Cecilia Grant - [Blackshear Family 03] (10 page)

N
ICK SEIZED
his self-possession in fistfuls. Barclay wasn’t the only man here who’d been raised as a gentleman. Regardless what one’s wayward siblings might do, one did know how to behave. He rolled Smithson’s mangled pages into one hand, and pushed off the wall to approach the man with his other hand held out.

“Ah, yes, Charles Westbrook prepared me for the possibility of this meeting. Was this your first experience of the Old Bailey?” His mind turned quickly. Barclay’s being here at all probably meant he hadn’t heard before of the Blackshear scandal. But how much of the exchange with Stubbs had he witnessed?

“I’ve never before had the privilege.” He had a good, firm handshake, and eyes bright with interest. “I got here early and watched five cases. I was utterly transfixed, particularly by your own trial. Westbrook spoke most highly of you, and it’s apparent to me he didn’t exaggerate.”

“I’m fortunate to have studied with him. He taught me much.” His hands went behind his back again, that Lord Barclay not be distracted in his errand by the sight of the crumpled brief.

“I hope you speak the truth, and don’t merely make a
show of modesty. I depend upon the notion that such skills can indeed be taught. If what I observed in the court today was rather a product of innate talent, then I fear it’s all up with me.” A dent appeared in one cheek as he grinned. A sort of incomplete dimple, halted halfway through by a scar.

“Nonsense.” Probably one oughtn’t to say
nonsense
to a lord. But the conversation had suddenly taken a turn into territory where Nick was most comfortable. So long as they spoke of trials and persuasion, he could bear himself with that ease conferred by perfect confidence in his own authority. “Diligence and a desire to succeed will get a man further than talent in most things. And if you’ve led men in the army it’s likely you’ll already possess some of the pertinent skills.”

“I suspect your impressions of soldiering may be colored—as admittedly mine once were—by what you’ve seen in novels and plays. I assure you I never once had occasion to deliver a rallying speech in the manner of Henry the Fifth. A point for which my men were undoubtedly thankful.” He would make an excellent pupil. That was already plain. He hadn’t that tedious fragility of self-opinion so many men had. A teacher wouldn’t have to tiptoe round his lordly dignity.

With effort, Nick kept his fingers from tightening on the already much-abused brief. He wanted this. The pleasure of imparting his expertise to someone so eager to learn; the chance to have influence with a member of Parliament; the myriad channels such a connection might offer for the industry of an ambitious man … Could he let himself hope Barclay had heard the conversation with Stubbs, or perhaps had even known all about the scandal beforehand, and thought it of no consequence? It wasn’t completely out of the realm of possibility. Mr. Westbrook, to take one example, was of that mind.

“I shan’t detain you any further.” The baron glanced left and right, to acknowledge how the corridor had emptied about them. “But you’re amenable, I hope, to discussing this at some greater length, and seeing whether you can’t make a credible speaker of me?”

I’d like nothing better. However it’s best we begin on a footing of honesty and therefore I cannot, in conscience, keep you ignorant of facts that could alter your own amenability to the arrangement
. He could say that.

Before I answer, I feel I must disclose certain details connected with my family name, and give you a chance to honorably withdraw that invitation
. That, too, would be a response of integrity.

May I ask whether you overheard the conversation I was having a minute or two before you first addressed me?
Direct, scrupulous, and aboveboard. That was the tone he ought to take.

“Of course,” he said, and bowed. “I’d be honored.”

“T
HIS WAY
, if you please, Miss Westbrook.” The butler returned from putting away Kate’s cloak and she followed him, finally, after years of wishing, through an archway to the main staircase of Harringdon House.

The main staircase alone was worth the wait.

Square in the middle of the room—not sidled up to one wall, as in Papa’s house and every other she’d seen—the thing rose, a dark, polished, lacy-railinged work of art, its steps narrowing incrementally until the last step gave on to a landing all painted ivory-white. From there the staircase split into two staircases,
curved
staircases, doubling back above her at the left and right walls until they reached a second landing.

Wasteful
, Viola would have said.
Why have two sets of stairs going to the same place? It’s an ostentatious show of wealth and nothing more
. Her sister had accompanied
her as far as Berkeley Square, but had gone off down the street to eat ices and, no doubt, make trenchant private observations about the fashionable people who were also eating ices.

She was glad Vi had declined to come in.

Her heart beat hard as she followed the butler up the stairs, and when she came to the landing and turned for her first look at what lay beyond, it seemed possible her knees would simply give way.

How had Papa never seen fit to mention that he’d grown up amid such splendor? Did people who lived in magnificent surroundings perhaps take the beauty for granted, and even cease to notice it? She never would. Even as a toddling child, she could never have looked on these soaring pale walls, this meticulous plasterwork, that overhead dome set with windows through which sunlight filtered down and not felt a bone-deep sense of wonder.

I ought to have been here as a child. Acquaintance with this house ought to have been my birthright
. She’d meant to not have bitter thoughts on this visit. It was difficult, though, to keep from wondering how many ladies without even a drop of Westbrook blood had tripped unthinking up and down these stairs, coming to call on the countess or some other member of the family and never in doubt of a welcome.

She’d come to a stop, she realized, and was staring like some country bumpkin who’d never been inside a house before. She groped for the poise she’d practiced in front of the mirror at home. “It’s very pretty.” Graciousness, her last, best weapon—the dagger she’d whip out from her garter when all her armor had been stripped away—came readily to hand, and shaped her confusion of sentiment into a compliment to the butler. As if he’d personally overseen the scheme of ivory and gold, and
wrought the next landing’s Corinthian columns with his own bare hands.

He inclined his head from the step where he’d halted, the very picture of modest pride. “We’re told it’s some of William Kent’s finest work.”
We
. She would be jealous of a servant now, if she wasn’t careful, for the unthinking ease with which he claimed a place in this house, this family.

“William Kent, of course. He brings such grandeur, doesn’t he, such tasteful luxury to the public spaces in a house.” She’d never heard of William Kent before this moment. No matter. The remark would serve for an architect or a plasterer. And she would file the name away, beside the Adam brothers and John Nash, for possible use on later occasions.

The butler led on and she followed, one covetous hand skimming along the iron balustrade. The fingers of her other hand felt through her reticule for the shape of her card case. She would not be ashamed of her card, fashioned as it was of the third-rate paper that had been all she could afford. If it sat among the other cards on Lady Harringdon’s tray like a drab gray goose who’d stumbled into a flock of swans, well, that much of a contrast must she make to the rest of the company with her elegant manners and the swanlike grace of her person.

Let other ladies shine with their skill at the harp or their knowledge of current affairs. She knew her strengths.

Her heartbeat settled into a cadence of calm self-possession as she arrived at the first-floor landing. To the left and the right, broad doorways, each topped with an elaborately scrolled lintel, opened onto whatever triumphs of decoration lay beyond—but she would not again gape stupidly at the handiwork of Mr. Kent. She busied herself in drawing out a card, as she followed the butler through the left-hand doorway and a series of
eminently gape-worthy rooms, and when they arrived at the double doors to the parlor, he took the card and read out her name to the four ladies seated within.

One thing to be said for growing up with an actress mother: a girl learned how to make a memorable curtsy. Kate sank straight down, dropping her eyelids and allowing the slightest inclination of her head, a blushing ingenue whose Ophelia had just stolen the show from Hamlet and the others. She could not hope to be grand enough for this room, with its imposing walls of red and gold climbing up and up to a coffered, decorated ceiling, but she could at least be the more striking in her simplicity.

She’d chosen her airiest muslin today, an unpatterned ivory whose tissue-light outermost layer followed her through the curtsy with tiny delays and hesitations, like a double handful of swansdown making its way to earth. When she rose, the lady seated on the sofa nearest the hearth—by age and bearing, almost certainly Lady Harringdon—was eyeing her with a faint smile of approval.

“She’s pretty. What did your man give for her name?” This was a much older lady, in peacock colors with a turban, occupying a chair at the countess’s left and peering at Kate through a quizzing glass. The youngest of the callers—seated on a sofa opposite Lady Harringdon’s with a woman of the right age to be her mother—threw a smile to the new arrival, a certain rueful spark in her eye suggesting that she, too, had heard her person evaluated at a volume not so confidential as the speaker supposed.

Likely this visitor hadn’t been called pretty. Her chin had a receding tendency and her forehead was overhigh. The smile bespoke an agreeable disposition, however, as well as suggesting the reconciliation to a want of
beauty that one so often found in girls whom Nature had not conspicuously blessed.

Pity. If they’d met at Miss Lowell’s, Kate would have seen to it that the girl made the most of those lively eyes. She’d prescribe the wearing of blue in proximity to the face, to begin. A rearrangement of the hair, allowing curls to fall across the forehead, would bring a better proportion to her features and almost entirely overshadow that shortcoming of chin.

But this was not her errand here, and her attention must rather go to her aunt.

“Miss Westbrook is her name,” the countess repeated to the turbaned lady, who frowned and moved her glass from one eye to the other.

“Westbrook.” She studied Kate fiercely. “Is she one of Richard’s girls?”

“No, she’s a Miss Westbrook who hasn’t visited here before. Come and sit down, dear.” Lady Harringdon patted the empty place beside her. “Miss Smith was just preparing to give us an amusing account of last Sunday, when Sir George Bigby took her driving in Hyde Park.”

Miss Smith, the lady of faint chin, leaned a bit forward, her eyes crinkling at the corners. “Well, I cannot promise the story will be amusing—”

“No, it will. I insist upon it.” Lady Harringdon delivered this edict in apparent earnestness, pointing at Miss Smith with her closed fan. “Miss Westbrook, it’s my pleasure today to make you known to Mrs. Smith and Miss Smith, of South Audley Street, as well as to her ladyship the dowager countess of Harringdon.”

Kate nearly stumbled as she took her place on the sofa. The lady with the quizzing glass was Papa’s mother, and her own grandmother. Had it not occurred to her, when the young lady in ivory muslin proved not to be a daughter of Richard, that she might be a daughter of Charles?

Did she even know Charles had children? They hadn’t spoken in many years, but it was the sort of thing Kate had always assumed a mother would want to know.

For the entirety of Miss Smith’s tale—which, as she’d warned, did not prove amusing, the only twist in the narrative occurring when one of the horses halted to munch on a shrub on the side of the road and then showed a disinclination to move again—she stole sideways glances at the two ladies Harringdon. The countess, she could now see, had a small red-and-white spaniel on her lap and was using her fan to direct a gentle breeze upon the creature as she listened, all gratifying attention, to Miss Smith. She even laughed once or twice, with an unfeigned enjoyment that could be accounted for only by the fact that she’d resolved in advance to find the story amusing.

The dowager listened, too, the furrows in her brow deepening when Lady Harringdon laughed. “I fear I missed the joke,” she leaned over to murmur, loudly, when Miss Smith’s silence indicated there was no more story to come. “Was it to do with the horses, or with the gentleman himself?”

“There wasn’t a joke, precisely.” Lady Harringdon sent a kindly smile to Miss Smith, as if to reassure her that her tale had been a success. “Rather there was a general air of mishap attending the outing from start to finish. The humor was cumulative in nature, one might say. And so, Miss Smith.” She plied her fan for a dramatic few beats, causing several of the spaniel’s silky hairs to lift and fall again. “Having now spoken with Sir George at Lady Stapleton’s ball, this drive of which you’ve told us, and, if I recall correctly, a pair of morning calls, what are your impressions of the man? Has he any qualities that particularly recommend him to a young lady’s affections?”

In among Miss Smith’s tactful answers, and the remarks
of everyone else, a few things became clear. First, that Sir George was too old for a lady of Miss Smith’s years: references to his being “worthy,” “wise,” and “distinguished” left little doubt of that. Second, that Mrs. Smith believed it an advantageous match.

And third, and most pertinent to Kate’s errand here, was the fact that she’d guessed rightly at her aunt’s fondness for matchmaking. Lady Harringdon entered into the matter of Sir George with all the authority of a woman who’d married off six daughters, one of them to a duke, and also with an obvious concern for the happiness of Miss Smith. If Kate was reading the situation correctly, the countess thought the man no great prospect for a young lady and meant to sow doubt among both Smith women as to the merits of the match.