6
“
U
npleasant how?” Lady Emily Stanhope asked, as the birdie struck her racket with a satisfying
poing.
“I don’t know,” Caroline said. She darted forward to return her friend’s serve. “She didn’t say. I suppose she means that his mistress will do . . . you know. The sort of things wives don’t.”
“And what sort of things are they?” Emily asked, lunging to return Caroline’s lob. “Dammit,” she said, when the birdie stuck to the net.
“I don’t know,” Caroline said, again. She approached the net, the racket swinging loosely from her hand. “That was quite an easy one. How could you have missed it?”
“Shut up,” Emily said. “And stop trying to change the subject. What sort of things?”
“I told you, Emmy. I don’t know.”
Emily looked impatient. “Well, all right, then. I want to know what’s so lucky about it.”
“Lucky?”
“You said you were lucky. You’re about to marry an adulterous cad. What’s so lucky about
that?”
“Lord, Emmy,” she said. “Do you have to shout it? Someone might hear, you know. I told you in the strictest confidence—”
“It seems I must shout it,” Emily declared, “since evidently, you don’t understand. There’s nothing lucky about it, Caroline. Nothing at all. You are saddled with an oppressor, the lowest of the low, the kind of man against whom we at the society have been fighting for years. . . .”
“I’m just saying,” Caroline explained, through gritted teeth, “that it’s lucky Lady Jacquelyn got out of Dame Ashforth’s sitting room by the back way, or surely Hurst and Mr. Granville would be meeting with pistols at sunrise.”
“A pity they aren’t.” Emily, who’d untangled the birdie from the net again, backed up, and struck it with a vicious backhanded serve better suited to tennis than to a friendly game of badminton. “You can’t marry him now, Caroline. He’s a lecherous swine. And there’s no telling what diseases he’s picked up from that cow.”
Caroline ran for the birdie, sending it sailing effortlessly back toward Emily’s side of the net. “Honestly, Emmy,” she said. “You can’t go about calling the daughter of the Duke of Childes a cow.”
“Why can’t I? She disgraced herself with someone else’s fiancé, didn’t she? That makes her worse than a cow. A slut, actually, is what she is, daughter of a duke or not.”
“That’s a bit of a double standard, don’t you think?” Caroline stood still and let the birdie Emily had just hurried to send over the net fall neatly onto her racket. “I mean, Lady Jacquelyn is a slut because she was with a man to whom she’s not married, and yet Braden Granville, whose been with just about every woman in London, is universally admired for his bed hopping.”
“Not by me.” Emily missed the shot. She was a pitiful badminton player. “Your point. And I still don’t understand why you didn’t simply tell Granville the truth. Then he’d have murdered Hurst, and it would be all over and done with, and everything could be back to normal again.”
“Everything would
not
be back to normal,” Caroline said, as she backed up for her serve. “Don’t you see, Emmy? I don’t want Hurst dead.”
“Why not?”
“You
know
why, Emmy.”
“Not
that
again.” Emily rolled her eyes. “Lord, you all act as if he did something miraculous.”
“He did. He saved Tommy’s life.”
“For God’s sake, Caro, all he did was stuff a handkerchief in the wound and yell for a surgeon. Anyone who’d happened along at that particular moment would have done the same.”
“At two o’clock in the morning?” Caroline demanded. “Just who do you suppose would happen along at that hour of night, except more of the same footpads who’d attacked him in the first place?”
“Have you ever stopped to wonder,” Emily asked, pointedly, “what Hurst Slater was doing in Oxford that night?”
“We’ve discussed this before,” Caroline said. “You know as well as I do that he was attending an astronomy lecture.”
“At two in the morning?”
“When else are you going to have an astronomy lecture? They were looking at the stars.”
Emily shook her head. “Have you ever heard Hurst express the slightest interest in astronomy, Caroline?”
Caroline said, softly, “He once said my eyes shone as brightly as the Pleiades.”
Emily clutched her stomach, which, since she was not wearing a corset, as was her custom, was on prominent display beneath the front of her satin gown. “I’m going to be sick.”
Caroline tapped her racket irritably against her hip. “Well,” she said. “You asked. And that isn’t all Hurst did, and you know it. You saw yourself how concerned he was for Tommy all during his convalescence. Why, I don’t think a day passed that Hurst didn’t stop by and stay for a few hours at Tommy’s bedside, trying to buck up his spirits. You know how depressed he was after the attack. Hurst’s little visits helped immensely.”
Emily snorted. “Certainly they did. They helped
Hurst
immensely. They got him a wealthy bride.”
Caroline looked aggrieved. “Please, Emmy,” she said. “You yourself said it was sweet, how devoted Hurst was to Tommy.”
“That was before I knew what an irreligious dog he was, underneath that saintly facade.” Emily glared at her friend. “From the start,” she declared, “you have mishandled this entire situation.”
“Oh, you think so?” Caroline folded her arms across her chest. “What would
you
have done, then?”
“First of all,” Emily said, “I wouldn’t have walked out of that sitting room without saying a word.”
“But I
couldn’t
say anything, Emmy,” Caroline said. “I’d never seen such a thing in my entire life. Her
tongue
was in his
mouth.
And that’s just what I could
see.
There’s no telling what was going on beneath all those petticoats of hers, which were covering them both up below the waist—”
Even in the bright sunshine, Caroline could tell that Emily had lost some of her coloring. “Oh, Lord,” she said. “I really do think I’m going to be sick.”
“It isn’t exactly the way sheep do it, Emmy,” Caroline went on, quite without compassion. “She was on top, for one thing.”
“I’ve got to sit down,” Emily said, and she collapsed onto the lawn.
“And that’s not all,” Caroline said, but Emily held out a hand.
“Yes,” she said, “that is all. As far as I’m concerned, that’s all. Caroline, you have got to break it off.”
“I can’t.” Caroline slumped down onto the grass beside her friend. “You know I can’t. Besides the fact that we owe him Tommy’s life, Ma says Hurst would be within his rights to take legal action against me, if I do. Break it off, I mean.”
“So what?” Emily glowered. “You’d win.”
“At what expense?” Caroline rolled over onto her stomach, enjoying the feel of the sun-warmed grass beneath her. “After I’ve stood up in front of a whole room of people I don’t know and told them that I wasn’t woman enough to please my fiancé? That certainly wouldn’t be humiliating, Emmy.”
“It has nothing to do,” Emily said, “with your lack of womanliness.”
“Yes, it does, Emmy.” Caroline stared down at the ground. “Hurst has never—not once—kissed me the way he was kissing Jacquelyn Seldon. Until I saw him with her last night, I thought . . . well, I thought we were happy. You know I did. I thought . . . I thought he loved me.”
How could she have been so wrong? That was the question she kept asking herself. All those times Hurst had found her hand beneath the dining table and squeezed it . . . all those times he’d caught her alone and stolen one of those quick, laughing kisses . . . had it all been for show? Had all the sweet things he’d done—bringing her flowers, introducing her with so much pride to his mother—been done solely to capture himself a rich bride? Had all the things he’d said—that he loved her, that he couldn’t wait to make her his own—been outright lies?
Emily reached out and patted Caroline on the shoulder. “I’m sure he does,” she said. “Love you, I mean. In his way.”
“Which is nothing,” Caroline said, bitterly, “like the way he loves Jacquelyn. Oh, Emmy, if only I could get him to love me like
that.
Everything would be all right then.”
“How?” Emily wanted to know.
“Well, because then I could marry him, and Ma would be happy, and—”
“You worry,” Emily said, matter-of-factly, “far, far too much about making other people happy. What about
you,
Caroline? What do
you
want?”
Caroline blinked at her friend. “Me? Why, to marry Hurst, of course. At least—” She frowned. “—that’s what I wanted up until last night.”
“And now?”
“Now?” Caroline shook her head. “I just told you, Emmy. It doesn’t matter what I want. I’ve got to go through with it. I owe it to him, for what he did for Tommy. Besides, the invitations have already gone out. Don’t you see? I’ve just
got
to get him to love me.”
Emily looked as if she would have liked very much to say something else, but all she said was, “And how do you intend to go about doing that?”
“I’ve been giving it some thought,” Caroline said, “and I really think Ma might be right. If I use my womanly wiles, I just might be able to win Hurst back. Away from Jackie, I mean. The trouble is, I’m not exactly sure how to go about doing it. Exercising something I’m not even sure I have.”
Emily snorted. “I’m certain it can’t be particularly hard, Caro. If Jackie Seldon can do it, surely you can. She’s a complete idiot. And we both know most men are nothing but great ignorant rats—”
“You called?”
Thomas, the second Earl of Bartlett, strolled toward them across the lawn, his hands in his trouser pockets, a tuft of blond hair falling down over one eye.
“Why, if it isn’t the king of the rats now.” Emily rose up to her elbows and grinned at the earl. “And what are you doing out here, pray, Your Majesty? Didn’t your mamma forbid you from strolling about in drafty gardens? You might, after all, endanger your fragile health.”
Thomas lowered himself until he was seated beside Caroline in the grass. “Sod off,” he advised Emily.
“Tell me something, your lordship,” Emily said, plucking up a blade of grass and inserting it between her teeth. “What is it that makes men completely incapable of maintaining a monogamous relationship with a woman? Can you tell me? Because I would really like to know why it is that one woman isn’t enough to satisfy you people.”
“Of course one’s enough,” Thomas said, affably. “If she’s the right one. That’s the trouble, you see. Finding the right one.
“The thing of it is, it’s damned hard to tell with you girls.” Thomas found his own blade of grass, and began to suck it contentedly, speaking out of the side of his mouth. “Your fathers keep you under lock and key until your wedding day, so it’s almost impossible for us to tell if we’ve got a rum’un until our wedding night, and by then, well, it’s too late, if you turn out to be a dud.”
“That,” Emily said, removing the grass blade from her mouth, and holding it toward him as if it were a sword, “is the vilest thing I think I have ever heard anyone say.”
“But it’s true, don’t you think?” Thomas shrugged. “I mean, it’s perfectly ludicrous. Two people pledge to live with one another until death parts them, and they’ve never even gone to bed together beforehand. A man wouldn’t buy a pair of trousers without trying them on first, but everyone expects him to commit the rest of his lovemaking days to this one woman he’s never even—”
“How are we supposed to know how not to be a dud?” Caroline demanded. “How can we know, when no one will talk about it?”
Tommy looked confused. “Talk about what?”
“You know.” Caroline glanced around the garden darkly, then whispered,
“Lovemaking.”
“Oh,” the Earl of Bartlett said. “That.”
“Yes,
that.
You know Ma won’t discuss it. So how am I supposed to know how to keep a man, let alone not be a dud in bed, when no one will tell me what it is that most people—particularly people like Lady Jacquelyn Seldon—already seem to know?”
“I say,” Thomas said. “This conversation has just taken an oddly personal turn. What’s Jackie Seldon ever done to you?”
“Nothing,” Caroline said, quickly, even as Emily was sucking in breath to tell all. “I just meant that, you know,
figuratively.
I mean, after all, Lady Jacquelyn must be incredibly . . . well, in order to have snared Braden Granville, who, according to you and your friends, has the most discriminating taste in, um, lovers, Lady Jacquelyn must be very . . . sure of herself.”
Thomas stopped looking at the sky, and instead, eyed his sister. “I suppose you could call it that.”
“Oh, stop it.” Emily threw away the blade of grass she’d been chewing, and sat up. “That isn’t what she means at all. It comes down to this, Thomas: We need to know what goes on between a man and a woman in bed.”
Thomas looked as if he thought he might like to be somewhere else all of a sudden. “Why are you asking
me?”
“Because I need to know,” Caroline insisted. “And Ma won’t help.”
“Well, there must be someone else you can ask. I mean, if Ma won’t tell you, surely Emmy’s mother—”