The Famous Heroine/The Plumed Bonnet (3 page)

So this place was as good as any.

“An Incomparable,” a haughty and rather languid voice said at his shoulder, unconsciously repeating the word he himself had used only a few moments before. “You are thinking of attaching yourself to her court, Kneller?”

Lord Francis turned to greet the Duke of Bridgwater, who was in the way of being a new friend. Though they had been acquainted for years, it was only in the past couple of weeks or so that they had had any dealings together. Bridgwater was Carew’s friend and Lord Francis was Samantha’s—yes, he was, he admitted ruefully, even though he had wanted to be very much more
than just that—and they had closed ranks, the two of them, he and Bridgwater, when that fiend Rushford had insulted Samantha and Carew had been forced to challenge him despite a partially crippled leg and arm. They had both become his seconds, Bridgwater by Carew’s request, Lord Francis by his own. They had gone to Jackson’s boxing saloon to witness the slaughter and to pick up the pieces of Samantha’s husband—and had remained to bask in the wonder and glory of Carew’s victory.

The clubs of London still had not ceased buzzing with the story, which might have seemed to be considerably embellished to anyone who had not been there to see it.

Bridgwater had been the one to advise Lord Francis that it was not the thing to wear his heart on his sleeve in quite the manner he was doing. Lord Francis had been ready to challenge Rushford himself, even though Samantha had a husband to look to her protection.

Discovering, as he had done just after the fight, that Samantha actually loved Carew and had not married him simply for his vast fortune had done nothing in particular to raise Lord Francis’s spirits. Neither had his begrudging admission that Carew was worthy of her.

“I am thinking of it,” he said now in answer to the duke’s question. “One likes to keep up one’s reputation as a connoisseur of beauty, you know.”

“For my part,” his grace said, “I would find it unsatisfactory to be merely a part of someone’s court. I would prefer to be the one and only. My pride, I daresay.”

“But then there is danger in being a one and only,” Lord Francis pointed out. “The danger of finding oneself netted. Or caught in parson’s mousetrap, to change the image but not the meaning.”

“I have a small favor to ask of you,” the duke said, causing Lord Francis to swing around to look full at him, his eyebrows raised. He felt a flicker of interest.
Life had been so desperately devoid of interest for weeks now. He must be impoverished indeed, he thought, if the mere mention of a favor he might do grabbed his whole attention. Perhaps his grace merely wished to know if a lock of his hair was sticking out at the back like a cup handle.

“My mother has arrived in town,” his grace said, raising his own glass to his eye and beginning a languid perusal of the occupants of the room through it, “with my two sisters—and a protégée.”

The slight pause before the final words and the almost imperceptible pain in the duke’s voice as the words were spoken alerted Lord Francis to the fact that the small favor had something to do with the protégée. It would hardly concern Lady Elizabeth Munro. She was betrothed to old What’s-His-Name, who was in Vienna, reputedly dazzling the world with his diplomatic genius. And Lady Jane Munro, though young and unattached, was unattached only because Bridgwater had rejected a string of suitors whom he considered unworthy—if gossip had the right of it, as gossip had a habit of not always being. Lord Francis Kneller was the son and brother of a duke, but it was extremely unlikely that he would ever attain the title himself since his brother had already been brilliantly prolific in the production of sons.

No, it could not be Lady Elizabeth and would not be Lady Jane. It would be the protégée.

“I trust they are all in good health?” Lord Francis said politely.

“Ah, yes indeed,” his grace said, his glass pausing for a moment and his lips pursing. Yes, she was pretty, Lord Francis thought as he followed the line of the duke’s quizzing glass to the young lady on whom it was trained. The quizzing glass resumed its journey. “I would appreciate it, old chap, if you would dance a set with the protégée.
Miss Cora Downes.” He said the name with something like distaste.

“Glad to,” Lord Francis said and wondered what was wrong with Miss Cora Downes. Apart from her name, that was. Her two names did not blend together into anything resembling poetry or even pleasing symphony. “Miss Cora Downes?”

His grace sighed, “It is unlike my mother to act purely out of sentiment,” he said. “But that appears to be what has happened in this case. She has taken the girl out of her own proper milieu and has brought her to town to present to the ton. It is her intention to find the girl a respectable husband.”

Lord Francis coughed delicately behind one lace-covered wrist.

“Oh, not you, old chap,” his grace said hastily. “It is just that for all my mother’s consequence and influence, I am still afraid Miss Downes will not take. It would be an embarrassment to her grace as well as to the girl herself, I daresay. And therefore to me.”

“Her own proper milieu?” Lord Francis’s curiosity was piqued. It seemed to him an eternity since he had felt anything as wildly exhilarating as curiosity.

“Her father could probably buy you and me up with the small change in his purse, Kneller,” the duke said, “and still have enough left to jingle in his pocket. He is a merchant from Bristol. He has recently bought property and set up as a gentleman. I believe his son has been to all the right schools and has taken up the practice of law. But there is the taint, you know, the lack of birth.”

“Ah,” Lord Francis said and pictured himself dancing with the girl and having his ears murdered with an uncouth provincial accent. Even that prospect was not utterly displeasing. It would be
amusing
. How long it was since he had been amused! “And my dancing with her will help her to take, Bridgwater?”

“Undoubtedly,” his grace said after letting his glass pause on Lady Augusta Haville before he lowered it and observed his surroundings with his naked eye. “Everyone knows that you commune only with the most fashionable and the most lovely ladies, Kneller. Your taste is legendary. You are a connoisseur of beauty, as you yourself just said. You have but to bow to a lady and a host of other men takes particular notice. If you tread a measure with Miss Downes, other gentlemen will flock to take your place. The girl will dance all night. She will be launched. Mama will be ecstatic. And I will be grateful.”

Lord Francis sifted through the flattery and decided that somewhere at the core of it was a sincere compliment. Was the girl so very dreadful, then? She was a merchant’s daughter? A merchant with pretensions to gentility? Was she ghastly and vulgar? Why had the very fastidious Duchess of Bridgwater taken her on? He decided to ask the question.

“She is your mother’s protégée?” he said, phrasing the sentence politely as a question.

“She saved my nephew’s life in Bath,” his grace explained. “Jumped into the river when he was drowning and almost drowned herself while fishing him out. A damned heroic thing to do, actually. We will be eternally in her debt, and I feel the debt personally as head of the family even though Henry belongs to George. But this seems a foolish way of paying it. Ah.”

His glass was to his eye again and directed at the doorway. Lord Francis glanced that way too and saw the Duchess of Bridgwater, her usual regal and beautiful self in purple, Lady Elizabeth Munro as beautiful and as aloof as ever, Lady Jane as small and sweet and innocent as she had looked last year during her first Season, and—and another young lady, who must be the protégée.

She was tall, large—he caught his mind in the act of using the latter word. She was not fat. Nothing like fat. But there was something large about her.
Voluptuous
, he thought, was a more accurate word. If she ever appeared on the stage, she would draw men to the green room like bees to a flower.

It was an unkind thought. She was dressed in virginal white, like Lady Jane—it was rather unfortunate that she stood next to the younger Munro sister—and the gown had been carefully designed to show somewhat less of her bosom than was fashionable. He suspected the restraining hand of the duchess. If the girl’s gown had been designed according to strict fashion, cut lower—well, his temperature threatened to soar a couple of degrees at the very thought.

He found himself wondering what she must have looked like when she climbed out of the river in Bath after having saved Bridgwater’s nephew. His temperature
did
rise at least one degree.

“The protégée?” he asked his grace.

“You see what I mean?” the duke asked, setting aside his quizzing glass and looking as if he were girding his loins for unpleasant action. “She looks for all the world as if she should be in a damned green room.”

Their minds sometimes moved along strange parallels, Lord Francis thought.

“And my mother thinks to find her a respectable husband,” the duke said with a sign. “Come along, Kneller. You did promise, did you not?”

She was not beautiful. Once the eye could be persuaded to rise above the level of the woman’s neck, one could see that. Her features were too strong for true delicacy and her eyes were too wide-spaced and too candid to inspire lovelorn sighs. Her hair was unfortunately dressed. It was a rich chestnut color, it was true, and was abundant and shining and clean. But it was far
too
abundant for the curls and ringlets she wore. One found oneself picturing it worn down about her waist—with the bosom of her gown cut lower.

Lord Francis fingered his quizzing glass and raised his eyebrows.

And then she saw him coming. Her hand shot to her mouth, her eyes lit up with unholy amusement, and she half turned her head as if to whisper something to Lady Jane. Then she noticed Bridgwater, appeared to realize that the two of them were moving in her direction, and dropped her hand. She very noticeably blanked her eyes.

But there must have been a speck of dust on the floor in front of her, Lord Francis thought afterward. There must have been. Certainly there was nothing else. Nothing that was visible. So it must have been something invisible over which she tripped. She did so quite inelegantly—not that there was an elegant way to trip, Lord Francis might have realized if he had been at liberty to consider the matter—and with a little shriek.

Lord Francis quickened his pace sufficiently to leap forward and save her from quite upending herself on the floor. For one moment before he set her to rights and stepped back in order to regard her with eyebrows that were raised again in polite inquiry, he felt the full impact of that remarkable voluptuous bosom against his chest. And for the same moment it seemed somehow irrelevant that her chemise and gown, his coat and waistcoat and shirt all separated his bare flesh from her bare flesh.

Quite irrelevant indeed. Lord Francis wondered if Prinny was due at tonight’s ball. If he was not, one was left to wonder why Lady Markley kept her ballroom so suffocatingly hot.

Miss Cora Downes, to whom the Duke of Bridgwater was proceeding to present him as if nothing untoward had happened, even though for a moment he had closed his eyes in pained acknowledgment of the fact that one-half
of the gathered guests must have witnessed the uncouth debut of his mother’s protégée and the other half would be told of it within the next five minutes—Miss Cora Downes blushed a shade brighter than scarlet and then giggled.

“Oops!” she said, interrupting his grace’s opening remarks. “I wonder if it is permitted to go back outside onto the staircase and try it all over again.” She spoke rather too loudly and heartily and then giggled once more before suddenly sobering in order to pay attention to Lord Francis’s name and to his request that he might lead her into the opening set.

What a deliciously frightful young lady
, he thought, feeling genuinely diverted for the first time in two or three eternities.

HE WAS FRANKLY TERRIFIED
. A
ND SHE DESPISED HERSELF
for feeling so, since rationally speaking she did not consider herself inferior to anyone. Lady Markley’s ballroom was stuffed full of the
ton
in all its jeweled splendor—all the
ton
and Cora Downes. The vast majority of those present were probably mere misters and misseses and misses, she reassured herself as she paused just inside the doorway with her three companions, surely the most conspicuous place of all to stand in any ballroom. She had to resist the urge to look down at herself to make sure she had remembered to put on her gown. The duchess would surely have thought before now of commenting on its absence if indeed she was clad in merely her shift.

Of course, there were undoubtedly several titled people present too. Cora felt a strange bonelessness in her knees—a most unfortunate part of the anatomy in which to feel it. Why be awed by titles? Jane had a title and was a very ordinary, pleasant young lady. And Papa always said that title and birth meant nothing but snobbery. It was wealth and property and the ability to acquire and manage both that really mattered. Cora herself was not really sure that even that was true, but it was a comforting thought to which to cling at the moment.