Elisabeth Kidd (18 page)

“Surely you might have had your father seek it for you,” Antonia suggested. “He is scarcely a giant of industry.”

Charles did not see the pun, but smiled just the same.

“Shall we at least see you for dinner this evening?” she asked, feeling
as if she should apologise to him. “I seem to recall that you are particu
larly fond of saddle of mutton, which indeed I trust is so, for Mrs
Driscoll has managed to procure an especially fine one for this evening.”

“Well, well, I must accept your invitation in that case. I shall certainly
look forward to it. And I wonder if I may challenge Isabel to a game of backgammon after dinner? I seem to recall now that she was quite a hand
at it, as they say.”

“She will trounce you soundly, I warn you.”

“I trust my pride will sustain the blow,” he replied with a smile. “How pretty little Isabel has grown to be, by the way. I remember her as a mere
slip of a girl, who adored her aunt and uncle and was quite miserable when they would not play with her, taking refuge in the nearest book!”

“Well, she is still very literary, of course,” Antonia conceded. “But she
has been very good about—that is, she appears to be enjoying the amusements of the city quite as well as the solitude of the library.”

“You are, certainly, hoping that she will make a good match this
season. Are there any serious candidates as yet?”

Antonia was somewhat taken aback at this plain speaking, but reminded
herself that putting a pretty face on it would not alter the truth of the situation. “Not as yet,” she told him. “There is one very pleasant young man who—”

She stopped then, suddenly aware that Charles would not be likely to
consider Octavian Gary a “serious candidate.”

“—who has called several times,” she finished, without mentioning a
name. She glanced appealingly at Imogen Curtiz, who remarked that there would be sure to be any number of young men at Almack’s for
Isabel to look over. This led to a discussion of Isabel’s social calendar, an
inventory of her wardrobe, and a number of recommendations from
Charles—who revealed an unexpectedly wide knowledge of current
gossip—on whom she might profitably not consider. Mrs Curtiz looked as if she expected this latest verbal contest to go on at inconvenient
length and rose to excuse herself as soon as Charles took a breath.

“If you children will pardon me, I did promise to meet Isabel and
Cloris after they finish at Owen’s, and I would not care to let them stand about waiting by themselves for very long.”

“Certainly not. Do not let us detain you!” Charles said, rising from his chair as Mrs Curtiz put down her teacup. “But may I not offer you my
escort?”

Imogen waved her hand at him to be seated again and told him such a
sacrifice would not be required of him. “I am certain it will be much
more agreeable for you both to stay here and decide all our fates over the macaroons.”

With that, she swept out of the room, leaving Charles gazing thoughtfully after her. At last he said, “I do beg your pardon, Antonia! I had not
realised I was becoming so—officious. I fear that the requirements of
running a business make me far too prone to giving orders outside the
office as well.”

“You have done no such thing here,” Antonia assured him, hoping she
did not appear too quick to deny it. She put out her hand to lay it reassuringly over Charles’s. “For my part, I welcome your suggestions
most eagerly.”

“Thank you, my dear. In that case, I shall take the liberty of offering
yet another—even more presumptuous, I fear. Tell me, do you still have
the intention of holding Isabel’s ball here?”

“Oh, yes. We are already up to our ears in redecoration schemes.”

“Excellent! But let me put this to you. I have recently purchased a
house in Cavendish Square, you may know. Not the most fashionable of addresses, perhaps, but quite fine enough for
...
ah, a man of business. I
had hoped to convince you—and you must not refuse me, Antonia, since I as well as my father stand as Isabel’s sponsor—that you will consent to
hold the ball there. I have quite a large, well-appointed ballroom, as you shall see for yourself, and several very fine smaller rooms in which card tables may be set up. In short, I should be very pleased to do this for you,
my dear.”

She smiled, touched more by this last impulsive utterance than by Charles’s rehearsed and not entirely unexpected offer of hospitality.

“Anything you may do for Isabel is indeed a favour to me as well,
Charles. Thank you; we shall be happy to accept your generous offer. And
do please come to dinner this evening—indeed, you will always be
welcome in our home.”

“Thank you,” he said, adding quietly, “I
...
I am happy to see you
again, Antonia. I trust we may renew our friendship?”

“I am certain we shall.”

“Splendid! Well—well, I shall take my leave, then. Do not trouble to
see me out. I can find my way.”

She saw him to the door just the same, and although he regretted once
again that he was unable to attend Almack’s with them, he assured her that he would be on hand at dinner, to approve their finery.

When he had gone, she sat down at her window and gazed thought
fully out of it at the house across the street, reviewing their meeting. She
had not known precisely what to expect of it, but she was a little
disconcerted to discover that it was both more and less than she had hoped. Charles’s voice, his smile, the touch of his hand were all as she
remembered, and his apparent forgiveness of their past estrangement ought to have represented the realisation of a years-old dream. But
something else had happened in those years. She could not put a name to
it, but it seemed to have to do with those things which had not changed in her—and perhaps not in Charles, either—but which were nevertheless not quite the same.

Viscount Kedrington was unable to call on the Fairfaxes for several
days after their encounter in the park, finding himself required to consult with his solicitor and to compose a number of letters calling for a certain
diplomatic tact—at which he was disconcerted to discover he had become
somewhat maladroit since his consular days. He also paid several calls at
a small house in Half Moon Street, in which his past experience of
subterfuge came more handily.

Between these matters of business, he was committed to certain social
engagements to which he did not like to draw attention by his absence.
He was therefore reduced to sending his secretary—after Octavian had
written out the more pressing letters in his neat hand—off to Mount
Street to keep his employer’s memory alive in that quarter. This duty was
no hardship for Octavian, even though the viscount charged him not to
overlook Miss Antonia Fairfax in favour of pursuing a more attractive
tête-à-tête with Miss Isabel. Kedrington reined in his own impatience
and went to visit his aunts in Berkeley Square. He arrived to find a
vaguely familiar landaulet standing in the stableyard, but it was not until
he had handed his hat and gloves to his aunts’ elderly butler that he
remembered whose it was.

“Good morning, Webster. Is my aunt receiving?”

“Yes, my lord,” he was informed. “Miss Coverley is also in the drawing
room. Mr and Mrs Rowland Wilmot and Mr Angus Wilmot arrived twenty minutes ago.”

Kedrington hesitated. “Good God, it’s Sunday, isn’t it?” he enquired rhetorically of the bronze Apollo set on the hall table. “I’d forgotten.
However, since I’m here, I must make the best of it, eh, Webster?”

“Yes, my lord,” the butler agreed woodenly.

Sundays were customarily set aside for family visits, not because Julia
Wilmot possessed any abundance of familial affection, but because she
refused to be plagued with unannounced invasions of relatives on any day
it suited them to descend upon her. Kedrington being the sole exception
to this rule, Miss Hester Coverley was obliged to smuggle into her own
home any stray cousin who chanced to call on a weekday. She was not in
fact often reduced to such a subterfuge, for although Julia left Coverley House but twice a year, journeying to and from her house in Berkshire,
Hester was free to gad about as she pleased, and to pay any number of
calls on whomever she pleased—even, indeed, to do so wearing the
daring, brightly coloured bonnets she adored but which Julia disapproved
in humiliatingly frank terms.

Hester had never lost the vivacity which made the Coverley girls—the
other of whom was Kedrington s mother, Cecily—famous in their day,
nor the affectionate nature which prevented her from being overwhelmed
by Julia’s more forceful personality. Julia had been born a Heywood, but
succumbed to the Wilmot charm, with which her husband, Gerald, had
been blessed in abundance, long enough to give birth to her son Rowland
before she began to regret her lapse.

In recent years, Julia had become more vocal in her condemnation of
the Wilmot side of the family, and when Kedrington returned from
Spain as from the dead, she lost no time in assuring the world that she
considered the event nothing short of divine intercession. Kedrington
did not share his aunt’s strong feelings, however, with the result that his
indifference toward any relatives other than his eccentric but personable
aunts was generally if erroneously interpreted as malicious. He did
nothing to correct this misconception, and being as phlegmatic about it
as Julia was outspoken, he unwittingly reinforced it.

It was therefore not to be wondered at that Kedrington took no pains to
conceal his distaste when the first sight to greet him as he was ushered
into Julia’s drawing room was that of his heir—his right arm flung up on
the windowpane in a posture of romantic despair, his eyes staring glassily
into the square. Angus’s spindly frame was clothed in a remarkable
ensemble of funereal black, relieved only partially by a grey waistcoat
with silver buttons and a white cravat spotted with black. His cousin
raised his quizzing glass and surveyed this unorthodox costume with a
critical eye.

“Who died?”

Angus, recognizing the Voice of Authority, jumped, sputtered, recalled
himself, and said he was dam—dashed if he knew what my lord meant.

The viscount was prevented from telling him by the icy accents of his
Aunt Julia, who requested her tiresome grandson to kindly refrain from
making a further display of himself and to fetch the viscount a chair. She herself, seated in state upon an elegant rose satin sofa, reached out an
imperious hand to her nephew, who smiled, touched his lips lightly to the parchment-like fingers, and expressed regret that he could not stay
very long.

“Nonsense! You scarcely ever come to visit me, Kedrington. The least
you can do is to take a glass of sherry with me when you do.”

“Unfair, ma’am! Aunt Hester, I appeal to you. Have I neglected you?”

Miss Hester Coverley, with a delicate flutter of her plump hands,
declared that indeed no! Her dear Duncan was ever kind and considerate..
.
No one could possibly think... Her voice trailed off, leaving, as it
usually did, unfinished sentences in its wake.

“Sally Jersey called this morning,” Julia said, not hesitating to interrupt.
Kedrington was in the act of greeting Angus’s mother, a pretty but
unanimated woman; and not being so easily quelled as his Aunt Hester,
he went on in a leisurely way to shake Rowland Wilmot’s hand. As Julia
watched with a hint of approval behind her glare, he said conversationally
that he had heard that Devil’s Own had won by two lengths at Newmarket
last week.

Wilmot, a good-looking, likeable man with more
savoir-faire
than he would ever pass on to his lackluster offspring, smiled wryly (well aware
that Kedrington knew he had dropped a good many guineas at that race by betting on the horse that came in second), said that it was closer to
three lengths, and hoped that my lord had not wasted an afternoon watching the debacle.

“No, Wilmot, I never put money on cattle I cannot control myself.
What did Sally want, Julia?”

The grey eyes that matched his own held a smile, but Julia’s voice was
as dry as the rustle of the old-fashioned petticoats she spread around her on the sofa.

“She wanted to know if it is true that you engaged in espionage in
Spain, disguised as a priest.”

Kedrington accepted Angus’s obedient offer of a chair and sat down near his aunt, taking her hand at the same time and holding it in his own
as he spoke. “Who told her that?”