How the Marquess Was Won (27 page)

“Choosing just the right first bite, are you, Miss Vale?” he asked.

“I like to push them around a bit before I eat them. It intimidates them good and proper.”

“Ah.” He smiled benignly.

She eyed him warily. Handsome devil. A bit bleary-eyed and bristly this morning. Nevertheless, he would be breaking hearts in earnest this season and every season until he decided to become leg-shackled. He also never resisted a mischievous or beastly impulse. It was the job of siblings and cousins everywhere, after all.

Lisbeth sipped at her tea delicately. She settled it down with a clink into her saucer. She still looked altogether ruffled. Phoebe was reminded of her cat, who abhorred it when anything was moved from its usual position. She’d dropped her pillow on the floor once from her bed, and Charybdis had warily circled it as though a meteor had landed in her room.

Lisbeth disliked disruption in the pattern of her world.

Jonathan looked from Lisbeth’s face to Phoebe’s and back again, like a billiard player assessing a shot.

“Did our marquess leave this morning?” Jonathan asked idly.

Excellent shot.

The corner of his mouth tipped slowly, slowly up in a smile, that spread all over his face, because obviously he’d drawn some sort of accurate conclusion from the expression on their faces.

“Pity Violet isn’t here,” he sighed to no one in particular.

Presumably Violet would have congratulated him on identifying a . . . sensitivity. And exploiting it.

“I’ve missed her,” Lisbeth declared. “Though she has made a brilliant match, and I’m quite, quite happy for her.”

“Oh, what balderdash, Lisbeth,” Jonathan yawned. “Violet wreaked havoc upon your nerves, and you know it. Admit you’re relieved she’s not here.
You
are
much
too well-behaved.” Jonathan made this sound like a cardinal sin.

For some reason Phoebe felt as though the reference to
behavior
was addressed to her. Something about the emphasis on the word
you
. Then again, everything was funneling into her ears through layers of guilt and disappointment at the moment.

“I can misbehave!” Lisbeth protested, sounding nine years old.

Jonathan snorted. “Don’t be ridiculous. You don’t know how. Al
though
. . .” he took a long, long sip of coffee “. . . you
might
make a brilliant match yet! Just like Violet’s.” He gave an exaggerated wink. “There’s still time. You
might
. One never knows.” He managed to inject a little doubt into his tone.

“Of course I will make a brilliant match!” Lisbeth was pink in the cheeks. “Why shouldn’t I?
Everyone
thinks I will marry the mar. . . . There’s no ‘might’ about it! How can you say that?”

A nerve, a terribly raw one, had apparently been struck.

Jonathan regarded her sadly. And then sighed, and carefully set the coffee cup down in the saucer, and leaned forward and took her hand between his.

“Here is the thing, dear Lisbie,” he said, with great gravity. Lisbeth hated being called “Lisbie.” “You are much, much too easy to tease. It’s wearisome. And yet I feel I must keep at it, for your own sake.”

And then he dropped her hand and leaned back again.

Phoebe laughed, and rapidly turned the laugh into a cough.

Jonathan turned to her, eyebrows upraised. “Which balls will you be attending with the Silverton sisters—and Lisbeth—Phoebe?”

“I don’t know. And I haven’t decided whether I’m going.”

“Of course you must go,” both he and Lisbeth said at once. One slightly less sincerely than the other.

“I will dance at least one time with you if you go,” Jonathan promised.

“In
that
case,” Phoebe said. “If you warn me ahead of time, I shall know when to run.”

Jonathan looked at Lisbeth and made a “See how it’s done?” gesture with his hands in Phoebe’s direction.

Lisbeth stuck out her tongue at Jonathan, which seemed to please him.

“Really, Lisbeth,” Fanchette Redmond, who had chosen that moment to enter the room, reproved. “What would your mother say?”

Lisbeth went scarlet.

Poor Lisbeth. Phoebe did feel a surge of pity. No wonder her personality seemed comprised of a series of attractive postures. Censure was around every corner. Acceptable behavior had been proscribed for her, and she was a hostage of sorts to her own beauty.

Phoebe tried to make herself as unobtrusive as possible by going still and sipping at coffee, like a wild creature freezing before a predator. She suspected Mrs. Redmond barely approved of her presence at the table. It wasn’t a personal issue; Mrs. Redmond understood the world as orderly and stratified and she liked to know everyone’s place. Occasionally order wriggled out of her velvet grip, such as when her son Miles had married Cynthia Brightly. Or when her eldest up and disappeared.

Nevertheless, she never ceased trying.

She was wearing a topaz-colored riding habit and pulling on gloves. Still such a pretty woman, so soft-looking for her age, so flawlessly turned out. Her clothes made Phoebe’s heart ache with a fleeting yearning and they were as intimidating as armor.

One new bonnet had opened up a floodgate of love for beautiful clothes she’d long learned to suppress at the school on the hill.

I can buy you anything you want.

That could very well be true. Of course, she’d never be received in the same homes that received Fanchette Redmond.

It occurred to Phoebe then that she wasn’t too terribly removed in philosophy from Mrs. Redmond. She understood now the value of . . . a
place
. She wanted to know where she was welcome and where she was not.

Argh. She hated
wanting
. Especially when what she wanted was as obtainable as the moon.

She looked down again at the girlish, breathless invitation with a certain wonder. There was no harm in fleeting pleasure, she told herself. And there was pleasure to be had in being wanted—for her
company
, and not as a . . . business arrangement.

And though she could now buy passage to Africa, she
could
also afford to give herself a reckless, glittering, send-off. But she might very well see the marquess in London.

Correction: She
hoped
she would see the marquess there.

Because he wanted her, and he couldn’t have her, and she wasn’t so magnanimous or large spirited as to hope he didn’t suffer over the sight of her.

Besides, it was beginning to look more than likely that someone else would want her, too. When no one ever, in truth, really had. Hope was that other thing she’d traditionally shied from, and yet here it was, just a little seed of it, poised to sprout with a little encouragement.

Jonathan noticed the dawning smile before she even knew she was smiling. “And will you be going to London, Miss Vale?”

“I’ll be going to London,’’ she announced. “Will you please pass the coffee?”

“A good many more opportunities for governesses and the like in London,” Fanchette pronounced dispassionately.

Phoebe looked up at her, and she was aware that she and Lisbeth were wearing nearly identical expressions. Lisbeth’s contained a hint of vindication.

“ ‘And the like,’ ” Jonathan repeated, amused, as his mother left the room.

She thought he’d winked, but then again, the aggressively polished silver might be making him squint.

Chapter 19

T
he very next day, the Silverton sisters actually
sent a carriage
for Phoebe at Miss Marietta Endicott’s academy. That was how eager they were for her company.

It was a landau. Not quite as grand as the
marquess’s
landau, at least judging from the outside, of course, but still so large and plush inside she nearly bounced to the ceiling with every rut in the road. And there were more than a few between Sussex and London. She’d packed Charybdis into a large comfortable cushioned basket with a lid. He registered his objection to this with a steady nerve-grating keening.

Every now and then a striped paw shot out of the top of it and waved around. She’d give it a pat and he’d tuck it back in.

“You’ll like London,” she promised him. “You used to live there.”

She was trying to reassure herself.

She’d packed a single trunk with all of her clothes, including two walking dresses, her only two dresses appropriate for balls and parties, the green one and the soft gray one, which looked very well with her eyes, and one spectacularly fine bonnet nestled in its own box with its original wads of paper, as if it were an egg or a loaded pistol.

Lisbeth hadn’t invited her to ride along in the Redmond carriage, as, she explained, there was no room, given that Jonathan and Argosy were coming along, too, and they hadn’t planned on another party from Sussex.

“But I shall be delighted to see you there! What fun we all shall have!”

J
ules strolled into White’s more out of habit than desire, because he needed something familiar to orient himself in the ton again after the fever dream of the previous few days.

It was the day after the first time he hadn’t gotten precisely what he wanted, and that was Phoebe Vale in his bed.

The world looked different and he couldn’t say exactly why. Everything was as it ever was. It was evening, a Tuesday, and the club was thick with smoke and conversation. Drinkers drank, gentlemen took refuge from wives behind newspapers; footmen moved among the crowd with trays. As usual, Colonel Kefauver, long retired from the East India Company and veteran of any number of battles, most of them foreign, slept in his usual high-backed chair, legs splayed, snores fluttering up his cobweb-fine gray hair at soothing intervals.

Jules handed his hat and coat and walking stick to the footman. And even before he was seen, a restless rustle began, a disturbance in the atmosphere, like an approaching storm, a sense that something exciting might be about to happen, that caused postures to straighten and heads to turn and fingers to drum.

The two young men sitting in the bay window immediately stood and went in search of other chairs.

Jules stared after them. They were both sporting forelocks.

He frowned briefly and gave his head a little shake. He sensed everyone harking in his direction. And this was usual, too. He began to feel a semblance of peace settle in, if not contentment. It amused and gratified him, and it was a solid place from which to launch his future.

“Brandy,” he told the footman, not necessarily because he wanted something to drink but because he wanted something to hold.

And he settled in at the bay window, because of course that was by far the best table and when he was present, it was his by default.

Which was when he saw Waterburn’s great wall of a back standing alongside d’Andre, and three or four other men, all of whom were huddled over the betting books and negotiating something with great earnestness.

“Two hundred pounds says we’ll do it within two
days
—”

“Two hundred? Are you mad, Waterburn? No, no, no. It needs to be
interesting
, and more . . . specific. And we need a defined period of time.”

This apparently caused a moment of silent mad pondering.

“I have it! We shall do it in . . . tiers! I’ll wager
you
 . . . two hundred pounds for the first appearance of a nickname for her, but it has to be within two weeks . . . if one appears, you win.”

“Excellent! I’ll take that wager.” Waterburn scribbled something. “I’ll wager
you
five hundred for word of hothouse flowers being sent to her.”

“Mmm. I don’t know, old man. Difficult to prove.”

“Nonsense. We’ll just ask the girls to verify it. And they have to be from someone with a title. And obviously not one of us.”

“I like it. And . . . let’s say . . . one
thousand
pounds for a duel challenge. Upon which we shall call it ended and tell the whole ton what we’ve done so no one need actually be shot.”

Waterburn snorted.

“Very well. I win if it happens by the end of the month, in two weeks time. You win if it doesn’t.”

“Done and done. And when you lose, I shall buy you supper, old man.”

They giggled like schoolboys and clinched whatever the bet was with a single firmly pumped handshake. A few other young men clustered about to see what the fuss was about.

Jules watched them idly. He avoided the betting books as though they were spreaders of disease. He wasn’t a whimsical or theoretical wagerer. He liked games of skill or a good horse race or pugilistic match. He wagered occasionally, spectacularly, and invariably won.