by Mary Balogh
They stepped into the drawing room, and Blanche rose from a chair and came toward them while Sir Nelson Elwood, her husband, set down his book and got more slowly to his feet.
“Blanche.” Colin took his sister’s hand in his and bowed over it. She was still very beautiful, he thought, her face free of cosmetics and flawless, though no longer youthful, her blond hair thick and healthy. Beautiful but lacking in animation.
“Colin,” she said.
Nelson was helping their mother to her chair at the other side of the room, a remarkable piece of furniture, all pink velvet in a pink room from which all raw daylight was ruthlessly kept at bay by pink curtains that filtered in a light that was flattering to the mistress of the house. Her chair was higher than the others in the room and was reached by two steps that served as a footrest once she was seated. It gave her the advantage of seeming to dominate the room and all that was in it.
The four outriders, having divested themselves of their outdoor garments, came hurrying into the room to serve her.
“Out!” Colin said, pointing to them and indicating the door behind him with his thumb.
Everyone froze and looked at him as though he had sprouted an extra head. All except his mother, who sat back in her chair and regarded him with a half smile on her lips. The four men, all young, all beautiful, turned to look inquiringly at her.
“I would remind you,” Colin said, “that you are in my house at my pleasure. You may wait elsewhere in it until your presence is needed.”
“The master of the house has spoken, my dears,” his mother said, sounding amused, and the four men withdrew, passing close to Colin as they did so, eyeing him as though to intimidate him.
“Mother,” he said when he heard the door close behind them, “I daresay word has spread that I have begun to consider taking a bride. I have become acquainted with several ladies since returning to London this year, in some of whom I have an interest. Perhaps some of them have an interest in me. I have not made my choice yet. I do not feel anywhere close to doing so. Until I do, I will be careful not to raise expectations where they may not be fulfilled or to give marked attention where it may cause hurt. Miss Dunmore is an amiable young lady. It would be strange indeed if I did not enjoy her company and if it did not cross my mind that she might make me a good wife. I do not know her feelings on the subject. I do not have a close enough acquaintance with her to have asked, and she is a properly brought up lady who does not wear her heart on her sleeve. Lady Dunmore, on the other hand, clearly has ambitions, for which she cannot be blamed since she has several daughters to settle. Today my life was made considerably more difficult even as her hopes have been raised and her daughter has been made more vulnerable. I resent the fact that without any invitation to do so you have chosen to interfere in my affairs and play matchmaker. It must and will stop.”
“Colin,” Blanche said reproachfully.
Nelson returned to his chair, picked up his book, and apparently began reading it.
“Such masterful behavior, dearest,” his mother said. “I knew you would turn into a fine young man as well as an extraordinarily handsome one. But sometimes young men, just like young ladies, do not know their own minds and fritter away their lives in indecision and procrastination unless they are given a little help. Miss Dunmore is clearly the one for you. She is the loveliest of this year’s crop of young hopefuls, and my son cannot demean himself by choosing anything less than the best. How shameful it would be if someone more decisive were to snatch her from under your very nose—as your father did me. I had other prospects, you know, many of them, in fact, and several would have led to more dazzling matches than the one I made. But your father took one look at me and knew what a treasure was within his grasp. He grasped it without waiting for someone else to forestall him.”
“I am not my father,” Colin said. “And I have no claim upon Miss Dunmore, lovely though she is. If she chooses to encourage someone else, she may do so with my blessing. I will not have my hand forced, Mother. Not with her and not with anyone else. I will not have you take over my life and organize it to suit your interests. I shall marry when I am ready to do so, and I shall marry a woman entirely of my own choosing. I shall take her to Roxingley, and she will be mistress there. It will be run as she and I see fit. I hope you understand this. I do not want any unpleasantness between us. I do not want total estrangement either. But I am more than just your son. I am a man in my own right. I am a person. I am Lord Hodges.”
“Dearest,” she said, taking up an ostrich feather fan from the table beside her and fanning her face with it, “do sit down and have a quiet talk with me. It has been so long. Far too long. Blanche, ring the bell for tea.”
“I will not stay, Mother,” he said. “I have another appointment.”
It was not true, but he could not remain here any longer in this dim, feminine light.
“You must come back another time, then,” she said, offering her hand.
He crossed the room to take it and kiss the back of it, feeling curiously like a courtier upon whom his queen was conferring a special favor.
“Do send my men in as you leave, dearest,” she said. “It is wearying to have to fan my own face. Did you hear Lady Dunmore tell me how very handsome you are and how very much you resemble me? You may not have heard. You were conversing with Miss Dunmore at the time. And the mother added that she was convinced you must be my brother rather than my son. People are such flatterers, are they not? Do you think I look old enough to be your mother?”
“I know that you are my mother,” he said, turning away and taking a brief leave of Blanche and Nelson, who looked up from his book to nod at him.
A minute or so later he was hurrying along Curzon Street, trying to outpace his memories of the afternoon. His mother. That very public display in the park of an apparently well-advanced courtship. His mother. Miss Dunmore’s mother. Miss Dunmore herself, sweet and lovely and very possibly in daily expectation of his making a formal call upon her father. His mother. Her voice. Her endless vanity. Her way of maneuvering people and events so that she almost always got her way.
Elizabeth.
The viciousness of rumor and gossip was passing him by, it would seem. And Codaire too. Instead, it was all focusing upon Elizabeth. Her vivid appearance and exuberant behavior at the ball, particularly during their waltz, was being turned against her. Her past, real and imagined, was being dredged up and turned against her. Was the ton satisfied with whatever nastiness had been flying about yesterday? If she had gone to Riddings Park, would it die down now from lack of fresh fuel?
Had she gone?
A London without Elizabeth in it was going to be a bleak place.
He thought of yesterday’s kiss in the park and his depression deepened. He could very easily fall in love with her. Perhaps in a way he already had. But it was not an inclination he could indulge. She was not for him. Yet—
I care for you too much to marry you.
Oh no, Elizabeth. If you cared, you would have said yes.
Fifteen
Elizabeth’s day began with the announcement in the morning papers of the ending of her betrothal. It made her stomach turn over a bit and robbed her of any appetite for her breakfast. It was all so very public and embarrassing. Yet it was not nearly as upsetting as she had expected it to be when she saw it so starkly set out in print. It had been a huge mistake to accept the proposal of a man to whom she had felt no real attachment except gratitude. She almost deserved the embarrassment.
There was to be more than she expected, however. A letter from Viola, Marchioness of Dorchester, came with the morning post. She had written from her home at Redcliffe Court in Northamptonshire primarily to congratulate Elizabeth on her betrothal to Sir Geoffrey Codaire with whom she had a slight acquaintance going back a number of years. She remembered him as a worthy gentleman of steady character and wished Elizabeth w
ell. But the letter continued beyond mere congratulations. It was, in fact, brimming over with exuberant happiness, for not only had Viola heard, as everyone else in Britain had by now, that Napoleon Bonaparte had been captured and exiled to the island of Elba, thus ending the long wars, but she had also discovered just the day before that Harry had survived the last great bloody battle of the wars at Toulouse in southern France. She had given in to Marcel’s persuasions and was coming to London to celebrate the wonderful news by attending Elizabeth’s wedding.
You more than anyone else in the Westcott family deserve happiness, Elizabeth, she had written. How could I not come to celebrate your great day with you as you helped celebrate mine on Christmas Eve?
Oh dear. But it would surely be too late now, even if she wrote without delay, to stop Viola from coming—and presumably Marcel too and Abigail and Marcel’s twins. They would have to find some other way of celebrating.
The morning continued when Alexander joined her and their mother at the breakfast table and asked Elizabeth if she had read the paper.
“The notice about my betrothal?” she said. “Yes. I am glad it is there for all to see, though everyone knew anyway, of course. Now the gossip, which I am sure was rife yesterday, will have a chance to die down.”
“Not the notice,” he said, setting the paper down beside her plate. It was folded to display one column of the social pages. “I believe I am going to have to have another word with Codaire.”
She picked it up and read. A reliable source had reported that Lady Overfield was conspicuously absent from a certain well-attended soiree last evening, too embarrassed no doubt to show her face after humiliating her betrothed and rendering many of the most respectable elements of the ton aghast when she had set her cap quite outrageously at a far younger man, who would remain anonymous out of deference to his good name. Her affianced husband, the reader would be gratified to know, had broken off the engagement without further ado.
Oh. Well, she had known it would not be good. Gossip by its very nature was vicious and not always accurate.
“Please do not confront Geoffrey,” she said. “It will only make things worse, Alex, and prolong this whole ridiculous episode. I will doubtless survive the injustice.”
“Do you wish to change your mind and go to Riddings or Brambledean after all?” he asked. “I will give the order if you want.”
“It might be best, Lizzie,” their mother said. “Viola will understand.”
“No,” Elizabeth said. “I am going to stay. And I must go and get ready. Anna and Jessica will be here soon, and Anna is always on time.”
It was obvious which way the wind was blowing, of course, and would probably continue to blow for a while. As in so many cases of scandal, the woman was at fault and the man blameless. In Colin’s case it was a good thing. In Geoffrey’s it was not. But perhaps he would gain some satisfaction from being painted as some sort of wronged, martyred hero. The only thing she could do was wait it out until the gossip died down, as it inevitably would after a few days.
In the meantime, she had a mission to accomplish. She had to find that one bonnet on Bond Street that she would not be able to resist.
* * *
• • •
By the following morning more stories about Elizabeth had been dredged up from somewhere in the realm of fancy and embellished with rumors and half-truths and outright untruths as they were bandied about in almost every fashionable drawing room and ballroom and gentlemen’s club in London. Many members of the ton, though not by any means all, were quite happy to forget that just a few days earlier they had held Lady Overfield in the highest esteem as a dignified, modest, amiable widow. Some even claimed to recall that they had accepted their invitation to her betrothal ball with a certain misgiving since they remembered her flirtatious ways during her first marriage and feared she would make some sort of unseemly exhibition of herself at the ball. A few professed to have felt a similar unease at accepting their invitation to her wedding, upon the conviction that poor, respectable Sir Geoffrey Codaire was almost certainly going to rue the day before the summer was out.
There were those who were quite happy to recall that Lady Overfield had made herself ridiculous after the marriage of her brother last year by setting her cap at her sister-in-law’s far younger brother in a quite unseemly display of flirtation. It was she, rumor had it, who had insisted that he be invited to spend last Christmas at Brambledean when all the other guests were members of the Westcott family. And it was she who had maneuvered matters this spring so that the amiable and long-suffering—and very handsome—Lord Hodges waltzed with her at every ball. An unidentified source had even claimed to have seen her on the day following the disastrous betrothal ball hurl herself upon him in Hyde Park, where she had persuaded him to walk with her in the rain. It was very fortunate for him that he had not taken a chill. He had repulsed her advances, of course.
Colin heard it all in one way or another during the course of the morning and was appalled. But the trouble with gossip and slander was that it was almost impossible to stop once it had started. He felt all the helplessness of his situation. He thought he should go about everywhere denying everything on her behalf, but knew very well that it would do no good. He would merely add fuel to the flames.
The fact that the whole thing was ridiculous and would soon die down and be virtually forgotten within weeks did nothing to soothe his agitation. He hoped she had gone home to Riddings Park and would not hear the worst of what was being said about her, but it was not so. Alexander told him when they met at the House of Lords that she had decided not to go but was trying to carry on with her life as though nothing had happened to disturb it.
“I find all this hard to believe,” Alexander said. “We are all familiar with gossip. It can be sickening. But I do not remember anything quite as vicious and relentless as this. Where is it coming from?”
“Codaire?” Colin said, tight-lipped. “I am going in search of him. Enough is enough.”
“Save your efforts,” Alexander said. “He left town the very day you confronted him at White’s.”
Colin was left wondering if there was anything he could do. She had refused to marry him. He had no right to offer any sort of protection at all.
Then something else happened.
He arrived back at his rooms in the early afternoon to be informed by his disapproving valet that two visitors awaited him in his sitting room and one of them was a lady. He gave the impression that he would not have admitted her to what were strictly bachelor rooms had she not had her husband with her and had she not happened to be Lord Hodges’s sister. They had been here for longer than an hour.
Blanche? And Nelson? Here? What the devil?
Colin let himself into the sitting room and closed the door.
His sister was seated straight-backed on the edge of a chair, her hands folded in her lap. Nelson was standing over by the window. He had probably seen Colin returning home.
“Blanche?” Colin said. “Nelson? To what do I owe the honor? Have you been brought no refreshments?”
“We did not want any,” Blanche said, getting to her feet. “And we will not be here more than a minute or two longer. There is something you ought to know, Colin, and I have come to tell you. Mother has sent a notice to appear in tomorrow morning’s papers. It is an announcement of your betrothal to Miss Lydia Dunmore.”
“What?” He stared at her blankly.
“You did hear correctly,” she said. “It is all I have to say. Come, Nelson.”
“Wait.” Colin held up one hand. “My betrothal? But there is no such thing. I have not even offered for Miss Dunmore. I am not even . . . What . . . Did Mother send you? Does she know you are here?”
“Of course she does not,” she said. “Nelson?”
His brother-in-law approached across the room, nodded to Colin as he passed, and opened
the door for his wife. Blanche left without another word and Colin found himself staring at the closed door.
What the devil?
Until a few days ago he had not exchanged a single word with Blanche for eight years. They had never been close. The twelve-year gap in their ages had been virtually insurmountable while they were growing up. She had never seemed to like him, and he could not pretend ever to have felt particularly fond of her. For reasons of her own she had chosen to stay loyal to their mother and to be her virtual shadow even after her marriage to Nelson. She had no children and no sense of humor—strange that those two things seemed to go together in his mind. Yet now, right out of the blue, she had chosen to come here, where the presence of ladies was much frowned upon, to warn him that his mother was up to one of her manipulative tricks—though a particularly outrageous one even for her. She was about to have his betrothal announced and make it next to impossible for him to withdraw.
Good God!
Did Lady Dunmore know about it? But it seemed unlikely that his mother would have gone to these lengths without the lady having at least some inkling of what was in the wind. Did Miss Dunmore know? And approve? But Colin had the feeling that that young lady was not often consulted on her own future.
What the devil was he going to do?
And why had Blanche broken the silence of years and the indifference of a lifetime to come here to warn him? He assumed it was a warning. Had their mother finally done something to outrage even her? Did she not want the competition of a younger, very lovely sister-in-law to take attention from herself? Yet strangely he had never sensed any real vanity in Blanche.
Did it matter what her motive had been?