An Extraordinary Flirtation (5 page)

Ianthe looked no less somber. “You may say that now, but it’s you who’ll fly into a pelter when you hear what she did while you were gone. At least I
think
she did it. We met Mannering at Gunter’s. Don’t glower, it was all perfectly correct. Except I think Zoe was responsible for him being there.”

Beau could not help but scowl, despite his cousin’s pleading. “That damned fellow! Things have come to a pretty pass when I can’t even turn my back.”

“Baron Fitzrichard was there also,” Ianthe added. “He has designed a new way of tying a neckcloth. I suggested that he call it the Dégringolade. I think he means to bring square-toed shoes back into style.”

Beau couldn’t have cared less about square-toed shoes and the foppish baron. “And while you talked to that man-milliner about shoes and cravats, Mannering no doubt took advantage of the opportunity to further his acquaintance with Zoe.”

Ianthe stiffened. “Don’t dare accuse me of being neglectful of my duties, Beau.
I’m
not the one who misbehaves.”

“Don’t get on your high ropes!” Beau strode restlessly around the room. He didn’t blame Ianthe for Zoe’s behavior—how could he? The child was a Loversall. But so was Ianthe a Loversall, and therefore should have had considerably more backbone than she had thus far displayed. “I’m not accusing you of anything. I just think you might discourage Mannering’s attentions if you tried. You should have sent him about his business. I rely on you to check Zoe’s starts.”

Cara thought this judgment seemed severe. “Beau—”

Her protest went unheeded. Beau continued scowling, while Ianthe bit her lower lip. “I don’t see why I should give Mannering a set-down when I quite like the man.
He
doesn’t rip up at me for things I didn’t do. And if you think
you
may stop Zoe acting like a little zany, then pray go ahead and try!”

Beau disliked hearing his daughter maligned, unless it was by himself. He said, “Zoe is but a girl.”

“Zoe is a thorn in my flesh,” Ianthe retorted. “I disremember when I last had a day’s peace.”

This bickering also was familiar. Ianthe and Beau could not be in a room for five minutes together without being at daggers drawn. Cara walked over to the French windows, drew aside the curtains, and looked outside. Although she could not see into the darkness, she knew the gardens were divided from the area at the back of the house by a simple stone colonnade. Two fine trees grew there, one a mulberry of noble growth, as well as roses of ancient lineage. Long neglected now, the flower borders had once been a blaze of tulips and jonquils, lilies and peonies and violets. Cara thought of her own gardens, and Paul Anderley. Were Lord Mannering to find himself alone in a garden with Zoe, would
he
steal a kiss?

She turned away from the window. “This squabbling accomplishes nothing! Has it occurred to anyone that Mannering might be serious? What if instead of merely engaging in a flirtation, he were to offer for Zoe?”

Beau regarded her with astonishment. “Are you mad?”

Cara frowned at her brother. “What I am is fagged to death! We have had a journey of some distance, and I dislike family brangles, as you may recall. From what Ianthe is saying, it sounds like the marquess may simply enjoy Zoe’s company.”

What was it about Mannering? Now even Cara defended him. “A gentleman may well enjoy a lady’s company without wishing to marry her!” Beau snapped. “And if Mannering ain’t married in all this time, he ain’t going to marry Zoe. Besides, he’s too old for her.”

Ianthe looked thoughtful. “She’s throwing her bonnet at him, and he’s letting her. Perhaps that’s a hopeful sign. Too, he told her that only his rheumatics prevented him going down on his knees and reciting poetry.”

Beau choked on a swallow of brandy. “Rheumatics?
Mannering?
The man spars with Gentleman Jackson. You must have made a mistake.”

“Why is it I who am always supposedly mistaken? Zoe informed me of that herself. Unless you think she’s telling taradiddles, perhaps?” Ianthe paused. Beau didn’t answer. “Whoever would have thought that Mannering was inclined to poetry!”

Beau didn’t think so, certainly. Nor did Cara. They exchanged a startled glance. “Why are you both so surprised? It’s not as if the marquess is a rakehell. No matter how Zoe has misbehaved, he’s always acted the perfect gentleman toward her.”

No gentleman himself, Beau may perhaps have been forgiven a certain skepticism. “So far,” he said, and finished his brandy. “Perhaps. And so far as you know.”

Ianthe stared. “You can’t think he would offer her false coin.”

Beau thought his cousin surprisingly naïve. “No man can be blamed for playing fast and loose with a lass who hurls herself enough times at his head.”

Cara leaned back against the window. “I believe we may be hearing the voice of experience speaking,” she remarked.

Beau ignored this sisterly provocation. He was appalled by the notion of his daughter engaged in escapades, and didn’t see that the matter had anything to do with how many escapades he’d indulged in of his own, an excellent example of the adage that what’s good for the gander may not also be good for the goose. “I won’t have Zoe plunged into the scandal-broth!”

Now it was the women who exchanged glances. Their family was notorious for the amount of dirty laundry it had aired in public, the exceptions being themselves. Ianthe mused upon Great-Aunt Amelia, who had eloped with her own groom and had wound up somewhere in Bavaria, where she attracted the attention of a princeling, and inspired a duel between that gentleman and a Greek. Cara was reminded of Third-Cousin Ermyntrude, who had eased her shattered heart by dressing as a man and fighting Red Indians in the Colonies.

Cara leaned her forehead against the cool window glass. What
would
Paul Anderley think when he discovered she’d gone to London? Probably that she was a coward. She was also flighty, because now she wished she might return home. Cara wished so all the harder when her niece walked into the room, looking like an angel with her big blue eyes and innocent expression and golden curls clustering around her face. “Hello, Beau. You came back. I wish you wouldn’t go away like that. Ianthe is always
picking
at me and it makes me cross. Tell her she must stop."

Beau gazed upon his daughter. He had fallen in love when he first glimpsed the red-faced shrieking infant, and felt no differently today. Indeed, he sometimes thought that Zoe was the only female he had ever truly loved, which was a sure sign of his basic faithlessness, considering how many females he’d had in his bed.

Zoe sank down on a footstool upholstered in striped horsehair and leaned against his knee. Beau stroked her gleaming curls. Impossible that he should deny her anything, which was precisely how they had gotten in the pickle they were in today. Knowing how a thing got broken didn’t make it easier to mend, unfortunately. “I hear you met Mannering at Gunter’s. What have you to say for yourself, puss?”

“One can meet any of one’s acquaintance at Gunter’s. You know that.” Zoe peered up at her papa from beneath her long eyelashes. “Cousin Ianthe just wants to make trouble for me.”

Beau glanced at his cousin, who pressed her lips together and said not a word in her own defense, primarily because she knew that if she spoke she’d call him a cabbage-head. “You misunderstand, poppet, Ianthe wants only the best for you.”

Zoe drooped. Beau looked stricken. Cara realized with horror that Zoe reminded her of herself at that age. Zoe was smaller and more petite than she had ever been, however, and so vivid that she made Cara feel as if she had one foot already in the grave.

Hopefully, the resemblance was only superficial, and didn’t extend to their personalities. Cara stepped out from among the draperies. “Hello, Zoe,” she said.

Zoe spun round on her stool. Her fine eyes widened, then narrowed, and she turned a furious face on her father. “What the devil is
she
doing here?”

“I apologized, of course, although I didn’t mean it!” said Zoe, as she bobbed gracefully on one foot. “I can’t believe that Beau has been so duplicitous as to bring Aunt Cara to town to be my chaperone. She is to tell me how I am to go on, if you please! As if I needed a bear-leader. Or a governess! I already have Cousin Ianthe.”

And Aunt Cara would perhaps be harder to bamboozle, reflected Lord Mannering, although he was prevented from making this comment by the movements of the gavotte in which they were engaged. When the dance brought them back together he said, “You don’t appear particularly enamored of your aunt.”

Zoe gave him her right hand, preparatory to the execution of the
moulinéyt.
“Cara is well enough, I suppose. But she is the only one of the family to marry
sensibly,
and I can’t tell you how many people have already asked me why she chose Lord Norwood when she could have done so much better, for she was the darling of the
ton.
I’m sure I don’t know what to tell them! I thought it was very queer myself. Although of course I was only a babe at the time.”

Lord Mannering relinquished Zoe’s right hand, and took up her left. “Perhaps it was a love match.”

“I think you must not have known Lord Norwood.” Both hands now, and each couple turned round at their places. “He was quite old. If it weren’t for her looks, one wouldn’t think Cara was a Loversall at all.”

The dance ended, to Zoe’s regret, without her partner having said or done anything to raise a damsel’s hopes, a reticence that she put down to his being fairly elderly himself, if still the most handsome gentleman in the room. “You
will
remember that we are engaged for the dinner dance,” she said, with a flash of dimples. “Because if you don’t remember, then I shan’t eat at all!”

Nick released her hand, and bowed. “Inconceivable that I should forget, then.”

Did he mock her? Impossible to determine, for no sooner had Zoe stepped off the dance floor than she was surrounded by her Zoo, in the forefront tonight the elderly knight, two viscounts, a Mr. Cuthbert, and a young gentleman freshly sent down from university for a caper including a trained bear. She laughed gaily, and loud enough for Lord Mannering to hear, and to be stricken with regret.

The rooms were hot, and thronged with guests. Nick moved through the crowd, musing that Beau Loversall’s worries about his daughter’s conduct—or his tolerance for her displeasure—hadn’t been sufficient to insure his presence here tonight. He found Fitz in the card room, gazing through his quizzing glass upon a singularly ineptly played hand. “I thought macao was your game. Have you discovered in yourself a burning desire to play whist?”

Fitz turned the glass on his friend and regarded him with an enlarged, ungrateful eye. “It’s enough to turn a man’s stomach. First Gunter’s, and now this damned boring affair, and you
knew
it would be boring, and dragged me here anyway! You’re in your dotage, that must be what it is. At least I hope
that’s what it is. Nicky, please tell me you ain’t pining after the little Loversall.”

“Do I look as though I’m pining?” The marquess tucked his hand in his friend’s arm and led him out of the card room. “No? Then I must not be. You fail to grasp the significance of this occasion, Fitz. It is the first time in many years that three Loversall females have been together in one room. One cannot predict what may ensue. All the world is holding its breath to see if Lady Norwood will do something to amuse and entertain them now that she’s returned to Town, Ianthe having been a sad disappointment along those lines, and Zoe—while showing promise—is too young to have hit her stride.”

Fitz barely avoided being trampled by a plump matron in orange satin. “Your Zoe is a baggage,” he said.

Nick removed a glass of champagne from a passing waiter’s tray and presented it to his friend. “She is indeed a baggage. Yes, Fitz, I noticed your use of the possessive pronoun. I am choosing not to rise to the bait. You can hardly blame poor Zoe for wanting to make her mark in the world, the previous generation having failed to come up to snuff. Lady Norwood made a deadly dull marriage. Ianthe reacted to a mysterious romantic disappointment by not marrying at all, when the least she should have done was sink into a decline and wither dramatically away. Beau has no more mistresses than anyone else. Obviously it is up to Zoe to maintain the family tradition. Just how she’s going to do this, she hasn’t decided yet.”

Fitz thought Lord Mannering knew more about the young woman’s thought processes than he should. “I hope this decision doesn’t include you.”

Nick smiled wickedly. “My dear Fitz, of course it includes me.”

Lord Mannering had not underestimated the effect of three Loversall women in one room together. That amount of female pulchritude was almost more than the senses could encompass, and the effect was to bring them more attention than at least two of the ladies wished. Despite the marked family resemblance, there were differences between them too: Zoe was petite and vivid, Ianthe elegantly tragic and pale; and Lady Norwood—Well. She had the face and figure of a goddess, was (in the words of one smitten and none-too-original gentleman) a veritable Venus come down to earth. She was blessed (as another admirer put it) with the face of an angel and the body of a Salome. And furthermore it was well known that Norwood had left her with pots of gold, in which case one might wonder why she wore a slightly outmoded evening dress, this latter an unkind observation, considering how nobly Barrow had risen to the challenge of appropriately garbing her mistress so soon after their arrival in town.

Still, if Lady Norwood wasn’t quite in the first stare of fashion, she was very fine in a gown of sea green crepe that clung to her divine figure in all the places that it should, her hair arranged
à la grecque
in braids and coronets and adorned with flowers. Ianthe was dressed rather more fashionably in a dress of raw gold silk and a scarf of cream-colored sheer muslin embroidered with gold metal thread, a turban of white satin with yellow French knots, and long yellow gloves; her hair was parted in the center and drawn up in ringlets behind. One who wished to find fault—and some did, for if the Loversall women were invariably stared at, they were not universally admired—might criticize the style as inappropriate for a woman of her years, but it suited her very well. The youngest member of the trio wore a charming dress of white gauze striped with blue, and an Austrian cap.