The Savage Miss Saxon (38 page)

Until Sir Wiley Hambleton had shown up to clog the scenery with his presence, of course.

Intent on retrieving a currycomb she had been using on one of her mares, Myrtle had uttered her irreverent remark and then continued purposefully walking toward the stable, only to be brought to an ignominious halt by a hand coming down heavily on her left shoulder, yanking her up short, then turning her around.

“I’ve a better idea, you overgrown guttersnipe. Why don’t I shove this copper straight up your—God’s teeth! You’re a female! I don’t believe it!”

Myrtle looked nearly straight into Sir Wiley’s black as pitch eyes—for she was a tall woman, and the top of her short-cropped head came nearly to the bottommost tip of his aristocratic nose—and said, laughing in real amusement, “Oh, close your mouth, Wiley Hambleton. You’re going to catch flies on your tonsils!”

Virginia sat on a stone bench in a corner of the gardens, safely away from the Mayfield music room where her sisters and the three London gentlemen—plus Doctor Angus Fitzhugh—were discussing plans for a small entertainment the following night, a Christmas in May celebration including a masquerade and pantomime of sorts.

The idea of only four women and five men dressing up in costume and not being able to identify each other as they recited conundrums from behind masks seemed silly in the extreme to Virginia, but when Myrtle had agreed to the scheme—and Myrtle agreed to precious little that was anyone else’s idea—she had decided to stroll out into the gardens and let them all have a go at it.

Besides, she was confident that Jonathan would join her as soon as he could be shed of Lord Fox, who had requested his removal to another guest chamber because his present one was decorated all in green, an unfortunate color which invariably made him bilious.

Virginia smiled as she looked about the vast gardens, envisioning a day when she would be mistress at Mayfield, her children at her feet as she brought her embroidery with her to this bench and waited for her beloved husband to return from riding the fields with his estate manager.

They would sit here together, talking over the day’s events, and then the children’s nurse would sweep them away to their evening tea and she and Jonathan would be alone. Blessedly alone. The way they never had been these past four days, since the gentlemen had arrived and they had been busy from morn till night mentally attempting to match miss with mister.

If only she had not promised her dear mother on that gentle woman’s death bed that she would obey her father’s strictures about marrying in order of birth.

If only Jonathan weren’t such a gentleman, refusing to open her up to censure by marrying her over the anvil.

If only her dratted older sisters would be more cooperative!

Lettice Ann had been barely civil to any of the gentlemen, sitting in corners like a little mouse, pining for Bad Bertie—as if she could ever have him.

Georgette had been somewhat better, seeming to have taken Lord Pitney Fox and his traveling chest of medicines in slight affection, the two of them comparing illnesses over the dinner table until Myrtle had begun to beat at Georgette-Vinaigrette with her soup spoon.

Myrtle. Now
that
was the sister who confused her. She had been walking about all day with a wide smile on her face and a kind word for almost anyone—which was not to say that she was being all that polite, only that she was not so cutting and direct in her comments. Why, she had not even balked at Clara’s suggestion that she allow the maid to try to “do somethin’ with that mop you call your hair.”

Yes, Myrtle was being strange. Very strange. Perhaps, Virginia thought, she might ask Doctor Fitzhugh to have a look at her sister tomorrow, just to be sure she wasn’t suffering some sort of fever.

Banishing thoughts of her sisters, Virginia concentrated on a more pleasant thought, thinking back to the first night she had met Jonathan, marveling yet again at the kindness of the gods that had made her single journey into society so magical.

She had been sitting on the very edge of the dance floor, for her father had told her she was not allowed to dance or in any way draw attention to herself when settling Lettice Ann was the order of the evening.

Virginia hadn’t been bored, for watching the dancers gracefully swirling and dipping as they whirled around the room was most entertaining, even if her toes had been tapping in time with the music as she wished someone would come along and sweep her into the waltz.

“What a lovely, winsome smile,” a male voice had commented as she stiffened, for the owner of that low, melodious voice was already in the process of sitting down on the chair directly beside hers. “You will forgive me if I flaunt convention and join you, I hope. I’m avoiding a most determined young female and I am assured that when she sees me in the company of the most beautiful creature in the room she will be discouraged and return to her mama. By the bye, my name is Jonathan. And yours—”

Virginia smiled now as she had then, remembering how she had turned to look at Jonathan and drawn in her breath in shock, for he was quite the most handsome man she had ever seen. The man of her maidenly dreams, to be blunt about the thing.

Devastated by both his proximity and her instant attraction to him, she had blurted out the first thing that came into her mind.

“Do you remember telling me very matter-of-factly, when first we met, that I should seek elsewhere for feminine companionship as you were already destined never to marry? I immediately took your words as a challenge, as if you had dared me not to fall in love with you. I’ve never so enjoyed losing at anything.”

Yes, that was what Jonathan had said to her the other day. She had issued him a “challenge” that first night. Innocently. Not meaning to be cute, or coy, or even mysterious. And, with that first exchange of names, of looks, of information, they had started down the road that had led them here, to Mayfield, doing their best to fob off three Noddenly sisters to any man who might be so generous as to take them off their hands.

Was it terrible of them? Or was it a necessary means to a mutually pleasurable end? At the moment, Virginia decided, it didn’t very much matter what it was. As long as it worked!

Virginia was drawn from her reverie as she felt a gentle pressure along her leg and looked down to see a fuzzy gray and white kitten rubbing itself against her. “Oh, you little darling!” she exclaimed, picking up the kitten and burying her face in its soft fur.

The kitten took exception to being squeezed and gave a sharp cry, turning its head to bite Virginia’s thumb. “Forgive me!” she told it, cradling the animal more gently against her breasts, so that it began to purr. “I know how prodigiously oppressing it is to be held too tightly, as I am to the bosom of my family,” she said, smiling. “Is that why you’re out here alone? Have you run away from all your sisters, daring anything for a life of your own?”

“Is that who I am, my sweet?
Anything?
” Jonathan questioned her quietly, coming up behind her and dropping a kiss on her nape. “Are you running to me only to escape your sisters, and your papa’s confounded rules? Why, I do believe I am crushed. Totally destroyed.”

Virginia smiled up at him as he came around the bench, to sit down beside her. “No, you’re not,” she told him. “You’re sweet and wonderful, and kind, and generous—and probably twice as disgusted with what we are attempting to do as I am. Or have you discovered that you really do like my sisters and their prospective husbands?”

Jonathan reached down to stroke the kitten’s head. “I’d like to tie them all up together in a very large sack and dump them in the lake,” he offered with a grin. “All of them save Georgette and Pitney, that is. They probably wouldn’t drown, but only catch a chill, and spend the remainder of our lifetimes sneezing in our faces.”

“Unless they broke out in spots from the rough material of the sack,” Virginia teased. “Then they would drive the pair of us to despair by sitting around all the day, scratching.” And then she sobered, asking, “Do you still think this will work, Jonathan?”

He shrugged. “As a child, I believed in miracles. Once I had reached my majority, I gave up that belief—until I met this remarkably beautiful red-haired, green-eyed creature one fine night and lost my heart to her. Now, my pet, I believe anything can happen.”

Virginia allowed her head to rest against Jonathan’s shoulder, sighing as she watched the sun slowly dropping behind the trees, the coming of dusk lending them a heightened feeling of privacy in the gardens. “Oh, Jonathan, how I love you!” she told him, sighing contentedly.

“That’s fortunate,” he told her, slipping an arm around her waist, “for I must inform you that, once they are all safely married, I doubt if I will allow any of your sisters or their husbands across my threshold.”

“Amen,” Virginia answered, sighing once more.

“Here’s the script,” Georgette said, waving a sheaf of papers for all to see. “Oh, listen to the names of these characters! I had forgotten how amusing Park’s Twelfth-Night Performers can be, ‘Mrs. Strut, Lord Lollypop—Countess Fly Away’! We shall have such
fun!
”

“And I say if it’s not
truly
Twelfth Night, we can’t
truly
perform in these costumes,” Lettice Ann declared as the small party sat around the half-dozen open trunks the servants had grudgingly lugged down from the attics just five months after they had lugged them up there following the Christmas holidays.

“We don’t necessarily have to perform, Miss Noddenly,” Lord Fox assured her, a handkerchief to his nose lest the dust from the trunks set him off into a fit of sneezing. “We’ll just each take a costume and use it for the masquerade. Surely there are masks somewhere.”

“In the smallest trunk,” Jonathan supplied helpfully, sitting on one of the couches beside his beloved, busying himself by playing with an enticing tendril of hair that had escaped her coiffure to tease him as it curled against her long white throat. “They are only simple eye masks, but they could easily be decorated by clever hands.”

“Oh, what fun!” Georgette cried, clapping her hands. “We could use bits and pieces of lace and material and even feathers! Except for Myrtle, of course, who is simply
dreadful
with a needle. Shall I fashion yours for you, Myrtle?” she asked her sister, who was holding up a pair of black satin breeches and eyeing them with interest.

“But then you’d know me, you widgeon,” Myrtle pointed out reasonably, dropping the breeches. “Wiley, do you see anything here you like, or are you thinking, as I am, that this is very nearly the most asinine exercise you have ever contemplated, sober?”

Sir Wiley smiled over the rim of his wineglass. “Now, Myrt, don’t ask me for the truth. I wouldn’t want to send the ladies screaming from the room.”

“Why not? It seems a fair idea to me,” Myrtle said, smiling at him while, Virginia noticed in shock, actually
batting
her short, nearly colorless eyelashes at the man. “Mr. Bromley, what do you think?” she inquired, turning to Knox, who had slapped a cardboard crown covered in gilt paint on his head. “Is this not the most ridiculous notion—dressing up and pretending not to know each other when anyone with half a candle lit in his noodle would know I’m the tallest female in this company, and you are the shortest man?”

“And the fattest, Myrt,” Sir Wiley inserted quietly, but not so quietly that Virginia and Jonathan, who were seated closest to him, didn’t overhear. Turning to each other, they smiled, believing that they scented a most unusual romance in the air.

“You do have a point, I suppose, Miss Myrtle,” Knox Bromley said, taking a deep breath which, to his companions, was the only warning they would receive that he was about to launch on another of his marathon ramblings. “I am the shortest male. However, I am also the only male who requires spectacles to see the tip of my nose. This, naturally, rules out any notion of my wearing an eye mask. Coupling this with the fact that you, Miss Myrtle, are indeed the tallest female, we two are already effectively unmasked. However, as neither you nor I wish to destroy the fun for the rest of this lovely party, I suggest you do your best to stoop, whilst we men all endeavor to locate masks that will not disclose which one of us is wearing glasses. As for the rest of it—I also now suggest we all, save one of us, leave the room while the remaining person selects his or her costume. Then, one by one, each will enter the room and select his or her costume, until we are all satisfied with our choices. Isn’t that simple?” he ended, beaming at each of them in turn.