My Lord Winter (18 page)

“Not that one,” said Jane.

“‘Tis the one you asked for, my lady.”

“But I always wear blue when I am with him. He will recognize me at a glance. I know, the rose pink with the matching toque.”

“But you didn’t like the toque. You bought them roses for your head instead, ’member?”

“Yes, but it will hide my hair.”

“And make you look a good ten years older, my lady,” Ella objected.

“So much the better. The earl will not know me unless we come face to face. I wish I dared borrow the marchioness’s rubies. Their magnificence would blind him, since he is used to seeing me shabby.”

“Rubies! That you won’t, or I’ll be turned off wi’out a character. Her ladyship said as pearls is the only proper jewels for a young lady, and pearls is what you’ll wear.”

Trepidation destroyed Jane’s usually healthy appetite and she did not enjoy her dinner. She was seated beside the Honourable Stephen Daventry, a fair, foppish gentleman in his middle twenties, who was not best pleased when she responded at random to all the latest on-dits. Nonetheless, he asked her to stand up with him for the first dance. She could think of no excuse to refuse.

The Fitzgeralds and Chattertons had not been invited to dine, but to Jane’s relief they arrived early for the ball. As they left the receiving line, Lady Chatterton stopped to speak to another matron with a daughter in tow. Jane seized her chance and hurried her friends off to one of the small antechambers set aside for guests seeking privacy. Closing the door, she set her back against it to discourage unwanted company.

“Lord Wintringham is coming here tonight!”

“Ned? He can’t be, Lady Jane. He’s never been to a ball as long as I’ve known him and he didn’t mentioned it when I saw him a couple of days past.”

“The countess insists that he escort her. I had it from my maid who had it from his valet.”

“Lady Wintringham?” groaned Lavinia. “Surely she has abandoned hope that he will offer for me! Mama has, thank heaven.’’

“What will you do, Jane?” asked Daphne anxiously. “Are you going to let him discover who you really are?”

“Not if I can help it. Please, will you all help me?”

“Of course,” Fitz assured her. “Just tell us what you want us to do.”

“Mostly to keep me informed of his whereabouts. Lavinia, pray stay by me whenever you can, since he avoids you, and Fitz, keep away for he is certain to wish to talk to you. Daphne, if you can bear to absent yourself from the festivities after so long a deprivation, perhaps you could claim to be tired and I shall accompany you to the ladies’ withdrawing room. The less time I spend in the ballroom, the better.”

“He will not recognize you from a distance in that quiz of a headdress,” Lavinia told her candidly.

“That is why I put it on. It is amazingly horrid, is it not? Oh dear, I hear the music starting. Mr. Daventry will be looking for me.”

“I’ll go and see if the coast is clear,” Fitz offered. He opened the door a few inches, sneaked round it and down the short passage, and peered round a pillar. From the rear, he looked every inch a conspirator.

After scanning the ballroom from his vantage point for a few moments, he beckoned and they joined him. “He’s not here yet, unless he made straight for the card room, but he ain’t no gamester. Being tall, he’ll be easy to spot. There’s young Daventry, Lady Jane, with a face like the end of a wet week.”

“Can you see my partner, Fitz?” Lavinia asked as Jane slipped away through the crowd to find Mr. Daventry.

He was easily persuaded that she preferred to be in a set close to the musicians, at the far end of the room from the entrance. Edmund would not see her when he came in. The obvious corollary to this advantage was that she would not see him. Already the flower-bedecked ballroom with its glittering chandeliers was filled with glittering matrons, gentlemen in blue or black coats, and silk-flower bedecked damsels. The Daventrys’ ball looked set to win the accolade of being described as a shocking squeeze.

Jane missed several steps in the more complex figures of the cotillion, in her effort to keep a watch on the entrance over the heads of several hundred guests. By the end of the dance, her fastidious partner appeared to be weighing in his mind the balance between her fortune and her clumsiness.

Fitz appeared at her side and murmured, “He’s not here yet,” so with tolerable composure she took to the floor again for a country dance with Lord Charles.

His lordship applied to the Dashing White Sergeant all the vigour of a country sportsman. Jane was hot and thirsty by the end. The silk toque had miraculously stayed in place but it made her head even hotter.

“Lemonade!” she panted, fanning herself.

“We’ll never find a footman in this crush. Let’s sneak into the supper-room.”

She agreed; Edmund was unlikely to make for the supper-room as soon as he arrived.

Several other people had made their way to the supply of lemonade, champagne, and punch. Jane and Lord Charles stayed there, chatting to friends, until Lord Ryburgh sought her out for the next dance. Her hand on his arm, they returned to the ballroom.

As she stepped through the double doorway, in the centre of one long side of the room, Fitz once more materialized at her elbow.

“Ned’s here! “he hissed.

She did not need the warning. Her gaze had automatically turned towards the entrance, visible now since sets were just beginning to form as the musicians tuned up. Edmund stood there with Lady Wintringham, Lady Daventry, and Alicia Daventry.

Jane thought him by far the handsomest man in the room, though his face was aloof, forbidding. Half of her wanted desperately to speed to his side and bring a warm smile to his grey eyes. Her faint-hearted half imagined his aloofness turning to ice instead, when he realized that she had deceived him.

She spared a moment of pity for Alicia as she turned to Lord Ryburgh and said urgently, “I am still horridly hot. Shall we go out onto the terrace?” Gripping his arm, she tugged him towards the orchestra’s end of the room.

“Is there a terrace?” he enquired.

“Of course, all proper ballrooms have terraces. Those tall windows on the other side open on to it, but we shall disturb people if we cross directly.”

Though he followed her lead, he objected, “I expect it’s raining.”

“Surely a farmer is not afraid of a spot of rain!”

“No, but it would be unconscionable in me to expose you to a wetting. Lady Jane.”

“Let us at least see if it has stopped.” She pulled aside a heavy blue velvet curtain. “Here are the French doors.”

Lord Ryburgh opened one and stepped out. “It is still raining.”

Following him, she held out one hand palm up. “No more than the merest mizzle, and I believe that is stopping. I begin to think you do not want to be out here with me.”

“My dear Lady Jane...” He hesitated as two couples came after them, the girls giggling.

She was afraid he was going to insist on returning to the ballroom. Turning up her face to the sky, she said firmly, “It is quite dry now, and the air is delightfully balmy. I do believe the moon is coming out. Let us stroll in the garden.” She grasped his sleeve and pulled him down the steps to the flagstone path.

The damp, gusty air, scented with some flower she could not identify, was indeed balmy but not precisely warm on her bare shoulders. The moon emerged helpfully between high, racing clouds, to reveal a pretty little summer-house, glassed on three sides, that Alicia had once shown Jane. Thither Jane led her suitor. She was far too fearful of meeting Edmund to consider what Lord Ryburgh’s emotions must be, until, seating herself on a well-cushioned bench, she found him on his knees before her. He clasped her hand.

“My dear Lady Jane, I had not hoped for such a sign of partiality, such encouragement I dare call it! I am all too aware that, though I feel myself in the prime of life, to you I must appear stricken in years.”

“Oh no, my lord, pray do not...”

He took her agitated attempt to forestall a proposal as a polite denial of his venerable age. “Yes, yes, I am a good deal older than you, my dear Jane. You are too sensible not to be aware that I am therefore settled in life, not subject to the whims and crotchets of younger men. Certainly my sincere devotion to you is no whim. I believe we can deal comfortably together despite...”

“I beg you, sir, say no more.” She pulled her hand from his, near to tears. “I am very sorry if I have misled you, but my feelings are not such as you would wish in a wife.”

Agile despite his years, which after all probably numbered no more than forty, he rose to his feet and  sat down beside her. “My dear child,” he said with a sort of rueful sympathy, “there is no call for tears. If I have been misled it was by your mama’s hints and my own wishes. Can you give me no hope that your sentiments may change?”

“I f-fear not, sir,” she stammered past the lump in her throat.

“Then I trust we can remain friends.”

His unexpected kindness was too much for her precarious composure. The tears escaped and, turning her face to his shoulder, she wept. His arm about her in a comforting embrace, he thrust a handkerchief into her hand.

“I w-wish you were my father,” she muttered into the handkerchief, surprising him into a wry laugh.

“Perhaps it’s a daughter I want more than a wife. Unfortunately it’s a bit difficult to come by the one without the other.”

That drew a watery giggle from her, followed by a shiver as a chilly gust of wind swirled through the summer house.

“Time to go in,” said Lord Ryburgh firmly.

“I must wash my face. There is a side door we can use.”

“Excellent. I must straighten my cravat.”

She tucked her hand confidingly into the crook of his arm and they stepped out into the garden. Another gust whipped her skirts, and then, without further warning, a drenching squall enveloped them. Jane’s thin silk was sodden within seconds.

Hand in hand they ran up the barely visible path, round the base of the terrace, and in through the side door. Her gown clung to her, her toque had collapsed in ruins about her ears, and icy streams trickled down her back, but Jane’s only thought was that she had the perfect excuse to go home.

Lord Ryburgh promised to send a message to Miss Gracechurch, and Jane, her teeth chattering, hurried to the ladies’ withdrawing room. There, happily for her reputation, she found three more young ladies who had been caught by the squall on the terrace.

Not that she cared a farthing for her reputation at that moment. Lord Ryburgh’s proposal had made her quite sure that the only person she wanted to marry was Edmund Neville, Earl of Wintringham—but when he discovered her secret, her beloved Edmund would turn back into “My Lord Winter.”

With any luck, Jane thought forlornly, she would take a chill and die.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Edmund woke with a groan and glared at Alfred through slitted eyes. “Go ’way,” he growled. The sunshine pouring between the opened curtains started a steam-engine pounding in his head.

“Beg pardon, my lord, but you’re expecting Mr. Selwyn at ten. Will I tell Mr. Mason to say you’re not home?”

“Selwyn! No, anyone else, but I won’t risk offending Selwyn.” He began to sit up, then sank back with another groan, his eyes shut tight. The Daventrys’ ball had been such a ghastly experience that he had overindulged in punch there and on his return home had retreated to the library with a bottle of brandy.     

“Just drink this down, my lord,” coaxed Alfred. “You’ll be right as a trivet in no time flat.”

Venturing to part one pair of eyelids by a hairsbreadth, Edmund regarded the glass hovering above him. It contained a singularly revolting-looking, thick, brownish liquid, and the smell that wafted to his nostrils made his stomach heave. He hauled one leaden arm from the comforting warmth of the bedclothes and pinched his nose.

“What the devil is it?”

“A little remedy for what ails you.”

“Where did you get it? I’ve never been top-heavy before in my life.”

“I winkled the receipt out of Lord Danforth’s man years ago,” said Alfred complacently. “You never know when something like this’ll come in handy. Swears by it, he does. Drink it down quick and you won’t hardly notice the taste, my lord.”

Nothing could possibly make him feel worse, Edmund decided. He sat up and swallowed the stuff in two gulps.

For a moment it was touch and go whether he’d need the basin with which Albert had prudently armed himself. For another few minutes he was ready to accuse his faithful valet of murder. Then, miraculously, his head cleared.

Unfortunately, the removal of the steam-engine left space for memories of the previous night. His aunt had paraded him around the ballroom, presenting him to bashful misses and their hopeful mamas. Though he had protested to Lady Wintringham that his dancing skills, never superior, were decidedly rusty, he had been unable to avoid asking several young ladies to stand up with him. Faced with his taciturnity, not one of them had attempted any conversational openings.

Now, the next morning, it dawned on Edmund that what his aunt was looking for in the next Countess of Wintringham was not only birth and fortune but docility. The dowager had every intention of continuing to rule his household with an iron hand. The realization increased his determination to choose his own bride. He would seek out the liveliest girls, those with the spirit to resist her ladyship’s domination.

Jane’s voice seemed to echo in his ears: “I am not really a bluestocking.” His own, answering: “Are you not? Pray don’t tell my aunt. She will be sadly disillusioned.” And Jane again, with a mischievous grin: “I would not disappoint her for the world.’’

“My lord,” Alfred interrupted the imaginary voices, “your hot water. It’s half past nine.”

He spent a pleasant couple of hours showing Selwyn some new acquisitions for his library and discussing his parliamentary speech with him. He had discovered that the lawyer brought new insights to the subjects that interested him. As he accompanied his departing guest into the front hall, he recalled his aunt’s mention of a secretary. Doubtless she had some impoverished relative in mind, who would be properly grateful to her for her recommendation.