The Famous Heroine/The Plumed Bonnet (10 page)

“Older brothers and sisters,” Lord Francis said, wonderfully diverted, “are a pestilential breed.”

“Yes, they are,” she said. “But I miss Edgar. And Papa. I suggested to her grace this morning that she send me home as soon as I am deemed well enough to travel. I have been nothing but trouble and embarrassment to her. But she says I must stay until she finds me a husband. I think it will be an impossibility. No man who is a
gentleman
will want to marry me.”

Lord Francis wondered if all young ladies who were not quite ladies discussed such matters freely with near strangers. But he would wager not. Miss Cora Downes was one of a kind, he suspected.

“I believe you will be surprised, then,” he said. “Perhaps you should be warned, Miss Downes, that you are very much in fashion.”

She fixed him with an intent stare. “In fashion?”

“Indeed yes,” he said. It was quite true. He had expected it, especially as it was late in the Season and everyone was starved for novelty. But it had happened even more forcefully than he had anticipated. “Drawing room and ballroom and club conversations have centered about little else but you and your heroic deeds in the past two days. And it is a veritable mountain of cards that are piled on the table downstairs. I believe that when you finally go out, Miss Downes, or even just downstairs, you will find yourself besieged.”

She paled. “I
hate
being conspicuous,” she said.

Which, in light of her behavior in the park a few afternoons
before, was a rather comical thing to say. He did not laugh.

“I believe,” he said, “that her grace’s wishes for you may well be fulfilled quite soon. And your own too. I assume you do want a husband?”

“Oh, yes,” she said. “But not one who wants me only because he thinks I am a heroine, or because Papa is wealthy. Not one who will remind me every day for the rest of my life that he has elevated me on the social scale. Only one who will like me and perhaps love me as well. And one I can feel affection for. And respect. And not an old man. Not one above—oh, thirty at the most. And not an old poker face. I would like someone who knows how to laugh, someone with some sense of the absurd. Life is frequently absurd, you know. Why are you chuckling? What have I said?”

“Nothing,” he assured her. But he was enjoying himself. He had woken this morning feeling mortally depressed again and had realized that he had been waltzing with Samantha in his dreams and she had been smiling at him and telling him that she was with child. Only as he woke up had he realized that it was not his child. Oh, yes, life was frequently absurd. Much as he had admired Samantha for the last several years, he would never have expected to feel like a sick and lovelorn boy at her marrying someone else. “I imagine, Miss Downes, that you will have your choice of several candidates. You must make a check list and interview each one.”

“You are making fun of me.” She looked sharply at him and then went off into peals of laughter again. “Now what I should do is marry
you
.” She held up a staying hand even as he felt a slight stirring of alarm, and laughed merrily once more. “But I will not. You are
Lord
Francis Kneller and your brother is a duke. You are far too high on the social scale for my comfort. Besides—” She blushed, bit her lip, and smiled.

He waited with raised eyebrows for the completion of the sentence, but it did not come.

“I am devastated by your rejection, ma’am,” he said. He got to his feet. It was time he took his leave. “I shall go elsewhere to nurse my broken heart.”

“Oh, must you leave?” She looked suddenly wistful, but she smiled again. “Yes, I suppose you must. It was very kind of you to come and to take me driving the other afternoon—I did not have a chance to thank you at the time. And to dance with me that first evening. You are a very kind gentleman. I believe you must be a close friend of the Duke of Bridgwater and are obliging him. But you have made me happy too. Good afternoon, my lord.” She offered her hand.

“It has been my pleasure,” he said, bowing over it and even lifting it to his lips.

He liked her, he thought as he was descending the stairs a minute later and taking his hat and cane from her grace’s butler. She interested him and amused him. He really must see to it that she was well married. There would be no lack of suitors. Already several would-be husbands were sounding him out on the subject of Miss Cora Downes and her prospects—and he was not even a relative or guardian. He had learned from Bridgwater at White’s this morning that there were others. Both the duke and his mother had been approached by several interested parties.

She could be betrothed and married within the month if she chose to be. He would miss her—a strange thought when he had known her but a few days. But she was the only person he had found since the marriage of the Marquess and Marchioness of Carew who could take his mind off his own personal depression and even make him laugh.

It was strange, he thought as he wandered along the street—he had not brought a carriage with him. Different
as the two women were—he would be hard put to it to discover one point of likeness between Samantha and Cora Downes—there was a certain similarity in his relationship with them. He and Samantha had teased each other a great deal. He had teased her earlier this year about being in her seventh Season. He had told her that if she was unmarried at the end of it, she must don caps and retire into spinsterhood. She had teased him about his appearance. He had dressed partly to amuse Samantha, though not entirely, he had to admit. He hated the swing to soberness in gentlemen’s dress and fought the trend. He dressed to please himself.

Perhaps the reason Samantha had never taken his courtship or even his marriage offers seriously was that she did not take
him
seriously. A man who always teased and joked could be seen as a man without depths of feeling or character, he supposed. He could remember how alarmed Samantha had been at his first angry reaction to her telling him about her betrothal. And so he had retracted his words, assuring her with a smile that he had been merely trying to make her feel bad—and had succeeded.

Cora Downes did not take him seriously either. Why else would she have announced so boldly that she should marry
him
? Would she have said that to any other man in this world? And what was that “Besides—” that would keep her from marrying him? Besides, he was a shallow man who could never be taken seriously?

It was as well, of course, that Cora Downes felt that way. He wanted no more than a teasing relationship with her and she wanted no more with him—her ambitions were very modest. She had no aspirations to the aristocracy in her search for a husband.

But it was a disturbing insight into himself he had just had, for all that. Was he so cleverly masked that no one could see beyond the mask? Maybe that was as well
too. Bridgwater had certainly known his feelings for Samantha—had even warned him not to wear them on his sleeve. But he doubted anyone else had known, and he doubted that even Bridgwater realized that he was still pining. It would not do at all for anyone to know how constantly he had loved a woman who had spurned him and recently married a man she had not even met six months ago.

The very thought of anyone knowing made him shudder.

I
T WAS ALL
unbelievably true, what Lord Francis had warned her about. She was in fashion, as he had phrased it. In her language that soon came to mean that she was very much on display.

Everyone wished to gawk at her. It was not a polite word to use of the
ton
, but Cora was learning something about the
ton
. Its members were very much like ordinary people except that they couched their behavior in somewhat greater elegance. Everyone gawked. And everyone wished to pay their respects to her and to congratulate her.

The story of the Hyde Park incident had crystallized by the time she made her appearance again. Lord Lanting, it appeared, had lost control of his mount, a fierce, unmanageable beast, which could—and would—squash a dozen poodles or half a dozen maidens underhoof without a qualm. Had not the animal been at Waterloo and learned its ferocity there? Lord Lanting had done his valiant best, poor man, but he had lost control.

Lady Kellington’s poodles had been for it. There was no doubt in anyone’s mind that there would not have been a single survivor if events had been left to take their natural course. Lady Kellington herself had already foreseen their imminent demise and had been in the hysterical
stage of a first-class fit of the vapors. The scene had been set for a spectacular disaster.

Enter Miss Cora Downes, heroine of the Bath incident involving that poor dear infant, Lord George Munro’s son, the Duke of Bridgwater’s nephew. Miss Cora Downes, with no thought for her own life and safety, had launched herself from the high perch of Lord Francis Kneller’s phaeton—she might easily have broken both ankles, not to mention her neck, in the process—and had thrown herself between the beast’s flashing hooves and the innocent, shivering dogs and plucked them to safety in the nick of time.

Miss Cora Downes had survived the ordeal. But only just. Sir Clayton Pennard, the Duchess of Bridgwater’s personal physician, had pronounced the young lady in grave danger. Only his skill and the devoted care of her grace and the indomitable will of the heroine herself had effected her miraculously speedy recovery.

A few times Cora tried to remind her admirers that it was Lord Francis who had really saved her life and that of a few of the dogs—just as she had tried to remind other people in Bath that it was her brother who had saved both her and little Henry. But Lord Francis, apart from being the owner of the phaeton, had no part in this story.

The duchess’s town house was besieged with callers, just as Lord Francis had predicted. Cora would have felt even more embarrassed about it than she did if Elizabeth had not been off, out with her future in-laws a great deal of the time, and Jane had not had steady calls from the Earl of Greenwald, her favored suitor. Lady Kellington whisked Cora off two days in a row, for a picnic the first day and to dinner and the theater on the second. At her first ball after the incident, Cora might have filled her card up twice over and even more, so eager were gentlemen to dance with her. Fortunately, by
the time the Duke of Bridgwater arrived and made his bow to his mother, there were no sets left to grant him, though he did ask her. Less fortunately, there were none to grant Lord Francis either. He grinned and winked at her when she told him so.

“That is such a lovely shade of lemon,” she said kindly, referring to his coat. Her suspicions of an earlier occasion seemed to be correct. The handle of the quizzing glass he wore on a ribbon this evening was studded with topazes. He wore a topaz ring on one finger of his right hand.

“My dear Miss Downes,” he said, fingering his glass and pursing his lips, “as usual you render me speechless. Now I may not compliment you on your gown without inducing you to say ‘
Touché
’ in response.”

Her grace pronounced the evening a marked success, and indeed Cora agreed. She had not missed any sets apart from the two waltzes—though late in the evening she had been brought the exciting news that she had been approved and might waltz to her heart’s content at all future balls. And at the end of the evening, even though she was weary and footsore, there was not a single blister to be nursed.

Her grace was even more gratified the next morning when Mr. Bentley called privately on her and asked her to whom he must make application for the heroine’s hand. Her grace replied that perhaps he should speak first with Miss Downes herself since she was of age. Cora, in the presence of her grace, refused Mr. Bentley—she had never been more surprised in her life—which the duchess said afterward was the right and proper thing to do since she certainly did not need to accept the very first offer she received. There might seem to be some desperation in such overeagerness. But it was extremely satisfying to know that Cora’s matrimonial
prospects were very bright indeed. Mr. Bentley was the third son of a baronet.

Cora was pleased. Certainly she had had no chance to be bored since she had emerged from her room with a lumpless head and rejuvenated toes—and larger slippers. And certainly too her dream of seeing London and participating in some of its most dazzling social events had come true. She had danced and danced at her second ball and enjoyed every moment of it. Some of the gentlemen she had met—even apart from Mr. Bentley—seemed interested in her as a person and were not at all daunted by the fact that her father was a merchant and her brother a lawyer.

She was very pleased indeed. She wrote and told her papa so.

And yet part of her was unaccountably lonely. She kept remembering telling Lord Francis Kneller what kind of husband she would like. She had never put it into words before, but she had spoken the truth to him. And she kept remembering telling him as a joke—which, of course, he had taken in good part—that she ought to marry him. And she kept thinking what a shame it was that he was quite disqualified as a prospective suitor. For the reason she had given him and for the reason she had only just stopped herself in time from giving.

How could one tell a gentleman—even such a kindly and good-natured gentleman as Lord Francis—that one could not marry him because he was not a masculine man? The very thought that she had almost said it aloud could turn her hot and cold at the same time.

She did not mind that fact about him. She really had admired his lemon satin coat. And she admired him for not being hypocritical, for dressing the way he wished to dress.

Now if only she could find all his other qualities in an eligible gentleman. Especially his ability to laugh.

She missed him, she thought when she had been back out in Society for a few days and had spoken with him only that once at the ball. But how absurd it was to think of missing someone one had met only three times before that.

It was her papa and Edgar she really missed, she decided. And her life with them—where she belonged.