by Mary Balogh
Would the scandal now be at an end?
Or would everyone be waiting for a betrothal announcement to be made before either party to the scandal could be accepted back fully into the fold?
Over the course of the next half hour Gervase was careful to exchange a brief word with everyone present. He discovered that he liked the Marchioness of Hallmere for all her air of hauteur and her strange though handsome looks—she was small with masses of barely tamed fair hair, darker eyebrows, and the prominent nose that characterized all her brothers too. She spoke in a forthright manner on a number of topics and did not disguise the fact that she was sizing him up on her sister’s account. Lady Aidan Bedwyn was gracious and amiable and pretty—and surprised him by smiling warmly at the maid who came to remove the tea tray and thanking her. Lady Chastity Moore was a sensible, pretty young lady.
The Bedwyns were the last to take their leave.
“We have been invited, Gervase—you and I and Henrietta—to a ball being given by the Marquess and Marchioness of Hallmere three days hence,” his mother told him. “Is that not delightful?”
Gervase looked in some surprise at the marchioness. He had not expected that after this afternoon’s display for the sake of silencing gossip any of the Bedwyns would encourage further encounters between himself and Lady Morgan.
“The ball is in honor of Chastity’s engagement to Viscount Meecham,” the marchioness explained. “Both were quite willing that we cancel it so soon after my brother’s death, but Hallmere and I decided that that would be unfair. And so the ball goes on.”
“We will be delighted to attend, ma’am,” Gervase told her, darting a glance at Lady Morgan, who was playing the part of haughty grand lady, as she had been doing all afternoon. He half smiled at her.
“Of course,” the marchioness added, looking very directly at him—it must be a family trait, that look, he decided, “none of the members of my family will be able to dance as we are in mourning.”
She rose to leave, and her sister and sister-in-law and Lady Chastity followed suit. His mother, he noticed, linked an arm through one of the marchioness’s, and Henrietta moved between Lady Aidan and Lady Chastity. Gervase, considerably amused at such an unsubtle maneuver, offered his arm to Lady Morgan.
His mother, he concluded, must approve of her.
There was a space of perhaps two minutes when they were virtually alone together, his mother having stopped with the other ladies at the top of the stairs to point out some feature of a portrait hanging there.
“It will not distress you, chérie,” he asked her, “if I attend the ball to be given by your sister and brother-in-law?”
“No, why should it?” Her eyes sparked up at him, and he knew that there must have been some spirited family discussion over him.
“What did the Duke of Bewcastle have to say about your coming here today?” he asked her.
“I am here, am I not?” she said.
“And what does he say about my attending the ball?” he asked.
“As far as I am aware,” she said, “he does not know of it. Why should he? It is not his ball.”
“But perhaps,” he said, “I will not go after all. I will not even be able to waltz with you, chérie.”
“Why,” she asked him, turning her head to give him one of her very direct looks, “would Wulfric be so adamantly opposed to allowing you to pay your addresses to me, Lord Rosthorn? You are an earl, and by the standards of the society in which we live you did do the decent, honorable thing by going to him to offer for me. Why does he hate you so much?”
“Chérie,” he said, “must he hate the man who caused his sister to be the subject of gossip? May he not just simply disapprove of me? Were you so disappointed, then? Would you have said yes?”
“You know I would not,” she said with a look of disdain.
He smiled at her. “Then Bewcastle did us both a favor,” he said. “He saved you from embarrassment and me from heartbreak. With the question still officially unasked and still officially unanswered, I may still hope.”
“How absurd you are,” she said, frowning. “I preferred you when you were my dear friend.”
They were outside on the pavement by that time, and the other ladies had caught up with them. Gervase handed Lady Morgan into the Marquess of Hallmere’s waiting carriage and turned to do the like for the others.
“Mon fils,” his mother said, linking her arm through his as the carriage rocked on its springs and rolled into motion, “she is a perfect delight. I would relinquish my title with the greatest pleasure to Lady Morgan Bedwyn.”
“I assure you, Maman,” he said, patting her hand and winking at Henrietta, “that you will not be called upon to make any such sacrifice. Bewcastle has refused my suit, if you will remember.”
But she had not. Not yet. And he was to see her again before the eyes of the whole ton. At a ball, no less.
He gazed after the departing carriage with narrowed eyes. Had he just told her he would be unable to waltz with her because she was in mourning?
They would see about that.
MORGAN HAD BEEN OUT RIDING EACH MORNING. She had attended church with her family. She had toured some of the galleries with Aidan and Eve and had gone to Gunter’s with them when they took the children there for ices one afternoon. And she had, of course, taken tea at Pickford House, where she had been surprised to discover other guests apart from her own family group.
Nowhere had she been given the cut direct. If the ladies at the tea had seemed somewhat distant, they had also been polite. And they had not had a great deal of opportunity to snub her anyway since the Countess of Rosthorn had kept her by her side all afternoon. Morgan had found her charming—she had the same slight French accent as her son.
A ball was a different matter entirely, of course. She would discover there whether the scandal had affected her standing in the beau monde. Not that she really cared. If the ton was tired of her, then she was mortally weary of them—or so she told herself. She could not wait for the Season to be over so that she could return home to the sanity of Lindsey Hall.
Except, she admitted to herself in unguarded moments, that it was also going to seem flat and dull after all that had happened since she left there in the spring.
She dressed carefully for the ball. She could not wear any of her loveliest gowns, of course—but most of those were white anyway, and she despised them. And she would not be allowed to dance—but dancing with all the callow youth with which London ballrooms tended to abound had never held any great appeal for her. She watched her new maid dress her hair in a high topknot, from which curls and ringlets cascaded, some to trail along her neck and over her temples, and decided that she liked the girl’s work.
She would not be able to dance. She thought wistfully of waltzing beneath the swaying lamps and the stars in the Forest of Soignés and felt guilty that she could want to waltz again when Alleyne was so recently gone. He had been at that picnic. He had scolded her roundly for allowing the Earl of Rosthorn to pay her such particular attention.
She still could not believe that she would never see him again.
Eve and Aidan rode in the ducal town carriage with their backs to the horses while Morgan sat beside Wulfric on the other seat. She wondered as the other three conversed if Wulf knew that Lord Rosthorn had been invited tonight.
She was, she had been realizing with the greatest reluctance over the past few days, ever so slightly in love with him. No, perhaps even that was self-deception. She had been attracted to him from the start. And then, when she had found an intelligent, compassionate man behind the rakish facade, she had come to like and respect him. And finally, when she had turned to him in the passion of her grief over Alleyne, they had shared the deepest intimacy of all. It was not that alone that had made her fall in love with him, but it had certainly made her realize that she had been deceiving herself by thinking of him only as a friend. He was a great deal more than a friend.
The carria
ge rolled to a halt behind a line of others drawing up to the entrance doors to Joshua’s mansion on Berkeley Square.
“Freyja and our aunt Rochester will no doubt have arranged for several young gentlemen to make your acquaintance this evening, Morgan,” Wulfric said. “Our consequence is, of course, too great for a little gossip to have made you entirely ineligible. You may not dance, but you may walk or converse with such partners.”
“Provided none of them is the Earl of Rosthorn, I suppose,” she said.
He turned his head and looked at her with raised eyebrows.
“He has been invited,” she told him, “with the countess and Miss Clifton, his cousin.”
“Ah,” he said softly. “It is interesting that no one saw fit to inform me of this fact until now.”
“Why should anyone?” she asked him. “This is Freyja and Joshua’s ball.”
“Quite so,” he said, his voice softer still.
The Earl of Rosthorn had not answered her question, she realized, but had skirted around it and changed the subject. She had asked him why Wulfric hated him.
“It is as well, Wulf,” Aidan said, “for Rosthorn and Morgan to be seen together at an event of this nature so that the last shreds of scandal may be dispelled.”
A footman was opening the carriage door and setting down the steps. Wulfric handed Morgan down onto the red carpet that had been rolled out over the steps and across the pavement. She avoided looking into his keen silver eyes. She lifted her chin and smiled as he led her inside and along the receiving line and into the ballroom, where he deposited her in the safekeeping of their aunt Rochester, who was looking even more formidable than usual dressed in black satin, with a monstrous black turban and plumes. Even the long handle of her jeweled lorgnette was black.
Morgan settled in for what she fully expected to be a tedious evening. And indeed it did not start well. Her aunt presented her with two partners in a row who were just the sort of gangly, pimply, stammering youths she had anticipated meeting during her first Season—gentlemen of her own age or no more than a year or two older, with whom she was expected to be comfortable and whom she was expected to consider seriously as marriage partners.
It was quite enough to make her want to scream, especially as she could not even make the time pass quickly by dancing but was forced to sit on a sofa with each of them in turn, making labored conversation about such inconsequential matters that she twice forgot what she was talking about in the middle of a sentence. Yet politeness compelled her to smile and fan her face and look for all the world as if she had never been so well entertained in her life.
It was the middle of the second set when the Earl of Rosthorn arrived with his mother and cousin. He was looking very splendid indeed, Morgan saw, in gray and silver and black. But she could not even allow herself the luxury of feasting her eyes on him. She was very aware of the buzz of heightened interest in the ballroom. It had been bad enough when she arrived, but now the two partners in crime of recent scandal were there together. Freyja’s ball was bound to be declared a resounding success tomorrow.
The earl disappeared from the room while his mother and cousin joined a group within it. But at the end of the set he reappeared and brought his mother across the ballroom to greet Aunt Rochester.
“Oh, it is you, is it, Lisette?” Aunt Rochester said, raising her lorgnette to her eye while Lord Rosthorn bowed. “I have not seen you this Season. I supposed you had stayed at Windrush. However do you keep yourself looking so young?”
“You are kind,” Lady Rosthorn said. “But you must not look too, too closely, mon amie, especially in the daylight. May I take this seat beside you? Henrietta is with friends. Lady Morgan, mon enfant, even in black you outshine every other lady at the ball. Do let me kiss your cheek.” Having done so, she turned back to Lady Rochester. “May I have the pleasure of presenting my son, the Earl of Rosthorn?”
Aunt Rochester regarded him through her lorgnette, and her hair plumes nodded forward perhaps an inch.
“You are the scamp who hired a maid for my niece without thinking to ask her if she suffered from seasickness, are you?” she asked. “And then stood on deck with my niece yourself while the girl heaved out her stomach below?”
“Alas, ma’am,” he said, “I am guilty. But what was I to do? Remain belowdecks myself and pretend to be suffering from seasickness too? Leave Lady Morgan in Brussels in the care of a lady who was about to be summoned to join her husband in Paris? Lady Morgan needed to be returned to the bosom of her family.”
“Lord Rosthorn was extraordinarily kind to me, Aunt,” Morgan said, aware again that though no one seemed to be paying their little group any particular attention, in reality everyone was drinking in every detail. It was a skill at which members of the ton were particularly adept—being able to do two things at once. It was how the gossip mill was constantly fed.
“Ma’am.” The earl bowed to her aunt. “With your permission I will ask Lady Morgan to stroll about the ballroom with me.”
Wulfric was not in the room, Morgan noticed in one hasty glance about. She held her breath as she nonchalantly plied her fan to cool her cheeks. Aunt Rochester was a far more formidable chaperon than Lady Caddick had been.
“Very well, young man,” she said after scrutinizing him closely through her lorgnette again—a pure affectation, of course, as was Wulfric’s quizzing glass. Their naked eyes missed very little. “I will be watching.”
“Lady Morgan?” The earl bowed to her. His expression was sober and polite, but she knew him quite well enough to recognize the laughter lurking in his eyes.
“Thank you, Lord Rosthorn.” She snapped her fan closed and took his arm, careful to keep her own expression cool, slightly bored, slightly haughty.
“You are having a wonderful time, chérie?” he asked.
“I am ready to expire of boredom,” she told him. “Amuse me.”
“Alas,” he said, “I fear I must break your heart instead. This next set is to be a waltz.”
“Oh.” She sighed. “Too cruel.”
After the excruciating boredom and inactivity of the last hour or so, her feet itched to dance.
“We will stroll like a couple of gouty octogenarians,” he said, “and tell each other what a scandalous dance the waltz is.”
She smiled at him. “I like the Countess of Rosthorn,” she told him. “She is charming and amiable.”
“And she likes you, chérie.” He bent his head a little closer to hers. “Now that I have come home, she is eager to see me settle down with a wife and set up my nursery.”
“Indeed?” Morgan felt her cheeks flush. Was he flirting with her again—and quite outrageously?
“Yes, indeed,” he told her. “Mothers can be remarkably uncomfortable persons to be around, I am discovering. She believes that thirty is altogether too advanced an age for a man with a title and a fortune to remain a bachelor.”
“Indeed?” He was thirty. Twelve years older than she. It should have seemed like too wide an age gap.
“And she does not believe that eighteen is too young for the bride of such a man,” he said.
“Lord Rosthorn,” she said, “your conversation is bordering on the improper.”
“Is it, chérie?” He dipped his head a little closer yet. “Just because your brother has said no? Even though we have been dear friends? And lovers?”
His accent was suddenly very French indeed.
“You would be better employed,” she said sharply, “paying your addresses where they are more welcome, Lord Rosthorn. And to a lady you can love.”
“Ah, but my mother believes,” he said, “that I love you. So does Henrietta. I begin to believe that perhaps they are right, chérie.”
Morgan could feel her heart beating against her ribs. She could hear her pulse throbbing in her ears. She could see that the ballroom floor had filled with dancers and that the music was about to begin. Chastity was going to waltz with Lord Meecham. They were smiling warmly into e
ach other’s eyes, oblivious to all around them. Morgan was so glad Chastity had found love this spring. She had had a difficult, lonely girlhood.
“This is not the time or place for such talk, Lord Rosthorn,” she said. “How I wish I could dance.” The music had begun.
“You can,” he said, stopping close to the doors. “If you wish, chérie, we will waltz.”
“No,” she said. “You know I cannot.”
“Not here in public,” he agreed. “But in private?”
She looked at him with raised eyebrows and plied her fan again as the dancers twirled past.
“There is an anteroom beside the refreshment room,” he said, “that is not in use. We could waltz together in there without anyone being any the wiser. If our absence is noted, it will be assumed that I have taken you for a glass of lemonade.”
“But Aunt Rochester will miss me,” she said.
She was horribly tempted, though. Not just because she longed to waltz and not just because he was the Earl of Rosthorn and she had just realized that perhaps he was falling in love with her as she was falling for him. She was also bored. She was feeling hemmed in by propriety and strict chaperonage again after the freedom and sense of purpose and responsibility she had known in Brussels. It seemed to her that the last weeks of heavy grief had been endless. And it would be just for a very short while. No one would ever know.
She could waltz again. Right now. With the Earl of Rosthorn.
“Come, chérie,” he said, his head moving closer to hers again, his eyes smiling lazily. “Come and waltz with me.”
She took his arm again, and he whisked her out through the doors before she could persuade herself to observe a more strict decorum.
IT WAS A SQUARE ROOM, NOT VERY LARGE, WITH A sofa and a few chairs arranged around the perimeter. Gervase had discovered it earlier and guessed that it had been set aside for those guests who would wish to rest in quiet for a short while. He had extinguished the candles and shut the door. It had been a fortunate find. A private room would serve better than the balcony, his original choice.