“I’ve developed just such an interest,” he said stubbornly.
“If you’ll forgive me my skepticism, Your Grace, there’s more to this than your sudden enthusiasm. Where is this professional actress coming from? Who is she?” Gillian looked directly at Mr. Spenser. It was he who was pulling the strings of this particular puppet show, or she’d miss her guess.
“Her name is Miss Loretta Hawes.”
“And where did Miss Hawes come from?”
“Mr. Spenser accidentally hit her with his carriage,” Imogen Maitland explained. “Due to her injury, she lost her place at the Covent Garden, so he promised her a lead role here. Thus Rafe’s unwonted theatrical enthusiasm.”
“As some sort of compensation?” Gillian said, her eyes searching Mr. Spenser’s face.
“Precisely.”
“So we have a professional actress in the main role,” the duke said wearily. “Is there anything else we need to discuss?” He stood up, swaying slightly.
“He should be lying down,” Lady Griselda said flatly, once the duke had left the room. “I have an idea for the performance.”
“What do you suggest, Lady Griselda?” Mr. Spenser asked.
“What about a Christmas pantomime? Everyone loves a pantomime, and if the caliber of our acting isn’t all that it could be, it certainly won’t be noticed in a pantomime.”
“You mean a proper pantomime, with a farce and—”
“Precisely! It suits us perfectly. All the parts are generally taken by men, but we can give one female role to this young person from London. She can play a princess or something. I’m sure she’ll be happy if we find an ostentatious costume.”
There was something fishy about the story of the actress knocked down by the carriage. Gillian was under the impression that Mr. Spenser had only just made himself known to his half brother. He looked like a man who would be much more comfortable tucked away in a dusty library in Cambridge. There was something faintly desperate in his eyes when he mentioned Miss Hawes that made her suspicious.
Lady Maitland came forward and put her hand on Mr. Spenser’s arm. “I think it’s a lovely thing you’re doing for this young woman,” she said, looking up at him.
Last time Gillian had seen Imogen look at a man with that intense interest, her name had been Imogen Essex, and her gaze had been directed at Gillian’s own fiancé, Draven Maitland. Gillian had welcomed it with joy, as it signaled a possible release from her engagement. This time, her name was Imogen Maitland, and her gaze was directed at the duke’s brother.
Gillian didn’t like it this time.
Not at all.
13
A Council of War Involves a Division of Battlegrounds Amongst Generals
I’m not afraid of a widow’s cap, Imogen said to herself. She was dressing for dinner. When the season arrives, I’ll travel to London and decide if I wish to remarry, and that will be that.
But the season doesn’t start for months. Six months. And I…
Want something for myself. Her grief was gone, but there was a sort of emptiness in its place. Last spring, she’d thought to have an affair out of rage, humiliation, and guilt. Now she felt as if the last year had happened to someone else. Surely it was another woman who had turned on her dearest sister Tess like a viper and blamed her for Draven’s death. And why?
Imogen’s hands stilled. Because she and Tess had been arguing at the moment when Draven’s horse flashed by the stand? She had apologized to Tess, of course. But she ought to apologize again. Surely she had been mad, maddened by grief.
She needed to scatter her apologies everywhere. She had to apologize to Miss Pythian-Adams as well. She put the thought away.
Mr. Spenser was delicious. She shivered even thinking of him.
Surely it wouldn’t be too hard to seduce him. Imogen took a deep breath. She’d do it this very night. Tonight.
“Daisy,” she said, turning about.
Imogen’s maid looked up from straightening her cupboard. “Yes, my lady?”
“I’ll wear the velvet evening gown that Madame Carême made for me.”
“Of course, my lady,” Daisy said, pulling forth a swath of glorious deep crimson, with a dipping neckline and small velvet sleeves that clung. It was trimmed in seed pearls and subtly shaped to follow Imogen’s curves. “Would you like a ribbon in your hair?”
“No,” Imogen said, “I’ll wear the rubies.” They would give her confidence.
I can seduce Mr. Spenser as easily as I fell from that apple tree at Draven’s feet, Imogen told herself twenty minutes later, looking in the mirror.
There was a sound at the door. Daisy opened it and said: “Miss Pythian-Adams wonders if you might receive her.”
“Do ask her to come in,” Imogen said. “And Daisy, I shall finish dressing myself. Thank you.”
The maid curtsied and shut the door behind her.
Gillian Pythian-Adams was dressed in a subdued striped silk, fashionable, certainly, but eminently suitable for a quiet dinner in the country. Her eyes widened when she saw Imogen.
“You look exquisite, Lady Maitland,” she said. “I am put to shame.”
“Thank you,” Imogen said, leading her to a chair, “but the idea of shame is ridiculous. I remember despairing the moment I saw you for the first time, last year. I had been so hopeful that you would be a dreary bluestocking.” She hesitated and then took the plunge. “I have wanted to apologize, Miss Pythian-Adams. I behaved in a truly despicable fashion when I ran away with your fiancé.”
“The fact that you loved him is a mitigating influence,” Miss Pythian-Adams said, dropping into a chair.
Imogen didn’t sit down. “I have given a great deal of thought to my behavior over this past year, and I have no excuse for it. I was utterly single-minded about your—your former fiancé, Draven Maitland. I’d been in love with him for some years, and although that cannot excuse my behavior, it might explain it.”
“Please sit down,” Miss Pythian-Adams said, “please. And you must call me Gillian. As for explaining your behavior, I felt only admiration, I promise you. You felt so strongly for poor Draven.”
“Yes, I did,” Imogen said, sitting down.
“If you will forgive my plain speaking,” Gillian said, leaning forward to touch Imogen’s knee, “I was amazed. You see, I was engaged to Draven myself, and yet you managed to see such a better side to him than I had glimpsed.”
“He was difficult,” Imogen said. “But he was also—magnificent.”
“I was fond of him,” Gillian said. “And yet I was so glad when the two of you eloped. If poor Draven had to live such a short time, I am grateful that he didn’t spend his days with such a sharp-tongued termagant as I am. I was terribly unpleasant to him, you know.”
“I’m sure you weren’t.”
“Oh, I was,” Gillian said cheerfully. “I tried any way I could to get him to cry off. I couldn’t break the engagement myself as his mother held the mortgage to my father’s estate. Luckily”—and she had the smile of a cat who’d found the cream—“she was kind enough to give it back to us when Draven married you. I believe she was afraid of a breach-of-promise suit. So you see, Lady Maitland, not only do you have nothing to apologize to me for, but I have every need to thank you.”
“You were truly attempting to get Draven to call off your wedding?”
“Absolutely. I was desperate.”
“How odd,” Imogen said after a moment of silence. “I’m afraid I felt the same emotion, reversed. I was desperate to marry.”
“What a lovely contrast you must have presented to me,” Gillian said. “There I was, trying to bore him to death by reciting Shakespeare morning, noon, and night. But Draven was so affable…he simply refused to be annoyed by me.” She opened her eyes wide. “I can promise you that I can be very annoying.”
“I’ve no doubt,” Imogen said wryly. “Perhaps Draven didn’t listen very closely.”
“By all accounts, such deafness was a f
ormative part of his character,” Gillian agreed. “I am quite envious of you for being able to overcome that fact and love him enough to elope with him.”
Imogen shrugged. “At the time, I couldn’t conceive that he wasn’t perfect in any way.”
The corner of Gillian’s mouth quirked up but she said nothing.
“I know,” Imogen said. “There was a great deal of Draven that I had to overlook in order to find him perfect. But I mastered it.”
“How lovely for him,” Gillian said. “Now if only I could manage to be hit by a kindred stroke of lightning, I might fall in love someday.”
“I shall do my best to help you if I may,” Imogen said earnestly. “Whether I overlooked Draven’s faults or not, the truth is that I should never have overlooked you.”
“I am most grateful for your offer of help, but I’m afraid that your kindness is likely unnecessary. I seem to be missing the necessary trait. I’m truly finding it difficult to imagine falling in love. I’m afraid—” she said it lightly—“that I am destined to marry for thoroughly practical reasons. I am schooling myself to view marriage like Chaucer’s Wife of Bath: a thoroughly commercial exchange, with interesting benefits.”
There was something so dry about her voice that Imogen found herself laughing out loud. “How can you be so elegant and yet so witty?” she asked. “It is taking all my intellect merely to dress myself with a modicum of grace, and though I read Chaucer with my sisters, I don’t remember very much.”
“There is more than elegance involved in the dress you wear tonight,” Gillian said, with a twinkle in her eye.
Imogen grinned at her. “And what, pray, do you imply by that?” By all rights, Gillian’s thick lashes should lend her eyes a limpid innocence. And yet somehow she managed to turn a mere glance at Imogen’s shoulders into a laughing commentary.
“You appear to be in full battle regalia. I would have to be unobservant indeed not to notice. Should I take it that you mean to go a-courting, as the old song goes?”
“I am not a frog,” Imogen said.
Gillian waited.
“Perhaps not courting…”
“In the sense of an endeavor aimed at the altar,” Gillian finished for her.
“Precisely.”
“You are surely thinking to bedazzle, if not marry. Your erstwhile guardian?”
“Absolutely not!”
“Then his brother,” Gillian said. “The ineligible Mr. Spenser.”
“He is ineligible.”
“But?”
“Indeed,” Imogen said. “I find him appealing.”
“An interesting pursuit.”
“Indecent by many standards,” Imogen said.
“Yes,” Miss Pythian-Adams sounded thoughtful and utterly unperturbed by the truth of Imogen’s statement. “I shall watch you with interest, Lady Maitland.”
“Oh, please, you must call me Imogen. I have been missing the presence of my sisters, and you and I have had such a frank conversation…don’t you think that we are practically sisters, given that we almost married the same man?”
“And that fact gives us a claim to family?” Gillian asked, cocking her head to the side. “I am honored.”
“We should go downstairs to the sitting room,” Imogen said. “I have to be there before Rafe, if only to stop him from being alone with the whiskey decanters.”
“My maid told me that he has recently stopped drinking. It seems a terrible process.”
“Only if you were thoroughly pickled when you gave up spirits,” Imogen said, glancing at the mirror. “Am I outrageously overdressed, or will it simply pass for eccentricity?”
Gillian looked at her. “You would not be out of place dressed for a formal dinner in Paris. If I were you, I would remove the rubies, as they are perhaps a trifle too anxious.”
Imogen looked back at the mirror. “I see what you mean.”
“There is a great charm in the obvious,” Gillian said. “For example, if you hadn’t been quite so forthright with Draven, I would likely be widowed at this moment. There are certain men with whom one has to be blunt.”
“But Mr. Spenser—”
“I would judge him to be quite a different sort of gentleman,” Gillian said. “There is his illegitimacy, for instance. That in itself makes him an altogether more complicated man than an average self-satisfied English gentleman.”
“Yet he is a gentleman,” Imogen said. “I find it fascinating that he looks every inch the aristocrat…in contrast to his lamentable brother, the duke.”
“Indubitably,” Gillian said. “But likely he is more sensitive than the typical Englishman.”
“I’m not used to sensitivity in the male sex,” Imogen said, thinking of her burly, shouting father.
“Since we were engaged to the same man,” Gillian said wryly, “you’ll understand that I can offer very few pointers in that direction myself. This promises to be a truly interesting evening,” she added. “I am so happy that I came.”
“Why did you come?”
“To put on the play, of course. And to escape a most unpleasant suitor.”
Imogen looked at her and shook her head. “I am not sure I entirely believe you, Gillian Pythian-Adams. You, like Mr. Spenser, are a good deal more complex than the typical English nobleman.”
Gillian smiled but said nothing.
Imogen looked at Gillian, at her gleaming copper curls, her slim white arms, and the discreet swell of her bosom. She looked delectable.
She was courting as well.
“It’s Rafe,” she said with a little gasp. “You’re courting…Rafe.”
Gillian smiled. “I had thought of it. He is such a tremendously kind man, isn’t he? And”—her eyes were sparkling now—“I find him rather—”
“I know he’s attractive,” Imogen said hastily, “but have you thought about actually living with him? He is the opposite of fastidious, after all.”
“He is untidy because he is unhappy, or so I thought when I last met him,” Gillian said. “I would like to see him happy.”
“Didn’t you just remark that you would never fall in love?” Imogen said.
“Yes. Love seems to me a fatal mistake. Think of Lord Maitland versus the Duke of Holbrook, for example. Draven was—if you’ll forgive me—rash, ill-tempered, and childish to the extreme. Rafe, to give him his Christian name, has been unfailingly polite on all occasions and has accepted his illegitimate brother into his family without a qualm. Moreover”—she smiled—“he is, as you say, attractive.”
“He’s plump,” Imogen said, feeling as if she were standing in quicksand.
Gillian shrugged.
How could Imogen have thought she looked docile? Now she saw that Gillian’s lips were dark cherry, and her eyelashes were tinged with black color, making the green sparkle. “I like a man to have heft about him,” she remarked. “It is obvious that you do not care for him—”
“I don’t,” Imogen said quickly. “I dislike drunkards.”
“It’s my lamentable hardheadedness,” Gillian replied. “Holbrook is not a fool. He may have been a drunkard, but he doesn’t have the look of a cruel man. And he may have a bit of a tummy, although I must say that he appears to have lost weight since I saw him last.”
“He hasn’t eaten properly since he stopped drinking.”
“Hopefully he will recover his good health in the near future,” Gillian said.
“Do you have the sense that Rafe is interested in women?” Imogen asked rashly.
“In the way of craving a female, you mean?”
And, at Imogen’s nod, “I didn’t think that I had to put on a low-necked dress in order to interest him, no. He’s lonely, though. I could feel it when I was here with Draven, last year.”
“Oh,” Imogen said, and then: “Of course, you’re right. My sister Tess always said the same.”
“There are many ways to catch a wedding ring,” Gillian said composedly. “Shall we retire to the sitting room? Now that we
are both party to our surreptitious plans, I might as well tell you that I would prefer that the duke not take up drinking again. It is much easier to handle a husband who is not soaked in liquor, although I would never wish to become a nagging wife.”
“I nag him,” Imogen said abruptly. “I can’t bear it when he drinks.”
“Well, I suppose given your connection to him, you have more latitude,” Gillian said, opening the door. “There is nothing more objectionable, in my opinion, than a husband or wife always pointing out a spouse’s shortcomings. I doubt I shall ever dabble in the subject; it’s so horrid when a wife is plaguing her husband to death over that kind of thing.”
“You must,” Imogen said, walking out the door behind her. “He’ll kill himself if he begins drinking again.”
“I trust not,” Gillian said. “At any rate, if he’s given it up, I shan’t have to think about it at all. I believe I shall try to bring about our engagement as soon as possible. Once the ton realizes that he’s sober, the matchmaking mamas will be out in force. A sober Duke of Holbrook will be the most eligible parti in London.”
“Yes,” Imogen said, feeling oddly unsettled at the thought.
“So what with one thing and another,” Gillian said, smiling at the footman who whisked open the door to the sitting room, “this project to put on Mr. Spenser’s play is quite fortuitous.”
“I see that,” Imogen said slowly.
She looked over Gillian’s shoulder and there was Rafe, standing by the window. As always, her gaze flew to his hand, but he wasn’t nursing a golden glass of liquor. He was staring out the window. Gillian was right. His gut was definitely reduced. It looked almost flat.
“You see?” Gillian said, turning to her, her eyes dancing. “He’s quite appealing, isn’t he? I’m so tired of wispy English gentlemen in striped vests with buffed fingernails. Your Rafe is a brute. A great brute of a man.”
Imogen tried to smile. Was she blind that she didn’t see him as a brute of a man? When she looked at Rafe, all she saw was the way he stood alone, staring out the window, and hadn’t even realized that they’d entered the room.