Let Me Be The One (12 page)

Though he spoke no more than the truth, Elizabeth could feel herself flushing. "Perhaps you would allow me the opportunity to win back my shilling." With no more warning than that, she and Becket were off like a shot in the direction of the stable.

* * *

Lady Battenburn rested her head against the back of the tub. A folded towel supported her nape. Her throat was exposed and droplets of water had pooled in the hollow at its base. Ribbons of steam spiraled from the tub. Her fair skin glowed in the candlelight like the petals of a rose damp with morning dew. Her eyes were closed, the dark lashes making faint shadows on her cheeks.

"I noticed your dance card was filled this evening," she said. "That is certainly a good sign."

Elizabeth sat in the same wing chair she had occupied the previous night. She had removed her slippers and rested her heels on the stool. Her toes twitched inside her stockings. She stretched and curled deliberately, easing the ache in her feet. "It is a sign they feel pity for me," she said. "This afternoon I had cause to tell Eastlyn the story of how I was injured. Lord Northam and Southerton heard it also. I would not put too much stock in their attentions this evening."

Lady Battenburn pooh-poohed this comment with a dilatory wave of her hand. "It was not only those three who attended you. Why, you danced with Rutherford, Lord Heathering, Framingham, and..." Her voice trailed off. "I shall have to review your dance card to refresh my memory, the list was so long. I do not believe you completed a single set with Harrison. He sulked in the card room again, I think."

"Hardly sulking. He must have been relieved not to do his duty dance with me." In any event, the baron needed no encouragement to retire to the card room. "As for the others who asked me to dance, they were merely following in Eastlyn's wake. The marquess and his friends set certain expectations without giving voice to a single word. I said as much to Lord Northam tonight, but he was having none of it."

"I am not surprised, since it was very nearly insulting for you to have said so." Louise touched a finger to her mouth and tapped her lips lightly. "It is too bad Eastlyn is leaving on Friday. I must say I was devastated by the news. He will miss the treasure hunt, and I had thought after seeing you with him on the dance floor that I would make you his partner."

Then it was a very good thing the marquess was leaving. "I think if you set your mind to it, you can make a proper match of Lady Powell and Lord Southerton. There is interest there, to be sure."

Louise would not be moved from her course. She flicked water in Elizabeth's direction, not caring that she made the carpet damp. "What about the earl? He rode with you at the hunt." When Elizabeth did not reply, the baroness thrust out her lower lip. "You intend to be difficult, don't you? Then I am going to concentrate my efforts on bringing Northam around. You should do the same, Libby. Harrison says the earl would make a most suitable partner for you."

"Are you looking for me to leave?" Elizabeth asked.

Louise's lashes flew open. Her head swiveled in Elizabeth's direction and she took measure of the seriousness of the question. "Leave? I do hope you know by now that it is impossible for you to leave us. Harrison and I could not possibly countenance such a thing. It is only that we are trying to set you up properly. It is fitting that you take a husband, Libby. You can leave our nest, as it were, and still be under our wing."

The stool tipped as Elizabeth stood with a speed and force that spoke to her agitation. She made no effort to right it before she turned her back on Louise and crossed the room to the window. Had she always known this day would come? she wondered. She didn't like to think so."It is calculating," she said quietly.

"Of course it is," Louise said flatly. "How naive you would be if you believed otherwise. Proposals invariably turn on matters of mutual benefit. Money. Title. Power. Influence. These things are always considered. Love matches, to the extent they exist at all, are formed when the interests of all parties are in equilibrium."

"That is very cynical."

"It is
true."

Elizabeth pressed her forehead to a windowpane. The glass was cool against her skin. "I do not think I can do it."

"What's that?" Louise sat up in the tub. The towel behind her neck slipped into the water. She retrieved it and slapped it on the carpet with all the flair of laying down a gauntlet.

The sound startled Elizabeth and she spun around.

"Speak up, Elizabeth," Louise said sternly. "You know I cannot abide mulishness."

Elizabeth's nostrils flared slightly as she took a steadying breath. She let it out slowly, calming herself so she could think clearly. "I said, I do not think I can do it."

"Do what?" Louise exclaimed. "Pray, do not be such a child. There is nothing for you to do. Northam will be brought around, just as I said. It shall all be accomplished so skillfully that he will think it was his idea. Men really have no sense of how they are led about and it would only subvert our interests to rub their noses in it. You will leave the particulars up to me. I shall see to everything."

Elizabeth knew Louise thought this settled the matter. She had only one card to play. "My father will—"

"Will be delighted," said Louise. "Oh, that may be putting too pretty a bow on the thing, but you take my meaning. He will not protest, Elizabeth, and indeed, he may be relieved. The opportunity for you to begin a family of your own will offer him some respite, will it not?"

Chilled of a sudden, her face drained of all color, Elizabeth moved away from the window. Even knowing the answer, she forced herself to ask, "You have spoken to him of this?"

"Corresponded only. Not the particulars, naturally, but the
idea
of it all. I have leave to act as I think is best." Louise's voice took on a husky, soothing subtlety. "Poor Libby. Is it really so bad? Or is it just that you had permitted yourself to believe you held the reins of your own fate? One does not, you know. It is the nature of fate that it is done
to
you, not
by
you. Surely you can find some cause to rejoice that it is Northam that has been chosen. Harrison had been considering Mr. Rutherford, but there is only the slightest chance he will inherit someday. His prospects are little better than Mr. Marchman's."

Elizabeth pressed one hand to her temple. Her head felt as if it had been stuffed with cotton batting. Louise's plan surpassed anything she had considered in regard to her future. That her father had been in agreement was not in itself surprising; that he had been apprised of this turn was.

"It is all rather too much, isn't it?" Louise asked. She felt at a loss herself. It was difficult to console Elizabeth from her bath. "Get me my robe, dear. There's a good girl. You must know that I have the very best intentions where you are concerned. Have I not considered your feelings in so many ways over the years? But you are six and twenty, Elizabeth, and while the existence of your limp is unenviable, it is not tragic. It was not meant to protect you from the circumstances of living your life." Louise rose gracefully from the tub and slipped into the robe Elizabeth held out to her. She belted it tightly about her waist and the material clung tenaciously to her damp and voluptuous curves. "Is there someone else, Libby? Someone else who has struck you as more fitting? I have despaired of seeing you catch anyone's eye. You are so very good at keeping suitors at a distance."

Elizabeth righted the overturned footstool. "I don't know what you mean." But she did, and she knew Louise knew it. Elizabeth almost wished the baroness would take her to task for her lie. She could accept these small cruelties. It was the little kindnesses she found unbearable. In the face of Louise's tactical silence, Elizabeth said, "No. There is no one else."

Louise nodded, pleased with this confirmation. "I observed you from the parapet this afternoon. It seemed that you engaged in a small flirtation with the earl. Did I mistake that?"

For a moment Elizabeth thought she had been spied in the act of returning Northam's kiss. The memory of his mouth on hers, her tongue against his lips, stirred a response that ran under the surface of her skin from the back of her neck all the way to her toes. Reason asserted itself, and she suppressed the memory and the stirrings. It was not the kiss that had been seen, but her playful, spontaneous act of knocking Northam's hat off his head. He had run her to ground in the woods, and while Louise couldn't know for certain that anything untoward had occurred there, her fanciful, romantic, and ultimately shrewd notions were filling in for the facts she lacked.

Elizabeth wanted to reach back in time and rub out a moment's recklessness. Regret nearly stilled her heart. At her sides her knuckles were white. She came to awareness gradually and realized that Louise was speaking to her again.

"It is too bad that Northam's friends followed you into the woods. Harrison had cause to curse his regrettable luck that he could not have arrived sooner."

Elizabeth's palms were clammy. She resisted the urge to open her fists and wipe them in the folds of her aqua silk gown. "Do you mean to say the baron and his friends deliberately followed us?"

Louise thought she would lose all patience with Elizabeth's obtuseness. "I mean exactly that. If you are to be compromised, then it should be the baron who finds you and demands satisfaction on behalf of your father. It does no good at all for Northam's friends to come upon the scene first and drive you out as if they were beating rabbits from the thicket."

Elizabeth could have told Louise that Eastlyn and Southerton had not come upon her and Lord Northam in a clinch, but she was no longer certain it was true. She had heard nothing of their approach until Northam pointed it out after they had left the woods. Now she had cause to wonder if the earl had not been aware of them earlier. The three friends seemed to share an uncanny sense among them.

"I cannot be easily compromised, Louise. As you have pointed out, I am six and twenty, an age that implies some maturity and the license to give my consent."

"Fiddlesticks. You are the Earl of Rosemont's daughter and your reputation can be ruined as easily as a gel's in the first flush of maidenhood. It is all in how one manages the aftermath, I assure you."

Elizabeth had cause to know Louise Edmunds, the Right Honorable Lady Battenburn, was a master of manipulating the aftermath. "It seems it is all arranged, then."

"More or less." She regarded Elizabeth's bleak expression with concern."You are overset, m'dear. I always forget how easily shocked you are. One would think that by this time..." She lifted her hands helplessly. "But no, you have no head for matters such as these. It is just as well that the baron and I have taken you into our bosom. I shudder when I think of how you would have gotten on without us."

Elizabeth suppressed her own shudder. She said with credible calm, "Will you excuse me?"

"Of course. I have kept you too long as it is. Harrison, I fear, is still at the card table. I only hope the outcome will be different from last night's debacle."

Elizabeth did not comment. She let herself out and hurried down the hallway to her own suite in the north wing. Once she was inside she leaned over the washstand in her bathing room and emptied the contents of her stomach into the porcelain basin.

Chapter 4

It was still the middle of the night when Northam roused himself from his bed. He dressed in the dark and took no candlestick with him when he left his room. Four nights had passed since Southerton's snuffbox had gone missing, and the earl thought he might have missed his one and only opportunity to surprise the Gentleman Thief.

He shook his head, his mouth set derisively as he considered that moniker. It showed a lamentable lack of creativity on the part of the
Gazette's
writers, though Northam supposed it was accurate enough. Still, there were more colorful cant expressions that could have been made to serve and given this sneaksman an excess of notoriety that might have made him easier to apprehend.

This particular thief—if the stories could be believed—expressed no interest in celebrity and, when confronted from time to time as he inevitably had been by those whose jewels he was lifting, made an elegant leg and apologized for the necessity of his activity. Southerton, sleeping as he always had in the very deepest embrace of Morpheus, had not been awakened by the Gentleman Thief and would not have been moved to shoot the fellow if he had. It was much more likely that South would have inquired as to whether a decent living could be made lifting snuffboxes, earbobs, necklaces, and the like, and then questioned the man as to all the particulars of his profession. In short, South would have talked the man to death, or at least engaged him in pointless conversation until help arrived in the form of the marquess. One could at least count on Eastlyn to shoot the intruder first and ask for the particulars later.