She glanced down at her ink-stained fingers with dismay. It seemed they were always ink-stained nowadays, whether or not she’d managed to achieve any sort of progress on her fourth novel. Even when she scrubbed them with soap until her hands were raw, it still left vaguely grey marks, as if her skin had soaked it up permanently, like a thief’s brand. Thank God for gloves.
She shuddered. If anyone found out—if anyone ever discovered where her money had truly come from—they would all be ruined. Victoria and Isobel would never make good matches, not with such a notorious sister.
But for the moment, they had a roof over their heads, food in their bellies, and clothes on their backs. Fine clothes, at least for the twins. Certainly better than what they’d had in Bristol, with Papa frittering away all of his money at the racetrack, until he’d taken a rather sudden illness from which he had never quite recovered. But there had never been much to go around even before his illness, and by the time he’d finally passed on, they hadn’t had so much as a handful of shillings to rub together. If not for the fact that she’d sent her first novel off to a publisher for consideration the same week he’d taken ill, they might have been ruined entirely.
Cousin Rupert had arrived shortly after the funeral, when Papa was not yet cold in his grave, and pronounced to all that he was the viscount now, and he didn’t intend to let his three cousins live off of his largesse. So Poppy had packed their belongings beneath his watchful eye, as if he thought her a thief, and she and the girls had trundled off to Bath, where Poppy had taken the lease of a small house that they could hardly afford. At least until her second novel had sold.
And it had sold well. Well enough for the girls to have a governess to train them in social graces and deportment. Well enough to keep her in paper and ink and pen nibs. Well enough to hire Lady Winifred to sponsor the girls for their first Season and take them up to London the very moment they had all come out of mourning.
Perhaps it was too late for her, but the twins ought to have a chance. Papa might not have cared enough to set aside even a pittance to bring them out, but she would never let their lives be determined by the fickle whims of men.
Poppy tamped down the rising indignation that burned in her chest. The past was in the past—she would do better to let it stay there. Her anger at their circumstances had the regrettable tendency to slip over her face if she did not make a concentrated effort to exorcise it, and though the twins would likely find suitors on their own merits, she could just as easily erase their chances with her penchant for looking like a ‘pinch-faced prune,’ as Cousin Rupert had put it.
She wasn’t a prune. She wasn’t.
But she could see the peevishness, the fury that fate had crossed her, in her face in the mirror. She scrubbed at her cheeks with her hands and turned away from her reflection with a sigh. Time for bed at last.
∞∞∞
“Miss Fairchild, you really must do something with your hair,” Lady Winifred chided as she accepted the glass of lemonade that Poppy had brought to her.
Resisting the urge to pat her dark hair to check it for herself, Poppy pursed her lips against the unkind response. “Rather like trying to make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear, I’d think,” she said. “The girls have a lady’s maid for their toilettes. I’m certainly not about to hire one for myself.” Or overburden poor Becky.
“I don’t know,” Lady Winifred said, squinting up at her. “If you gave it any effort at all, I suspect you could almost achieve prettiness.”
Almost pretty. What lovely praise. Any woman would be grateful for it, surely. But she let the back-handed compliment wash over her like water and took her seat beside Lady Winifred. She wasn’t quite sure how, exactly, Lady Winifred had wrangled this invitation from the Duchess of Rushton, but the twins certainly seemed to be enjoying themselves.
Of course they were enchanting; two pure and perfect visions of feminine loveliness. Victoria had chosen a rose-hued gown while Isobel had gone for a summery yellow, and they were both petite and elegant and everything that Poppy had never been, even at that age.
They were both currently engaged in conversation with a group of young men, one of whom looked quite lovestruck indeed. Poppy allowed herself a vicarious flutter of satisfaction—they might not have much in the way of a dowry to recommend them, but girls of their rare beauty wouldn’t need it. No fortune hunters for her sisters; they could very well have any man they pleased eating straight from the palms of their hands.
“You could do with a new gown or two as well,” Lady Winifred sniffed. Poppy had quite forgotten, in the intervening time between the first such remark and this one that she was meant to be embarrassed.
“What’s wrong with this one?” she asked in surprise.
“You look like somebody’s maiden aunt,” Lady Winifred said, which was rather a bit too much coming from a woman who was herself somebody’s maiden aunt. “Your gown is years out of date, and is that an ink stain I see upon your skirt?” She gave a sniff of disapproval as Poppy tried, surreptitiously, to layer the pleats of her skirt over the offending mark. She had thought the navy muslin had camouflaged the mark rather well, but it seemed that nothing could escape Lady Winifred’s gimlet eye.
“I suppose,” Lady Winifred began magnanimously, “that were you to take some pains with your appearance, you still have enough youth left in you that you might make a match of your own. Oh, you certainly can’t aspire to any great heights,” she said, gesturing to a cluster of noblemen standing near the duchess who was on the terrace, holding a small pink bundle of fabric in her arms that Jilly suspected must contain the duchess’ young daughter. “But perhaps a widower,” Lady Winifred suggested. “A man looking for a mother to his children.”
Poppy ground her teeth together. “I am not seeking a husband,” she said. And then, lest Lady Winifred think her a giddy girl with delusions of grandeur, she added, “And even if I were, it would not be men like those.” This, with the barest nod toward the gentlemen that Lady Winifred had indicated. “They’re too…too merry.”
Papa had been merry, too—when he had had a rare good day at the track. But his moods had always been subject to the whims of fate, and Poppy had learned quickly that life was much more peaceful when she hadn’t any vacillating humors to contend with. Most of the noblemen she had met—though those were few—had been all stuff and no substance. They could afford to live that way, she supposed, but she did not care to play the unwary captive to their inconstant moods.
“I can’t like it,” she said. “I simply could not abide such a capricious demeanor. I wouldn’t wed a man like that if he came equipped with a noble title and ten thousand a year to recommend him.” She gave a little shiver, despite the heat of the day. No, that sort of frivolity would never do. Which was not to say she entertained any thoughts, no matter how idle, of marriage. But if she did…if she did, she would choose a different sort of man altogether. Not a nobleman, nor one with any inclination toward the social whirl. A solemn man, to match her own disposition. No, perhaps not solemn, since the word itself evoked a sort of melancholy feeling—but sober.
Yes. Sober would do nicely.
Chapter Two
David Kittridge, Earl of Westwood, who had both a noble title and quite a good deal more than ten thousand a year, was drunk. Although the process of achieving that state hadn’t been quite as pleasing as he would have expected, now that he’d arrived at it he was finding it very satisfactory indeed.
Elaine was getting married. He’d known it was coming, of course. Everyone had. One could hardly go about London these days without tripping over the two of them, Leighton and Elaine.
It seemed unfathomable that only a month ago she’d given him the hope that she might accept his suit instead, but no—the announcement had been in all the papers just this morning, and she’d taken the damned marquess after all.
He slouched in his chair. Noticed his glass had gone empty again. Snared the decanter of whisky and abandoned the
glass altogether.
After a good swig or two—or five, who was counting?—he turned his head to the side and saw a pair of boots. How very odd. One would think that whomever had left them ought to know better than to abandon their footwear in Jilly’s library. But then they moved a step closer, and David was certain that couldn’t be right—footwear did not move on its own. Even three sheets to the wind, he could still recall that much.
He let his eyes wander up, past the boots and legs (they were attached, after all) all the way up to the rather disapproving face of his brother-in-law, the Duke of Rushton.
“Go away and let me soak myself in peace,” David said, affecting a careless tone. “There’s a good chap.” He gave the duke a bland smile and took another hearty swig of whisky.
Instead the duke pried the bottle from his clenched fingers and set it quite out of reach. “Everyone else has left,” he said. “And yet I find you in my library, availing yourself of my whisky.”
“Stubble it,” David gritted out. “Need I remind you how often you once found yourself in precisely the same state?”
“I had good reason,” the duke reminded him. “So what’s yours?”
Wordlessly, David extended the crumpled-up newspaper in his direction, and the duke took it and shook it out to ease some of the crinkles that David’s tense fingers had wrought in the offending object.
“Ah,” the duke said at last. “Lady Elaine, of the golden curls.”
And lovely blue eyes. And rosebud lips. And breasts the size of cantaloupes, which always seemed to be an instant away from bursting from the bodice of her sinful gowns. She was everything that David had ever wanted, all wrapped up into one delicious package.
Which had then been delivered to another man.
“I love her,” David said morosely.
The duke snorted. “No, you don’t—you don’t know her well enough to love her. You’re besotted with her cleavage.”
Well, there was rather a lot of it to be besotted with.
“I would have married her,” David said, “but it seems as though she’d rather be Leighton’s marchioness than my countess.” Damned Leighton could go straight to the devil, with David’s compliments. The man had two mistresses. He didn’t need Elaine, too.
“She’s vapid,” Rushton said, taking the seat across from him. “Entirely empty-headed. Hasn’t the good sense God gave a gnat.”
Having never once considered intelligence—in either party—a prerequisite for marriage, David blinked in befuddlement. “What’s that got to do with anything?”
“You’d have been bored to tears in a week.” Rushton sighed, pouring himself a measure of brandy. “She might be beautiful, but that’s all she is. Can you imagine sitting down to breakfast, day after day, with a woman of no more intelligence than the average sheep?”
David slanted Rushton a poisonous glance. “I thought you had likened her to a gnat.”
“The intellect of a sheep, and the good sense of a gnat,” Rushton replied, sipping his brandy. He made a vague gesture with his free hand. “Unless you’ve a marked preference for farmyard creatures and irritating insects, you’re well rid of her.”
Of course he wasn’t. Every time he closed his eyes, he saw her beautiful face, the enchanting dip of her upper lip, the silky pout of the lower. Her eyelashes, so long and graceful. The delicate curve of her cheeks, her elegant neck.
“I could live without breakfast conversation,” he said. But he could not live without Elaine, without her sparkling beauty, her lustrous gold hair.
“You think you could,” Rushton said. “But only because you’ve never been married. Entering into that state with the wrong person would be a kind of torture.”
David cracked an eye. “You had better not be telling me you’ve deserted my sister,” he growled. “Because I’d have to beat you.”
“In your present state?” The duke scoffed. “No—Jilly is almost alarmingly perfect for me,” he said. “I can’t imagine what it would be like not to have her at my table in the morning. I know I should be able to, since it wasn’t too terribly long ago that we were married, but I can’t. I don’t tolerate her presence; I cherish it. But I don’t simply gaze into her eyes from across the table or marvel at her beauty—although she is beautiful, you understand. We talk,” he said.
“Talk?” David uttered the word as though he’d never heard it before. “About what?”
Rushton shrugged. “Everything. Nothing. The point is, when I look at her, I am rarely thinking of her physical attributes, although they are considerable. They’re not what makes her who she is. It’s everything else inside her—her thoughts, her opinions, her feelings. That’s who you marry, Westwood. Not the glorious bosom or the golden hair.”
It seemed such an abstract concept to David. Still, in an effort to refute what he had taken to be disparagement to his character, he said, “I’d care. About her thoughts and feelings and whatnot.”
Rushton laughed lightly and shook his head. “No, you wouldn’t,” he said. “Because she almost certainly hasn’t got any. If she has so much as a single opinion beyond what gowns to wear, I’ve seen absolutely no evidence of it. You don’t want to be bored with your wife, Westwood. Learn to look beyond a pretty face.”
David dropped his head back against the chair. “And the bosom. Don’t forget the bosom.”
“Just so,” Rushton said, with a wry grin. “Just so.”
End preview.
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