The Golden Season (5 page)

She gazed about the lovely drawing room while she waited for her friends to digest the information she’d presented. This was her favorite room: light, elegant, and filled with exotic touches. She had selected the tea-colored brocade draperies, the pale, eggshell blue hue on the walls, and the rich Persian carpet underfoot. She and Eleanor had bought the landscape hanging above the mantel at the Academy Showing two years before. Together, too, they had found the porcelain figurine gracing a side table at a street market in Venice when they’d traveled there the winter after her debut. She’d identified it as a Carracci at once.

Her guardian’s home had been filled with such artifacts from his travels as a young man. She’d made a habit of studying his collection, honing her eye and discernment during the two years she’d lived in his house in Sussex. There hadn’t been much else to do during her exile. And that is how she saw her fourteenth and fifteenth years, as ones of exile. It was a time when, heartbroken with unspeakable grief at her vibrant, loving parents’ deaths, she had lost everything and everyone she had ever known.

When she’d been with her parents, traveling from one exotic locale to another, she’d taken for granted the world’s brilliance and beauty, its gaiety and sophistication, the conversations and company. Their deaths had put an end to that. In Sussex, she might have learned to appreciate all manner of art and artifact, but things were no substitute for people. For family.

Her gaze moved now to her three companions for this evening’s dinner: Eleanor, Duchess of Grenville, her godmother; the very young Mrs. Sarah Marchland, her oldest friend; and, of course, sweet- faced Emily Cod. Sarah’s family had owned property in France near one of her parents’ residences there. They had played together sometimes as children and become reacquainted the year they both were presented at court in England. Lydia enjoyed many fond social relationships—but these three were her most trusted friends, privy to all her secrets, though she had always had a dearth of those. Until now.

“So which would you choose, my dears? Freedom or wealth?” Lydia asked, determined not to let them know how gravely she’d been affected by Terwilliger’s news. She was renowned for her sangfroid. Everyone had remarked on it, praised her for it.

The truth was she hadn’t known any other way to react. It was what she had been taught from birth. She might perforce lose her wealth and status, but at least she could preserve her reputation.

“Don’t be ridiculous, Lydia. You’ll marry, of course,” Eleanor said, her deep- set, hooded eyes glinting with irritation. Time might have pared away her once legendary beauty to a refined angularity and silver shot through her smoky hair, but wealth and an unerring sense of style still allowed her to effortlessly command attention. “What good is freedom if you can’t afford to do anything with it or go anywhere or know anyone?”

“I shall still know you,” Lydia countered mildly.

“Of course,” Eleanor said, setting down her own cut-crystal goblet. “But you should hate being a burr, unable to reciprocate invitations, without the wherewithal to pay your own way.”

A burr
. The contemptuous moniker echoed in the room. Though a cold-blooded assessment, it was an honest one. Lydia appreciated Eleanor’s honesty. She had relied on it when she’d come out under her patronage eight years ago, and though the relationship between them had evolved from mentor-student to one of equals, she still valued her counsel.

Eleanor valued their friendship as much as she. The duchess was long on acquaintances and sycophants and short on true friends. For that reason, and for Lydia’s sake, she had adopted Sarah and Emily into her very small inner circle. Their inclusion had provoked comment amongst the
ton
and one could recognize why; the arid and attenuated duchess and the rash and round young Mrs. Sarah Marchland were an odd enough pairing. But what common ground could a duchess and a lunatic widow find?

Lydia sometimes wondered that herself.

“You are quite right,” Lydia replied. “But I do not see how that is appreciably different than being dependent on one’s husband for the same.”

“It’s not quite the same,” Sarah said, picking through an assortment of sweetmeats on the table beside her. Plump, creamy, and plush, with her white-blond hair and light blue eyes, Sarah reminded one of a particularly toothsome blancmange, a mass of sweetness without substance. Loath as Lydia was to admit it, it was not an assessment without grounds. “Husbands are obliged. Friends are not.”

“Husbands are only obliged if they are obliging,” Emily said from the depth of her favorite armchair. Away from the scrutiny of assessing eyes and in the company of those whom she trusted, Emily’s nervousness abated. As did her unfortunate predilection for “borrowing” things.

“Quite right, Emily.” Eleanor nodded. “Sarah’s husband is willing to look the other way regarding her actions. Not every marriage is so successful.” Eleanor spoke without irony. She had buried her duke a decade earlier and, rumor had it, upended a chamber pot over his grave. Discreetly, of course. Eleanor was always discreet.

“Gerald pays handsomely to keep me away from”—Sarah hesitated a moment, then finished—“the farm.”

Lydia would have sworn it was not what she’d originally been going to say.

“This is my advice to you, Lydia,” Sarah went on. “Marry a rich, accommodating man who promises to be accommodatingly absent.”

Like many people, Gerald Marchland had mistakenly assumed Sarah’s plump prettiness and guileless blue eyes indicated a docile and indolent nature, when in truth Sarah was and always had been a virago. Even as a child she had delighted in escapades that brokered comment and criticism. The pleasure she took in dining was simply a reflection of an appetite ravenous in other areas as well.

It was well known that Sarah had many . . . admirers. Luckily, Gerald—as stiff as Sarah was lax—disliked Society and stayed well away from London. Sarah swore the situation suited them both. But though Sarah always
seemed
forthcoming, Lydia suspected there was much she did and thought that she kept hidden from Lydia and Eleanor and Emily. Doubtless, because she knew they would not approve.

Lately, Lydia had wondered if Sarah’s marriage was as successful as Sarah claimed. Every year, Sarah seemed to grow more restless and careless in her “friendships” and more vocal in her detestation of Gerald.

“I suppose you’re right,” Lydia said.

“About marrying or what sort of fellow to marry?” Sarah asked, looking quite pleased as she tucked her feet beneath her.

“Both,” Lydia replied.

“Of course she’s right,” Eleanor said.

“What do you think, Emily?” Lydia asked.

Emily was peering into her reticule with a familiar expression of chagrin and Lydia reminded herself to check later for something she might have managed to slip in during the visit to Terwilliger. Stress often preceded Emily’s little bouts of larceny—always of items of negligible value. Afterward she was stricken with remorse and often said she didn’t even recall taking the things. She would simply die of ignominy should anyone ever catch her in the act of secreting a little something and call her a thief. Not that she ever would be. Whenever she discovered Emily had borrowed something, Lydia wrote a gracious note and sent it along with a very nice gift and, of course, returned the original “misplaced” item.

No one ever took umbrage. It was one of the benefits of being Lady Lydia Eastlake. Rank had its privilege but celebrity had even more.

Emily tugged the reticule drawstring closed and looked up. “Excuse me? I wasn’t attending.”

“We were discussing whether Lydia ought to get herself a husband,” Sarah said, inspecting the gooey center of yet another sweet. “Lydia asked your opinion.”

“I don’t have one. Don’t want one,” Emily said.

“Forgive me for pressing you,” Sarah said, looking slightly taken aback by Emily’s unfamiliar vehemence.

“I believe she was speaking of a husband, Sarah,” Eleanor said.

“That’s right,” Emily agreed. “I don’t have one. He’s dead.”

It had been Emily’s husband who’d committed her to the lunatic asylum where Lydia’s solicitors had found her. They’d been searching for any additional legal claimants to Lydia’s parents’ estate and instead found Emily, a distant relation on her mother’s side. They had informed Lydia, who forthwith had gone to see the “madwoman.”

She hadn’t known what to expect, certainly not the small, soft-faced woman who had shyly greeted her. The warden had informed Lydia that after committing Emily for compulsive thieving, her husband had promptly fallen off the face of the Earth—though reports suggested that it had been a ship he’d fallen off while fleeing victims of his fraudulent investment schemes and he’d been ape-drunk at the time. Those same victims had taken every penny Cod had left behind. Ever since, the asylum had been maintaining Emily out of their sense of Christian duty and, Lydia suspected, Emily’s usefulness as an unpaid attendant.

Compulsive thievery notwithstanding, Lydia had decided to take Emily home with her. It hadn’t been her original intention, but Lydia was wont to act on strong emotion first and justify her choices intellectually later. Emily’s situation—her abrupt change in circumstances, her husband’s unexpected abandonment, her obvious confusion over how her life had come to such a state, and her loneliness—had brought back to Lydia her own sense of bewilderment and despair the few short years between her parents’ deaths and Eleanor’s arrival.

She knew what it was to be displaced. She knew about second chances and reprieves from limbo. After Eleanor had extricated her from Sir Grimley’s house she had made it her vocation and avocation to enjoy life to the fullest, never to take for granted those things and people she knew and loved.

As no one was paying for Emily’s keep, no one objected when Lydia signed the necessary documents to have her released. It proved a fortuitous decision, for not only had she secured for Emily personal freedom but for herself she’d acquired a convenient chaperone. The situation suited both. Lydia accepted Emily’s little foibles and Emily did not interfere with Lydia’s independence.

“Ah, yes,” Emily repeated contentedly. “Dead.”

“Emily,” Sarah said, her expression growing cunning, “your story suggests to me a solution to Lydia’s dilemma. Do you see what I mean, Lydie?”

She did, but the devil that so often played havoc with Lydia’s resolve to be serious or modest and that led many to think she was incapable of gravitas, would not be gainsaid. “Well, there’s a thought, Sarah. I’ll marry some likely chap, convince him to sail with me to Italy, and then shove him off the deck.”

Sarah stared at Lydia a second before realizing she was twitting her. “That is not what I meant. I meant that you ought to consider marrying a gentleman in uncertain health.”

“An old man?”

Sarah lifted a shoulder. “Uncertain for whatever reason.”

“Don’t be ridiculous, Sarah,” Eleanor said. “Lydie can’t marry some pox-ridden fellow for his wallet. Nor can she wed an antique.”

“I can’t?” Lydia murmured. Not that she would agree to marrying some syphilitic scab, but an aged husband? A
very
aged husband . . . ?

“No,” Eleanor said with finality. “Lydia has her reputation to consider. For eight years she has been the beau ideal for every young woman who dreams of independence.”

“Oh, fie,” Lydia said. “I never set out to be anyone’s paragon. If my decision to wed disillusions someone, that is their problem. I refuse to fashion my future to satisfy some romantic notion of me.”

She was not being entirely candid. She liked her celebrity. She thrived on center stage; it was where she was most comfortable. She had spent her childhood learning how to please and entertain, to be witty and winsome and pretty and vivacious because that’s what people responded to, that’s what her parents had delighted in showing off, and that’s what she did best: enchant people.

As a child, her reward for being so good at it was to be swept along in the wake of her labile, extravagant parents, taken on all their travels, shown off to princes and princesses, introduced to great men and women. In short, to live a fairy-tale life of opulence and excitement.

The life she had been raised to lead.
This
life. Being Lady Lydia Eastlake was her profession as much as being the prime minister was the Earl of Liverpool’s. Besides, who would she be if this were taken from her? In the deepest part of her, she feared she might not like the answer.

“You will simply have to marry a paragon,” Eleanor was saying. “Someone as wealthy as you are—were—and with as just much consequence. A gentleman of wealth, breeding, and rank, who will appreciate your independence.”

“Easier said than done,” Lydia commented dryly, and at Sarah’s questioning look elaborated. “As it has lately been pointed out to me, those whom I refused are unlikely to ask again and those who have not asked for my hand are bound to be advised against lending themselves to a similar indignity. I have also been informed that once it is known that I am bankrupt, the mercenary reasons for my interest in them is bound to sit poorly with any proud, wealthy,
suitable
gentleman.” She gazed around at her friends.

“Privately we may acknowledge that we wed for fortune and status, but no one wants the fact paraded publicly. We cleave to the notion that someone might actually want us for ourselves.” She spoke nonchalantly, but the words struck a tender note in her heart. “And the greater one’s status and fortune, the more it seems to matter. Gentlemen do not like to think their suit is being encouraged only because of the size of their purse.”

How could one know another well enough to be certain they wanted to wed them? How could one know if someone was worthy of one’s respect and admiration, someone in whose company one would always find pleasure and interest? Her parents had fallen in love over the course of years of friendship and, despite what Society had whispered, did not act on that love or declare it until after her uncle’s death.