. “I thought at first that the angel was the Angel of Death. But it is the Angel of Death’s express role to take a man’s life. So it doesn’t accord with a theme of betrayal.”
“Do you think the man struck a bargain with the Angel of Death, perhaps, and then the angel reneged?”
“That’s an interesting idea. Or perhaps he had no idea what kind of angel she was. Perhaps he thought her the gentle, harp-plucking kind.”
Elissande considered it a moment. “Wouldn’t such an angel have white wings and a white robe?”
“Yes, she would, wouldn’t she?” Lord Frederick spread his thumb and his index finger along his chin. “Perhaps she transforms? If I were to paint this theme, I might show her mid-transformation, her white wings and robe turning black as she flies away from him.”
If he were to paint this theme. “Are you an artist yourself, sir?”
Lord Frederick picked up his fork and knife and bent his face toward his plate, seemingly shy about discussing his artistic inclinations. “I do enjoy painting, but I’m not sure I’d go so far as to call myself an artist. I’ve never exhibited.”
She liked him, Elissande realized. He had not been blessed with his brother’s Olympian looks, but he was pleasing in both his features and his demeanor—not to mention he was an intellectual giant next to Lord Vere.
“Was Shakespeare any less a poet before he published his first volume?”
Lord Frederick smiled. “You are too kind, Miss Edgerton.”
“Do you paint portraits or classical themes or perhaps biblical stories?”
“I have done a portrait or two. But what I like best is painting people when they are outside. Taking walks, picnicking, or just daydreaming.” He sounded embarrassed. “Very simple things.”
“That sounds lovely,” she said sincerely. So much of her life had been spent trapped inside this house that the simple activities Lord Frederick took for granted were infinitely appealing to her. “I would be privileged to see your work someday.”
“Well”—his already sun-ruddied complexion acquired an even deeper color—“perhaps if you ever came to London.”
His blush further endeared him to her. Suddenly she realized something else: Lord Frederick would do well as a husband for her.
He was not a marquess himself, but he was the son of one and the brother of one and that was almost as good, with the influence of his family and all their connections behind him.
Furthermore, she could trust him to understand a delicate situation. Should her uncle come calling, Lord Vere would no doubt nod and agree that of course Mrs. Douglas longed to return to her own home and, well, here she was, and could he help hand her into the carriage? Lord Frederick, a far more discerning man, would sense her uncle’s malice and help Elissande secure Aunt Rachel’s future we
ll-being.
“Oh, I shall try,” she said. “I most certainly shall try.”
Chapter Five
It wasn’t a country house party until Vere had mistaken someone else’s room for his own. He had plenty of choices. Miss Melbourne would scream loudest, Miss Beauchamp laugh hardest, and Conrad grumble most forcefully.
So of course he chose Miss Edgerton’s room.
He had been inside her room already: When the ladies had departed for the drawing room after dinner, he’d left the other gentlemen on the pretense of having to retrieve his special Colombian cigar from his room.
He had taken the opportunity to map the rooms and their occupants. But what he had really needed was a moment alone, which he’d spent in the empty passage, his back against his own door, his hand over his face.
He had lost nothing: How could he lose something that had never existed in the first place? And yet he had lost everything. He could no longer think of his constant companion as she had always been—warm, supportive, and understanding. Now he saw only Miss Edgerton’s predatory prettiness, the flattery that gleamed in her eyes as the sun gleamed on a crocodile’s teeth.
Now he at last understood why young boys sometimes threw rocks at pretty girls. It was this wordless fury, this pain of shattered hopes.
He was here to throw rocks at Miss Edgerton.
She was seated before her vanity table, her profile to him, combing her hair slowly, absently. As she raised her arm to reach the top of her head, the loose, short sleeves of her nightdress slid down to expose her upper arm and—for one heart-stopping fraction of a second—the curve of the side of her breast.
“Miss Edgerton, what are you doing in my room?” he called from the door he had silently opened.
She looked up, gasped, and leaped out of her chair. Hurriedly she grabbed her dressing gown and belted it tight about her person. “My lord, you are quite mistaken. This is my room.”
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