Talk of the Ton

by Eloisa James

  The manager, Mr. Fredwell, saw them coming and hurried toward her. “Madame de Custine!” he cried, taking in the situation at a glance. “You must have injured your ankle.”

  “Indeed she has,” Gil said coolly. “I believe it would be best for madame if you had two footmen carry her in a chair to her chambers.”

  There was a little rustle of voices, as of wind passing through the poplars. Apparently the Earl of Kerr wasn’t going to sweep this mysterious Frenchwoman up to her chamber in his own arms, thereby guaranteeing that she would appear in every gossip column printed on the morrow.

  Instead, and to everyone’s disappointment, he deposited her in a chair, nodded to Mr. Fredwell, and left without further ado, striding down the steps as if he hadn’t whisked her out of the ballroom, sparking a hundred rumors and a thousand delicious speculations.

  Emma swallowed hard and didn’t let herself worry about the fact that her future husband was the type of man who bedded a beautiful Frenchwoman, told her to marry her fiancé promptly, and then left without a word of farewell. After all, Gil was what he was.

  And she loved him, more’s the pity for her.

  Her spirits rose a bit when the footmen left and her own maid came clucking toward her. “Oh, miss, what did happen to you? Twisted your ankle, did you?”

  Emma fashioned herself a graceful limp and allowed herself to be placed in a steaming bath scented with rose, given a tisane, and put to bed in starched sheets, as if she were an invalid.

  Her chamber looked over the great inner courtyard of Grillon’s. Slowly the sound of tinkling laughter and voices died away, and yet she lay wide awake in her beautifully ironed nightgown, tied at the neck with a blue ribbon, and stared at the stars. Her room opened to a small wrought-iron balcony, along the lines of that onto which Juliet wandered.

  The stars were far away, small and cold and quite unlike the twinkling bits of gold flake that still danced at the corner of her vision. She tried to imagine using transparent stretches of silk to revolutionize Mr. Tey’s stages, but she dropped the idea without even trying. She didn’t want to paint scenery flats any longer. And it wasn’t only because Grieve’s set had been so much better than hers.

  For some reason, it felt as if she’d taken Gil’s virginity, which was absurd. Absurd. Then why did she feel this dragging sadness?

  Clouds kept drifting across the full moon, looking like boats, frigates, and ships making their way over to France, and all those enchanting, irresistible Frenchwomen.

  At last she fell asleep, not even realizing that her cheeks were wet.

  Chapter Thirteen

  The next day Emma went back to St. Albans and waited for Gil to contact her. A day passed. Another day. Bethany sent a scolding letter, and a former school friend wrote, describing Gil’s scandalous behavior at the Cavendish masquerade. By all accounts, he left the ball with a Frenchwoman. Emma smiled to herself. Another day passed.

  On the third day, Emma received a letter from her cousin. It seemed that Kerr had danced all night long, the previous night, with the wife of a French envoy, and there was talk of a duel. That letter struck like a blow from the dark.

  Suddenly Emma realized that she hadn’t really thought that Gil would be so dazzled by Madame de Custine that he wouldn’t realize who she was, eventually. She hadn’t truly believed that her future husband was the sort of man who slept with a beautiful Frenchwoman and never asked for her forwarding address.

  But it seemed that Gil was precisely that sort of man.

  As the days passed, the Earl of Kerr was as uncommunicative as he’d been for the previous three years. So finally Emma spoke to her father, who focused on his daughter just long enough to agree that perhaps the betrothal had been a mistake.

  Kerr responded by return post to her request that their engagement be terminated. Most likely he had been hoping for just such a letter. After all, the man had devoted himself to outraging his fiancée’s sensibilities. Her mail was flooded with letters describing a flaxen-haired beauty in his carriage at Hyde Park; the color her hair notwithstanding, no one had the slightest hesitation in asserting the woman’s nationality.

  As for her, Emma had come to understanding that in winning, one can lose as well. She didn’t want Gil on the terms that he had flung forth as a challenge. What’s more, the whole baby-in-one’s-belly thing must take more than one night, as she’d discovered in the last two weeks. She didn’t want Gil on the terms of marriage that her father had established, either. It had never been about winning, although she hadn’t understood that at first.

  Now she had a new plan.

  She has going to dissolve their engagement, and then she was going to London, like Queen Titania, and she was going to choose her mate.

  And if he was an earl, with the initials GB-G, that would, of course, be serendipity.

  She wrote back and told the earl that she saw absolutely no purpose to their meeting in person. In fact, she was occupied on the day he proposed to visit St. Albans and would rather that the business was taken care of by their respective men of business. To that end, she enclosed the name of her father’s solicitor, Mr. Prindle, with all best wishes & etc.

  But he was a stubborn man, this Earl of Kerr. Although he agreed with her that it was best for everyone if their betrothal be dissolved since it was initially set up, he pointed out rather unnecessarily, with the agreement of neither of them, he still felt that duty required that they effect this delicate business in person.

  “I shall attend you tomorrow, Tuesday, at four in the afternoon,” he finished.

  Emma stared at his handwriting. Her heart panged with love and desire. That was the worst of it: she found herself lying in bed at night, wrung tight as a spring by memories of their evening together. And yet he, by all accounts, had had so many of such nights in his life that he had forgotten the half of them.

  She couldn’t seem to forget even the slightest detail, try though she might. She practiced her archery. Her arm brushed her chest as she pulled back the bow, and the pang of lust at the thought of Gil’s mouth went straight down her spine. She took a bath and rubbed rose-scented oil on her legs, and that simple, innocent action, which she had completed every day since her birth, was no longer simple. Nor innocent.

  He’d changed her. Yet he hadn’t been changed at all, and the knowledge of it was bitter as ashes in her mouth.

  It didn’t change her conviction though.

  She would dissolve their false betrothal, come to London as herself, and make him beg at her feet for those same indulgences that Frenchwomen gave to him with such generosity. She ordered a dozen more gowns from Madame Maisonnat on the strength of her conviction.

  The next morning, she didn’t even feel nervous. This was not the game. The game would start when she moved herself to London, to her sister’s house, in one week. This was merely the prelude.

  Her maid wound her hair into a circle of braids and pulled a few curls loose to bob at her ears. Emma’s fingers were absolutely steady as she put discreet emeralds at her ears and buttoned the small buttons on one of Madame Maisonnat’s military-inspired gowns. She was a general in a campaign of great importance.

  Finally she looked at herself in the mirror. Of course, he might recognize her. She had not worn a mask in the darkness of the carriage, nor again in the darkness of the theater. But she didn’t think he would. She was forming the impression that the Earl of Kerr was a man who drifted from woman to woman, not examining them very closely. After all, he accepted her tale of Emelie.

  No, he probably wouldn’t recognize her. Context was important, and the great charm of Madame Maisonnat’s gown had nothing to do with an exuberant show of bosom. This was not the dress of a sparkling, glittering Frenchwoman, but that of a steady, responsible Englishwoman, prepared to dissolve her betrothal with an offer of guarded friendship and an acknowledgment of mutual disinclination to commit matrimony based on their fathers’ wishes.

  He was waiting in her sitting room whe
n she entered, so she gestured to the butler to close the doors without announcing her. He stood by the window overlooking the long sweep of the lawn to the apple orchard. For a moment she just feasted on the line of his thigh, the hair curling at his neck, the impatient click of his crop against his boots.

  He was very dear to her. Surprisingly so, she had to acknowledge.

  “Lord Kerr,” she said coolly, holding out her hand as she came toward him, “it is indeed a pleasure to see you.”

  He turned around. Her heart stopped. But—nothing happened.

  He showed no signs of recognizing Emelie. Instead, he bowed and took her hand, raising it to his lips as politely as if she were a matron of long acquaintance. “I can only apologize for my overly prolonged absence, Miss Loudan.”

  She inclined her head with just the right amount of steady, impersonal acceptance. “Won’t you sit down, my lord?” She walked over to a settee, but rather than sitting in the chair that she indicated with a wave of her hand, he sat down just beside her. Every atom in her body sprang to life at his scent, at his closeness, at the dearness of him.

  “So you would like to annul our engagement?” he enquired.

  She pushed away the black flood of disappointment in her heart as firmly as she could. She could think about that later. She knew her beloved’s shortcomings when it came to remembering his amorous adventures; there could be nothing new in the idea that she was no more novel than any other woman.

  She nodded. “I think it would be best.” She opened her reticule and took out the elaborate ring that his father had sent her father as a sign of their agreement. He opened his hand without hesitation, and she dropped it onto his palm. She didn’t trust herself to touch his fingers, even in passing.

  “I must say, I am grateful,” he said. “I wished to tell you this in person, Miss Loudan. Although as a man of honor, I would never have ended our betrothal, I do wish to marry another. I have lost my heart, foolish though that sounds. And so I am grateful for your decision.”

  “We should never have suited,” she said quickly, because a black wave was threatening to pull her under and send her crying from the room. “Child betrothals are a relic of the past.”

  “True,” he said, smiling genially. “Of course, the Elizabethans liked such things and found them useful.”

  “Quite.”

  “I am inordinantly fond of Elizabethan customs,” he said, obviously making conversation to cover the awkward fact that they, who had been betrothed to each other for years, had nothing to say.

  “Indeed,” Emma murmured, wondering where her father was. He had promised that he would come into the room and soothe the whole process. Of course, he had probably decided to reread some article on the diet of baboons and quite forgotten that Kerr was coming.

  “Almost as much as I love the customs of the French,” he said.

  Emma’s brows pulled together. This was a bit much! Not only did he make a laughingstock of himself and her all over London, with his Gallic obsessions, but he dared to throw it in her face.

  “I have heard as much,” she said stiffly.

  “So, you truly wish to dissolve our betrothal?” he said.

  “Even more so now that I hear you wish to marry,” she noted, her voice still chill.

  “She is a darling,” he said pensively. “I do wish that the two of you could meet. I feel as if we have known each other for years, you and I, although we have infrequently met.”

  She ground her teeth and thought cruel thoughts about her father. “Quite so,” she said.

  “Will you be coming to London?”

  “Naturally,” she said. “I shall come for the remainder of the season.” If he were a man of any conscience at all, he would know that his discarded fiancée would be desperate to find another husband. Except that at four and twenty she was decayed beyond all hope, as Bethany had said.

  “I shall introduce you,” he said with perfect sangfroid. “She is French; I’m afraid that I have a weakness for women of the Gallic persuasion.”

  “So I have heard,” Emma said, choking back a wish to strangle the man. She rose from the settee, thinking of nothing but escape. He rose as well, naturally.

  “I’m afraid that I have a very busy morning ahead of me, Lord Kerr.” She sank into a curtsy. “If you will excuse me . . .”

  “But I want to tell you more about her,” he said, and she accidentally met his eye for the first time since he entered the room.

  What she saw there made her stand as if she were rooted to the carpet.

  “She’s exquisite, like all Frenchwomen.”

  “Of course,” Emma whispered.

  He was walking toward her, and she knew that devil, wicked, laughing look on his face. She knew it, oh, how she knew it.

  “She wears her hair down on occasion. And she’s as good at playing the queen as the courtesan, if you follow me.”

  She nodded.

  “But of course I shouldn’t speak so to an innocent English maiden, should I? Should I, Emelie?”

  Surely that was joy in her heart. It was a new feeling, and so potent she couldn’t be sure. “Did you—when did you know?” she whispered.

  “Did you never think that I heard of your scene painting?”

  Her eyes widened. “You knew before—before we went to Hyde Park Theatre?”

  “There was something about you that I recognized, that made me uneasy and yet made me want to laugh.” He was standing just before her now, and somehow he’d trapped both her hands and had them at his mouth. “And then you suddenly told me that you painted flats. Darling, you are the only woman in all England who does such a thing. How could you think that I would not know it?”

  “It’s not at all well-known,” Emma objected. “Not a single audience member knows that I painted Mr. Tey’s flats.”

  “Have you forgotten my godmother, the Countess of Bredelbane?”

  “Oh,” Emma said, remembering all the letters exchanged between the countess and herself over the years.

  “She has pursued a relentless campaign to put the two of us before an altar.” He was pressing kisses into her palms, and her knees were weak again. “So, darling—” His eyes searched her face. “Am I to gather that you have not succeeded in quite all of my demands?”

  Pink crept into her cheeks, and she shook her head. He was sliding something over her finger, a heavy, elaborate ring that once belonged to his forefathers.

  “I should like the chance to try again,” he said simply.

  The smile was almost painful, she felt it so deeply.

  “Again. Again and again, Emma. Somehow I fell in love with you. With everything about you.”

  “Not with Emelie?” she asked, letting him pull her close and closer still.

  He shook his head. “ ’Twas Emma who put on the masquerade, and Emma who paints, and Emma who ravished me as Queen Titania, and Emma who ravishes me as herself.”

  He gave her a fierce kiss.

  “And it was Emma, damn it, who took such an unaccountably long time to contact me. I thought I’d die during these two weeks, Emma. I was afraid that I’d disappointed you, and you had decided to find a new husband.”

  “I’m sorry,” she whispered, tracing that line of his lip with an unsteady finger.

  “Don’t ever do that again!”

  “Do what?” She’d lost track of the conversation.

  “Stay away from me. Ever.”

  “You stayed away from me,” she pointed out. “If you knew, why didn’t you come here the next morning? Why did you dance with a Frenchwoman?”

  He looked down at her with his small, crooked smile. “I wanted a bit of revenge. For your calling in the favor. I found it hard, you see, to admit that I had lost the challenge. But I was about to come to you when you finally wrote me.”

  There was just one thing, one small question that she had to ask: “So you won’t wish to return to France someday?”

  He pressed a kiss on each of her eyelids. �
��I’m done trying to throw myself from Walter’s carriage. I loved him, and I love you. And I’ll love that babe once we have him or her. I have the fiercest wish to hang onto the reins, Emma.”

  “I love you,” she whispered into his neck. “Je t’adore.”

  “In English, Emma. In solid, old-fashioned, Anglo-Saxon English, I love you.”

  A Note About Scene Painters and Sisters

  As a female scene painter, Emma would have been quite unusual for the 1800s, although not utterly improbable, as women were employed in many areas of the stage by this period. I made Emma a scene painter because my imagination was caught by the description of Philip de Louther bourg’s sets for Drury Lane, created in the 1770s. One of de Loutherbourg’s innovations was to stretch colored silks on side scenes that served as transparent shades, casting a brilliant color on the backdrop. As soon as I read this detail (thanks to my brilliant research assistant, Franzeca Drouin), I imagined the scene between Emma and Gil: a proud Titania challenging—and conquering—her wayward Oberon. The description of the fairy woods is purely my invention, although the performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream was certainly probable. In the season 1811-1812, for example, there were eight Shakespeare revivals staged at Covent Garden theater alone.

  One final note: Emma’s sister Bethany Lynn is a real person, blessed with a passionate and loving husband who wrote me a note out of the blue, telling me of his wife’s birthday and his wish to give her a particularly interesting birthday present. So . . .

  Happy Birthday, Bethany Lynn!

  The Vicar’s Widow

  JULIA LONDON

  Chapter One

  London, 1816