Miss Dashing, page 7
Hecate wended between lemons, oranges, ferns, and camellias until she came to a door that opened onto a blessedly quiet terrace.
“Do Portia and Flavia ever separate long enough to be private with anyone?” Phillip asked. “I took them for twins.”
“They are eleven months apart. Portia is the elder, and yes, for strategic purposes, they separate. They nearly succeeded in compromising a viscount’s pride and joy last year. They didn’t want to marry him. They wanted to blackmail him.”
“I’m not wealthy,” Phillip said. “You will please inform them of my poverty in no uncertain terms. Blackmail would be pointless. Then too, the appeal of becoming a social outcast is growing on me.” He set the tray on a wrought-iron table near a balustrade that faced the wooded border of the park.
“You see those oaks?” Hecate said, gesturing to the line of trees thirty yards off.
“We walked through part of them earlier today.”
“And you rejoiced to be in the out of doors. You can probably trail game down unseen paths, identify every bird by its call, and tell the savory mushrooms from those that can kill.”
“I admit to being at home in the woods and fields. I hope every child has the good luck to spend a few summers exploring hedgerows, meadows, brooks, and good climbing trees.”
“Portia and Flavia know polite society’s underbrush, birdcalls, and wildflowers the same way you know the countryside. They are at home lurking near punchbowls. They pore over Debrett’s as you’d read tracks on the muddy banks of the Twid. Underestimate them at your peril, my lord.”
Hecate delivered not a lecture, but rather, a serious warning, and Phillip took it as such. “If compromising is on the list of acceptable wilderness tactics here at Nunnsuch, why are you permitted to be private with me?”
Hecate gestured to a cushioned seat.
“I beg your pardon.” Phillip dutifully held her chair for her before taking the one next to it. “Sorry. They flustered me. One doesn’t expect an interrogation from a pair of giggling ninnyhammers.”
Hecate took up a table napkin and spread it on her lap, which reminded Phillip to do likewise.
“I am on the shelf,” Hecate said. “Firmly, completely, irreversibly. You could spend the night under my bed, and my family would not take it amiss. Spinsterhood was the bargain I struck with my father. The family’s first tactic was to try to marry me—and my fortune—off to a cousin or in-law. Keep the money where it will do the most good.”
Phillip held the plate of sandwiches out to her. “You don’t blame them for this conniving?”
“My fortune is all the money they have, so no, I don’t blame them, but no suitably obliging fellow over the age of sixteen stepped forward. Next, they tried to marry me to greater wealth, but again, no candidates volunteered. The last strategy was to put me on offer to gentlemen of exceedingly great age, with the understanding that I’d come into my widow’s portion in short order, but again, candidates were few and a bit too vigorous.”
She chose a single sandwich of butter and cress.
Phillip added two of roast beef and Stilton to her plate. The sandwiches were about the size of pocket watches, for pity’s sake. “You warned all these bachelors off.”
“After the first few, overt warnings weren’t necessary, but I hadn’t realized that my own solicitors—my former solicitors—were abetting my spinsterhood. I’ll have a raspberry tart, please.”
Phillip put three on her plate and bit into his own sandwich. “Thus you struck a bargain with your father. He agreed to stop leading you about Mayfair like a brindle heifer available to join a new herd, and you agreed to use your fortune for the family’s greater good.”
Hecate finished her first sandwich. “Your agrarian analogies want some polish, my lord.” She picked up a second sandwich.
“How old were you when you negotiated this cease-fire?”
“One and twenty, and I’d come into control of the first portion of my wealth. The whole of it is under my direction now, and I cannot tell you what a relief that is.”
“Probably about like gaining title to Lark’s Nest is for me. That place is my home, not simply the property where I dwell and sweat and snore. Mine. If Tavistock goes down in history as the worst brother ever to bear the label, I will still love and revere him for that single instance of generosity.”
Hecate took up her glass of punch, and Phillip considered she’d soon be off to avert various disasters on the terrace, in the kitchen, or in the garden shadows. He had a question or two yet to put to her.
“Tell me, Miss Brompton, did you love your cousin Johnny, or did you commend him to the Canadian wilderness with a sense of relief?”
She put her glass down slowly, the punch untasted. “Fast work, even for Flavia and Portia.”
Phillip waited, because her answer mattered.
“To be honest,” Hecate said. “A bit of both.”
Chapter Five
What had Flavia and Portia been about, regaling Lord Phillip with ancient family history? Their schemes ranged from outlandish to devious and both at the same time, and they were always scheming.
Edna doted on them shamelessly, which helped not one bit.
“Johnny is the one Brompton of whom the family is justifiably proud,” Hecate said, starting a second sandwich and surprised to find meat and cheese where she’d been expecting a dab of butter and some greens. “He talked the solicitors into allowing him a lieutenant’s commission and managed to get posted to Canada as hostilities on the Peninsula heated up. He even took a wayward younger brother with him.”
“For whom you were also expected to buy a commission?”
“I pay for everything. You needn’t carp on the fact. In any case, off they sailed, and in Canada they have remained. Johnny loves the out of doors, while Emeril is good with figures. Emeril attached himself to quartermastering in the eastern provinces, while Johnny went west. He eventually sold his commission and took to trapping and guiding. He’s apparently happy doing what he excels at. Emeril bides in the east, employed by some trading outfit, though I think they see each other every couple of years or so.”
How must it feel to have the vast, wild, whole of Canada to wander freely?
“And you are proud of them,” Lord Phillip said. “Do they write?”
“They write to Great-Uncle Nunn once or twice a year, and he deigns to share the letters. What of you? Any far-flung relations waiting for letters from you?”
Too late, Hecate realized her attempt to change the subject had been awkward.
“I have lady cousins throughout the home counties. I have met two of them thanks to Tavistock’s kind offices. I will meet the rest in the autumn if I return to London.”
Hecate sipped her punch. This was her second glass—and would be her last of the evening. “I’m sorry. I ought not to have asked after your family. You truly don’t know them?”
“They did not know I existed, and neither did Tavistock, by the old man’s design.” Lord Phillip munched on a second or third sandwich with what appeared to be complete equanimity. “I knew of them, though. We get the London papers in Crosspatch, and the nieces of a marquess were launched with some fanfare. I knew less of Tavistock because he was on evasive maneuvers in France.”
Soon, Hecate would have to wade into the affray on the main terrace, monitoring the punchbowl and keeping an eye on the buffet. If Eglantine and Edna or Portia and Flavia—or all four of them—became quarrelsome, Hecate would separate the combatants before the gentlemen started exchanging bets.
“What was it like,” she said, “to know you had family you were forbidden to meet?”
Phillip rose and propped a hip on the balustrade. “Probably like having cousins in Canada. You wish them well, you wait for the occasional word of them, you go on with your life. Did you love him?”
“We really must work on your small talk, my lord.”
“He abandoned you,” Phillip said. “I could not blame my relatives for ignoring somebody whose existence was unknown to them, but in the case of your Johnny…”
“He was all of twenty. I give him credit for understanding that with a fortune comes responsibilities. He preferred adventure, and at his age, the choice was understandable. He said I’d get the family sorted if I could avoid matrimony until age twenty-one, and he was right.”
“Your family is sorted, then?” Lord Phillip lounged, drink in hand, just out of smacking range.
“Keeping the Bromptons sorted is a near run thing from Season to Season, but they are all on allowances and have learned for the most part to live within their allotted means.”
For the most part, sometimes, in a manner of speaking.
Lord Phillip resumed his seat, gaze on the darkening line of trees. “Are you proud of yourself?”
A third sandwich awaited, and Hecate told herself she really shouldn’t, and she ought not to, and Lord Phillip had had no business putting so much food on the plate.
“Why would I be proud of myself? My every need is met not because of some effort I put forth, but because I had the good fortune to inherit wealth. I’m healthy through no fault of my own, of sound mind and reasonable appearance. None of it my doing. What do I have to be proud of?”
Phillip peered over at her, his expression hard to read in the gathering shadows. “You describe a pair of cousins who used your money to make their way to Canada, where everything from their boots to their biscuits was provided by the crown until other employment beckoned. Yet you are proud of them for following a path smoothed by your coin.
“Great-Uncle Nincompoop,” Phillip went on, resuming his seat, “has no idea how to make his land profitable despite having decades to study on the matter. When the Corn Laws are repealed—and they will be—he will expect you to keep Nunnsuch going, if you aren’t already. Edna the Ostrich expects you to dower those two hoydens, and it will take a small fortune apiece to find souls stout enough to meet those two at the altar. Cousin Charles would have gambled himself into exile but for your steadying hand, and that’s the recitation I can offer on one day’s acquaintance with your family. But you take no pride in these accomplishments.”
Hecate finished her third sandwich, hearing criticism rather than praise. “What is money for, if not caring for loved ones and the less fortunate?”
“Who cares for you?” Phillip passed her two more raspberry tarts. Had they been peach or apple, she might have refused.
“I care for me.”
He propped a boot on the balustrade and tipped his chair back on two legs. “I haven’t your great self-sufficiency. I look after Lark’s Nest, which might be loosely analogous to a rackety family. Just when I think the irrigation system has finally been set up to manage all the right acres in the right manner, we get a wet spring and I have flooding.
“I choose a fine stud for my broodmares, and only half of them catch. I decide to put a field in mangel-wurzels—remind me to tell Tavistock about mangel-wurzel beer, which is very good for breeding females—and turnips become more fashionable. Managing a patch of ground is like playing chess with fate, but at least I can compare notes with my neighbors.”
He popped a raspberry tart into his mouth while Hecate cast around for yet another subject they might pursue besides her family. Did they truly think her so antediluvian that she could dine virtually in seclusion with an eligible bachelor?
“I have reinforcements, though,” Phillip went on. “The Crosspatch Committee for Outwitting Unkind Fate meets regularly in the common of the Crosspatch Arms. Fortified with our pints, we trade insights, share the latest pamphlets, and offer each other encouragement and ideas. The same committee meets in the churchyard and on market day. Occasional executive sessions pop up over Vicar’s chessboard. My neighbors aren’t related to me, but they took me on as family all the same.”
“And you took them on as family.” Amaryllis DeWitt had passed along that much. Phillip never entertained formally, but he was always available to assist with a difficult foaling or calving and never begrudged a neighbor the loan of a team or a plow.
“I didn’t know any better,” he said, finishing off a second tart. “Does nobody truly care that we are private as darkness falls?”
“My family trusts me.” To be able to say that should have satisfied some dictate of pride or loyalty. Hecate appropriated the last tart and wished Phillip had brought more.
“But on what basis,” Phillip said, “do they trust me? I’m Lord Bumpkin, unacquainted with Society’s finer manners. Why trust such a one with the family treasure?”
Because the treasure is my fortune, not me. To put matters that bluntly would offend those finer manners.
“Why did you kiss me?” Hecate asked, tapping her forehead. “Here.”
“Not done? Does nobody in the beau monde express affection? Does nobody touch? Nobody hug? I begin to think a lordly title more of a curse than a blessing if that’s the case.”
“They don’t touch me.” Heaven help her, she’d downed too much punch too quickly. Or she’d still been short of sleep after a three-hour nap. Some imbalance in the humors had to account for such an unseemly admission.
The owl hooted out another warning just as a burst of laughter drifted up from the main terrace. Hecate wanted more punch and more cakes and to be anywhere else.
No, on second thought, that was incorrect. She wanted her family to be anywhere else, but then she’d worry about the mischief they were getting up to.
“I was born with a deformity,” Lord Phillip said in the same tones he might have offered to fetch more food. “My right shoulder and the muscles around it didn’t work properly. Forceps were to blame, apparently, but the old marquess chose to see my weakness as more proof that I was not his get. I could not crawl properly, and the strength on my right side is still not the equal to my left.”
“What has this to do with…?” Hecate fell silent as her mind’s eye filled with the memory of couples whirling on the dance floor. Hands held high, hands forming an arch for other couples, ladies twirled with confident strength by their manly partners.
How could one dance without a stout right arm?
“My neighbors touch me,” Lord Phillip said. “A pat on the back, a hug, a handshake, but until recently, I shook with my left hand. Nobody remarked it—they were being kind—until Tavistock brandished his right in a manner I could not ignore. Like putting up his fives, though with the best of intentions.”
“I’m… sorry.” Nothing in Phillip’s bearing or appearance suggested any imperfection. What point was he making with this disclosure?
“I wanted to shake with my right, but what if somebody took a notion to squeeze my hand too hard? Would that affect my shoulder? What if, knowing of my malady, they found my right hand distasteful? The whole business put me off greeting anybody face-to-face. To shake with the right hand is normal and manly, and yet…”
“You were not normal,” Hecate said, grasping a thread of significance. “You wanted to be, but fate decreed otherwise.”
“I am not normal,” Phillip said, “but who is? I do believe, though, that it’s normal to long to kiss a lovely woman when she has become dear to me. When I esteem her and enjoy her company and hope she can—despite my many shortcomings—enjoy mine.”
He was saying he was… attracted to her? The notion was equally outlandish and intriguing. Lord Phillip Vincent was woefully inadequate at dissembling, and he was still self-conscious about his shoulder apparently, and he wasn’t at all impressed with the Brompton Horde.
Who were, after two cups of punch, more than a bit tiresome.
“Are you wishing I’d kiss you, my lord?”
“If we’re venturing onto that fraught ground, might you call me Phillip?”
“Answer the question, Phillip.”
He took her hand. “One doesn’t wish to presume, et cetera and so forth, but one is also compelled by honor to deal with a lady honestly, and therefore, I do admit to harboring—”
“Hecate!” Eglantine’s soprano warbled out from the conservatory. “Oh, Hec-a-teeeee! My dear, you simply must come. Charles is trying to get up a whist party, and whist was invented by the devil to steal my pin money.”
Eglantine emerged from the house, a pale form against the increasing darkness. “That is you? Who is your friend? Oh, Lord Phillip. Doing your bit for the family spinster? Too bad for you, I have need of her. Hecate, you must talk sense to Charles. Mr. DeGrange knows his way around a deck of cards, and Edna is encouraging this nonsense. My trunks haven’t been unpacked, and Charles is already imperiling his sons’ inheritance. Do excuse us, your lordship. Needs must.”
Phillip had dropped Hecate’s hand the instant Eglantine had called out, not that he need have bothered.
He rose and bowed. “I understand. Duty calls. Don’t spare the horses. The fate of England, we happy few, and so forth…”
Hecate rose and curtseyed, when she wanted to pitch Eglantine over the balustrade. “I’m coming, though whist for farthing points would pose no threat.”
Eglantine snorted. “You must set the stakes, Hecate. Charles won’t listen to me, and Edna will argue for pounds and pence, because she always hopes to win and seldom does.”
Hecate let herself be dragooned into the conservatory, though she paused to look over her shoulder. Phillip was lounging against the railing again, his glass in his hand.
When Hecate would have turned to go, he blew her a kiss, then tapped his lips. She could not be sure—no torches had been lit yet—but she was fairly certain he’d also winked at her.
Not done. Unspeakably sweet of him, but not done.
“He’s coming home?” Edna Brompton asked, ready to snatch the blasted letter from Uncle Nunn’s grasp. “Our Johnny is coming home?”
“So he claims.” Nunn took a leisurely sip of his morning coffee. “Will take ship shortly, if he hasn’t already. Wants to be home before the autumn storms start up. One doesn’t trifle with North Atlantic weather.”
