His at Night (9 page)

She should pity him: He could not help being an idiot. But the only thing she felt was a burning irritation. His presence was spoiling her carefully laid plans.

“How sweet of you,” she made herself say. “And here I was all by myself. Do please fill your plates and sit down.”

But how to salvage breakfast? She would need to bombard Lord Frederick with questions about art—his art in particular—the moment he took his seat.

But Lord Vere thwarted her yet again by commencing his monologue while still standing before the sideboard, loading his plate with fried eggs, broiled herring, and buttered muffins. The topic of his dissertation was animal husbandry. Apparently he’d been to an agricultural fair or two and considered himself an authority.

He expounded at considerable length on the Shropshire mutton sheep, its merits and demerits, and then compared it to the Southdown, the Oxford Down, and the Hampshire mutton sheep, the rams of which possessed something of a Roman nose, in his opinion.

Despite her country upbringing, Elissande knew nothing of sheep. But she could just imagine the atrocious mistakes he was making. She still wanted to shake him by the shoulders and ask him how she could possibly have Raphael’s
Deliverance of St. Peter
in
her dining room when it was a wall fresco at the Palace of the Vatican—part of the architecture of the papal apartment itself.

At some point Lord Vere shifted his focus from sheep to cattle. He had not only attended agricultural fairs, he wanted Elissande to know, but he had seen actual scorecards. “My, those fine animals were put through a rigorous judging—head, body, forequarter, hindquarter. But do you know what the most important aspect of judging a dairy cow is?”

“No, I’m sure I don’t, my lord,” she said, stabbing her knife into the muffin on her plate.

“Mammary development, Miss Edgerton, worth a whopping thirty-five percent of the overall score. The udder must be very large and very flexible. The teats must be of a nice size and evenly placed. Milk veins, extensive; milk wells, capacious.”

He was no longer looking at her face but at her chest. “I don’t believe I’ve viewed a dairy cow quite the same since. Now when I see cows, instead of just saying to myself, ‘Oh, look, cows,’ I study their udders and teats for their conformity to the principles of animal husbandry—and for the sheer enjoyableness of studying udders and teats, of course.”

Elissande could not believe her ears. She opened her eyes a little wider and nodded a little more vigorously. Then she slanted a look Lord Frederick’s way, certain that the latter must be frowning at Lord Vere, trying to warn his brother that his speech had quite smashed through the bounds of acceptability.

But Lord Frederick was not paying any attention. He ate slowly, his eyes on his plate, his mind obviously elsewhere.

Lord Vere went on about udders and teats, his gaze fixed to her torso. In his enthusiasm he dropped two forks and a spoon, overturned his teacup, and finally caused a fried egg to land directly onto his own lap, at which point he jumped up, loudly upending his chair. The egg on his trousers flopped to the floor, but not before leaving behind a perfect round of sticky yellow yolk just where no one ought to look.

The commotion finally brought Lord Frederick out of his reverie. “Penny, what the—”

“Oh, dear,” said Elissande. “You’d best change fast, my lord, if you don’t want your good clothes ruined.”

For once, Lord Vere did the sensible thing and departed. Elissande slowly unclenched her hands underneath the table. It was, however, another few seconds before she could master herself enough to smile at Lord Frederick.

“And how are
you
this morning, sir?”

The breakfast tray in his room and the lack of one in Freddie’s told Vere everything he needed to know: Miss Edgerton had meant to have breakfast with Freddie, just the two of them.

He could not fault her taste: Freddie was the best of men. She with her plentiful smiles and scheming ways, however, was not remotely worthy of Freddie.
But let her try. He would thwart, foil, and destroy every last one of her plots.

But for now he needed to speak to Lady Kingsley. He slipped a note under her door. She met him five minutes later at the turning of the grand staircase, from which point no one could approach them unobserved.

“I’ve asked Holbrook for Nye,” said Vere.

Nye was a safecracker. After Vere had left Mrs. Douglas’s room, he’d changed, written a seemingly rambling note that Holbrook would know how to decode, and walked into the village just in time for the telegraph office to open. On his way back he’d caught a ride on a hay wagon and laid his head down for a pleasant nap after a sleepless night, arriving at Highgate Court as Freddie came downstairs for breakfast.

“Where is the safe? And you still have straw in your hair.”

“In Mrs. Douglas’s room, behind the dead-man painting,” said Vere, running his fingers through his hair. “Do you have the servants’ movements?”

“They don’t go into Mrs. Douglas’s room unless called for. Twice a week Miss Edgerton puts her in a wheelchair and walks her up and down the passage. That’s when the servants go in to clean and change the bedding and so on. Otherwise only Miss Edgerton—and I imagine Douglas himself—enters the room.”

“In that case, Nye can start working as soon as Miss Edgerton comes down for dinner.”

Lady Kingsley glanced up and waved at her niece, who returned her wave before disappearing down the passage, probably to visit one of her friends. “How long will he need?”

“He has opened a combination-lock safe in as little as half an hour. But that was when he could drill. Here he cannot drill.”

Lady Kingsley frowned. “Last night when the ladies retired, Miss Edgerton went to Mrs. Douglas’s room before she went to her own.”

“We must make sure then she doesn’t retire so early tonight.”

“We’ll do that,” said Lady Kingsley. “And I can invent a reason to keep her with me for a while even after the ladies retire, but not for too long.”

Miss Kingsley reappeared at the top of the stairs. “Lord Vere, could I borrow my aunt a moment? Miss Melbourne simply can’t decide what to wear today.”

“You do what you can and I will take care of the rest,” Vere said with just enough volume for Lady Kingsley to hear. Then he raised his voice. “Of course you may have her, Miss Kingsley. Here, she is all yours, with my compliments.”

It was a good talk, about the places in London and the surrounding countryside where Lord Frederick liked to paint. But it was not an exciting conversation. Not that Elissande was overly familiar with exciting conversations, but still she felt the missing spark.

Lord Frederick did not look at her as if he were a
hungry head of cattle and she a fresh, fragrant bale of hay—and goodness, why was she thinking in terms of animal husbandry when she’d never done so in her whole life? Lord Frederick was polite and obliging, but he betrayed no sign of a
preference
for Elissande.

She blamed it all on Lord Vere, especially when he returned much too soon, still wearing the same egg-stained garments. His endless discourse on mutton sheep must have drained all life and verve from Lord Frederick, who’d had to listen to him for God only knew how many thousands upon thousands of hours over a lifetime.

“Penny, you forgot to change your trousers,” Lord Frederick pointed out.

“So that’s what!” Lord Vere cried. “I got up to my room and for the life of me I couldn’t remember why I went. Bother.”

Idiot!

“Perhaps you should give it another try?” Elissande suggested, curving her lips and wishing that smiles were arrows. Lord Vere would be more perforated than St. Sebastian.

“Oh, no use now. I’ll just forget again,” Lord Vere dismissed her idea breezily. “I might as well wait until I change for the shooting. And how is the shooting here, by the by, Miss Edgerton?”

Was he looking at her bosom again? His eyes certainly did not meet hers. “I’m afraid we don’t keep a game park, sir.”

His eyes remained precisely where they were. “No? Hmm, I suppose we shall have to play tennis.”

“I’m sorry, but we lack a tennis court also.”

“How about archery? I’m not so terrible as an archer.”

Beside him Lord Frederick squirmed.

“With my aunt’s health and my uncle’s consideration of it, we do not have anything that would produce noise or excitement about. Perhaps you’d like to go for a walk instead, my lord?”

“I already went for a walk before breakfast—do you not remember, Miss Edgerton? I suppose I could settle for a game of croquet instead.”

How did he do that? How did he carry on a conversation with her while his eyeballs were firmly ensconced between her breasts?

“I apologize. We do not have the necessary equipment for croquet.”

“Well,” said Lord Vere, finally exasperated enough to return his gaze to her face. “What is it you do around here then, Miss Edgerton?”

She sent him a smile that should have damaged his vision. “I look after my aunt, sir.”

“That is exceedingly admirable, but unbearably tedious, is it not, with no amusements nearby whatsoever?”

She managed to sustain her smile but not without putting some effort into it. How he irked her, like a rock in her shoe.

“Tedium does not enter into it at a—”

She stopped. The dreaded sound: a carriage arriving. “Excuse me,” she said, rising.

“Are you expecting someone?” Lord Vere followed her to the window.

She said nothing, wordless with relief. It was not her uncle. She did not recognize the carriage. She also did not recognize the middle-aged, sharp-featured woman in a blue traveling dress who exited the carriage.

“Is that not Lady Avery, Freddie?” said Lord Vere.

Lord Frederick came swiftly to the window. Lord Vere yielded his place.

“What is she doing here?” Lord Frederick growled. He swore under his breath, then remembered himself and turned to Elissande. “I beg your pardon, Miss Edgerton. I did not mean to speak so rudely of your caller.”

What a perfect gentleman he was. “You may speak as rudely of her as you wish, sir. I assure you I have never met this particular caller.”

“Oh, look. She has brought luggage,” said Lord Vere, unperturbed. “Think she’s come to stay?”

Lord Frederick smacked his palm against the windowsill, then again begged Elissande’s pardon.

“It’s quite all right,” said Elissande. “But who is she?”

L
ady Avery was a Gossip.

Elissande was not entirely unfamiliar with the idea of a gossip: Mrs. Webster in the village had been one, carrying on about the butcher’s wife or the vicar’s new gardener. But Lady Avery regarded herself quite above such provincial rumormongers as Mrs. Webster:
She
was a woman of the world with entrée to the very best Society.

With her arrival, Lord Frederick promptly disappeared. To Elissande’s mounting despair.

To be sure, she had begun to despair even before Lady Avery’s unannounced arrival: Lord Frederick was in no rush to appropriate her hand, while her time, already as limited as Lord Vere’s intelligence, shrank second by rapid second.