A Little Scandal (11 page)

“Not yet,” she said, with some heat. “But he hasn’t exactly had a chance, with Papa breathing down my neck everywhere we go.” She awarded Kate another of those sly, sideways glances. “But maybe now that you’re here, Miss Mayhew ….”

Kate had already sucked in her breath to inform the Lady Isabel—though not in so many words—that it would be a cold day in hell when she’d go against the wishes of the man who was paying her so generously to look after his only child when the man himself suddenly appeared, tapping on the door which Kate had left open.

“Ah, Miss Mayhew,” Lord Wingate said. He was, Kate saw, actually holding one of the very books his daughter so disparaged, his index finger tucked inside it to mark the place where he’d left off reading it “Pardon me for interrupting. You and Isabel have a function to attend this evening, I believe?”

Kate nodded, hastily averting her gaze so that she did not have to look into those too bright green eyes. Burke Traherne had passed his jade irises on to his daughter, but somehow, in Isabel’s paler complexion, they were not nearly so discomforting.

Then again, maybe it wasn’t the marquis’s eyes that were making Kate so nervous, but the fact that almost the last time she’d looked into them, she’d been hurling an atlas at his head. And the time before that, she’d been pointing the business end of her umbrella at his heart. Truly, they had not had the easiest time of it, getting to know one another.

“Yes, my lord,” Kate managed to say, briskly enough. “Lady Allen’s for dinner, and then a ball at Baroness Hiversham’s—”

“Then breakfast at Lord and Lady Blake’s,” Isabel interrupted, checking off invitations on her fingers as she recited them in bored tones, “and shopping with their odious daughters. Then lunch with the Baileys, followed by more shopping, or perhaps some calls to find out who has got engaged and who still hasn’t yet, then home to change for dinner with Lord and Lady Crowley, after which there’s the opera, then a card party at Eloise Bancroft’s, then a few short winks of sleep, and it’s off riding the Ladies’ Mile with those awful Chittenhouses, then breakfast again, I swear I don’t remember where—”

“Isabel,” Lord Wingate said mildly, “perhaps you’d prefer to be back at the Abbey.”

Isabel broke off and stared at him. “Back at the Abbey? Wingate Abbey, you mean? Certainly not. Whatever would I do there, when Geoffrey is here?”

“Well, judging from your tone of voice just now, you seem to be finding London a bit dull.”

Isabel dropped her hands to her sides. Kate was standing close enough to her to see the slim fingers ball into fists. “Oh, you’d like that, wouldn’t you?” The Lady Isabel tossed her head, sending her rag curls bouncing. “Anything to stop me from seeing Geoffrey!”

Kate didn’t think it was her imagination that had Lord Wingate looking bemused. “On the contrary,” he said. “I was thinking perhaps you feel the need for a respite in the country, in order to restore you to your characteristic ebullience.”

Isabel let out a frustrated shriek, then strode furiously for the door, slamming it—apparently for dramatic emphasis—behind her.

And leaving Kate and her employer alone in her bedroom.

Kate, appalled, stared at the closed door, as if looking at it long enough might open it again, and restore some propriety to the situation. Lord Wingate, however, seemed to feel no such discomfort. Well, Kate thought with disgust. He wouldn’t. He immediately sank into one of the green velvet armchairs by the fire, and began to gaze moodily into the dancing flames.

“You see, of course,” Lord Wingate said, in his deep voice, never shifting his gaze from the fire, “what I am up against. Young love. It is a considerable adversary, Miss Mayhew.”

Kate swiveled her head from the door to Lord Wingate and back again. Well, isn’t this cozy? she thought. Supposing Mrs. Cleary, the housekeeper, happens by, and hears his lordship’s voice coming from the new chaperone’s bedroom? Or worse, Mr. Vincennes, the butler. So far, Mr. Vincennes did not appear to despise Kate, in spite of what he must have undoubtedly thought her very peculiar behavior. But Vincennes didn’t know about Lady Babbie—not yet. And he certainly didn’t know his lordship had invited himself into Kate’s room for a little teatime tête-à-tête …..

“Isabel,” Lord Wingate went on, as casually as if they were discussing the weather in Bath, “has convinced herself that she is in love with this young man, this Geoffrey Saunders. It is, of course, an impossible match. Mr. Saunders is a second son, without a cent to his name, except that which his elder brother doles out to him. He is supposed to be a scholar, but has been run out of Oxford by the numerous individuals to whom he owes money lost at playing cards. How he makes his living now, I haven’t the faintest idea, but one must suppose philandering to be involved.” Finally, he turned his face from the fire, and pinned Kate with his steely gaze. “Isabel is to be kept from him at all costs.”

Riveted where she stood by those emerald eyes, Kate swallowed. She had fancied the twin armchairs before her hearth were quite large—she had sunk into their deep cushions with a good deal of room to spare. But Lord Wingate’s enormous frame dwarfed the furniture, making Kate quite painfully aware of a fact she’d been hoping to forget … that Burke Traherne, the third Marquis of Wingate, was truly a remarkable figure of a man.

Unaccountably, Kate recalled that Mrs. Cleary had, just that afternoon, handed her a check for fifty pounds. “An advance,” the plump old lady had informed Kate, “against whatever costs you might incur changing positions.”

And though she hadn’t asked for an advance, Kate had gratefully accepted it, then hurried to her bank, and then to the post office, where she’d mailed the entire sum to her nanny in Lynn Regis. At the time, she hadn’t stopped to wonder why his lordship might have paid her two months’ salary in advance. She’d supposed it was so that she could purchase what she might need in order not to shame her employer with her shabby dresses at the society functions she’d necessarily be attending. But she still fit quite nicely into her gowns from her own first season out. They had proven to be quite serviceable once they’d been well aired, and needed only to be slightly altered by the skillful Mrs. Jennings, so that the skirts were not quite so full, according to the new fashion, and the necklines not quite so daring—daring necklines not being at all the thing for chaperones. The gowns had had to be dyed, too, since the majority of them were white. At twenty-three, Kate knew she was entirely too old to wear white.

But now she had a new and somewhat disturbing idea what the advance had been for. It was so that she couldn’t quit, not without owing the Marquis of Wingate a considerable sum, a sum she could never hope to repay. He had obviously learned a lesson from Isabel’s past chaperones, and was intent that this one, at least, would not get away so easily.

And flight was the first thought that entered Kate’s head the moment Lord Wingate’s sea-green gaze fell upon her. In fact, she started toward the door, following in Isabel’s footsteps.

Only when she laid a hand upon the latch, the marquis’s deeply rumbled, questioning, “Miss Mayhew?” brought her back to herself.

Good Lord, what was she thinking? Kate Mayhew didn’t run from anything—well, except for shadowy figures on the street whom she mistook for Daniel Craven. But certainly not authoritative marquises, no matter how piercing their gaze, or how thoroughly they managed to fill a chair.

And so instead of fleeing, she took a steadying breath, then merely opened the door and swung it wide, so that anyone passing through the corridor outside could see that the master of the house was only paying a social call upon his newest employee.

“I quite understand,” Kate said in a calm voice, turning round to face him, and even managing to meet his gaze without blushing. “You have objections against the young man. That is only natural. You love your daughter, and want the best for her. Only I wonder, my lord, if forbidding Lady Isabel from seeing Mr. Saunders is quite the best way to handle the situation.”

Lord Wingate peered at her from round the back of the chair in which he sat. He looked quite uncomfortable, twisted in his seat that way, and Kate, taking momentary pity on him, moved round to the matching chair, though she didn’t sit down in it.

“I beg your pardon,” the marquis said, in tones of some incredulity. “But I believe I know how my own daughter ought to be handled.”

“And I’m almost certain that’s what Juliet’s parents were thinking, when they forbade her to see Romeo.”

Lord Wingate raised a single dark eyebrow, an unreadable expression on his face. “It’s been some time since I had the Bard thrown in my face during the course of a conversation.”

“Then you shouldn’t mind,” Kate said, “my reminding you of the tragedy of Abelard and Heloise. I’m quite certain Heloise’s uncle Fulbert felt the same way about her relationship with Abelard that you feel about Mr. Saunders.”

The marquis said, with a chuckle, “You know, I have a good deal of sympathy for Fulbert. It wouldn’t bother me a bit to see Mr. Saunders meet the same fate as that rascal Abelard—”

“My point,” Kate interrupted flatly, “is that Romeo and Juliet and Abelard and Heloise all met with tragic fates due to parental interference in their romances—”

The marquis glowered. “Damn it, Miss Mayhew. Isabel isn’t about to kill herself, let alone run off to any convent. Though frankly, I’d prefer the convent over matrimony to that gadabout.”

“Lord Wingate,” Kate said. “Both history and literature teach us that forbidding a child from something lends it a certain mystique that it otherwise wouldn’t hold. Your dislike for Mr. Saunders might be exactly what Lady Isabel finds so appealing about him.”

“Then what do you suggest I do, Miss Mayhew?” Lord Wingate snapped. “Allow her to throw herself at this jackanapes?”

Kate spread out her arms. “What harm could come from a few dances with him? The more time she spends with him, the more likely she is to notice his failings.”

“And supposing she doesn’t?” Lord Wingate inquired. “Supposing she falls even harder for him, and the next thing I know, I’m a grandfather?”

Kate flushed. She was grateful that she was standing near enough to the fire for any change in color to be reasonably blamed on the intensity of the very strong blaze.

“I highly doubt it will come to that, my lord,” she said. “Isabel seems to me to be a girl of uncommon good sense, and a very strong character. She would never allow herself to be compromised.”

Lord Wingate snorted, and sank deeper into the chair. “You don’t know very much about young girls, do you, Miss Mayhew?”

“Because I used to be one, you mean?” Kate couldn’t keep a trace of dryness from her tone.

Lord Wingate pinned her once again with that emerald gaze. “I would imagine that you, Miss Mayhew, were quite a different sort of girl than Isabel.”

Kate glared at him. “Your daughter might be in possession of greater wealth and status than I was, but I assure you, my lord, I was every bit as—”

She broke off in confusion when she saw that Lord Wingate was laughing. She had never really heard him laugh before—he had always seemed, since the evening she’d first met him, to be in a singularly foul mood. But now, laughter poured out of him, making him look quite a bit younger than his thirty-six years. It also made Kate uncomfortably aware that his cravat was loosened. When he threw back his head to laugh, his shirt collar opened to reveal his throat, at the base of which she spied a good number of coarse black hairs. Kate, her gaze instantly drawn to those silky curls, found herself completely unable to look away. Whatever, she wondered idly, was the matter with her?

When Lord Wingate stopped laughing long enough to look at her again, she sincerely hoped he didn’t notice her unaccountable attraction to his open shirt collar, or that her blush was now a fiery glow that had spread over most of her face and neck.

“I wasn’t referring to your lack of wealth and status, Miss Mayhew,” he said, still smiling. “I was referring to the fact that you are quite obviously more attractive than my daughter ever will be, and you likely were when you were Isabel’s age, as well. Attractiveness more than makes up for lack of wealth. Unlike Isabel’s, your beaux, Miss Mayhew, could not have been after you for entirely pecuniary reasons.”

Quite suddenly, Kate wished she’d kept the door closed after all, and not because she didn’t want Lord Wingate’s assumptions about her supposedly impoverished childhood overheard. She hurried across the room and pulled the door shut, saying over her shoulder, “Shhh! Supposing she hears you?”

“So what if she does? Isabel knows she isn’t pretty. Unfortunately, she inherited my looks.” He pulled a pocket watch from his waistcoat and began to wind it. “And,” he muttered, “her mother’s brains.”

“It’s perfectly dreadful of you to disparage your own child in such a manner,” Kate said, quickly crossing the room to stand beside his chair. “Lady Isabel is quite lovely—”

“She has animal spirits,” Lord Wingate corrected her. “Which is different from physical attractiveness. People are drawn to her because she is vivacious. Though I’ve sent Isabel to the best schools, she has retained nothing, as far as I can tell, aside from a few dance steps. Whereas you, Miss Mayhew, were blessed with good looks and intelligence, far more than can be said for my daughter. So surely you can see,” he said, putting his watch away again, “why I don’t believe that a comparison between your girlhood and Isabel’s is necessarily appropriate, under these circumstances.”

Then, as if noticing for the first time that she was standing and he was sitting, he rose, looking quite bothered about it, and said, gesturing to the chair across from his, “I’ve quite forgotten my manners. Do sit down.”

Kate glanced at the closed door. “I don’t think—”

“Sit!”

She started at his abrupt tone, and quickly sat, folding her hands in her lap and staring warily across the short piece of space between them.

“That’s better,” Lord Wingate said, lowering himself back into his seat with some satisfaction. “You are very small, Miss Mayhew, and yet I was getting a crick in my neck, looking up to you.”