“And your cravat must stay on,” she said. “In its original condition,” she clarified, since he had a rather appalling habit of yanking upon it until it was loose about his neck, its frills limp and sagging.
“It’s too damned tight.”
“It’s meant to be tight.” The carriage was turning, beginning to slow. Phoebe wracked her brain for further reminders, regretting now that she had spent rather too much time on table manners and place settings and perhaps too little upon the art of polite conversation—an area in which he was woefully lacking. “You will want to avoid speaking of business or politics,” she said. “It’s considered crass to discuss commerce or money in polite company, and those with seats in the House of Lords aren’t likely to welcome your opinions on their favored bits of legislation.”
Sounding vaguely harassed, he replied, “I don’t much follow politics, but I’ll do my best not to embarrass you.”
“Embarrass me?” Taken aback, Phoebe said, “You won’t embarrass me.”
“Then why all the instruction? I haven’t accidentally put my elbow in the pudding in at least three days.” His fingers drummed out a rapid rhythm upon the door of the carriage, as if his patience was thinning. “Be honest,” he said, his voice turning sulky. “You think I might trip some poor fellow with my cane apurpose and Lord and Lady Clarke will rethink any future invitations.”
“I don’t care if they do,” she said, perplexed. “Lady Clarke is a nosy gossip, and Lord Clarke is an arrogant boor. If I never receive an invitation from them again, it will be no great loss.” She flicked back the curtains to gaze out the window, watching the street lamps drift by the carriage.
“Then why did you accept this one?”
“It’s what you wanted,” she said. “And besides, Emma and Lord Rafe will be present. It’s the first event, is it not? That you will attend together? I thought it would be pleasant to have at least two other familiar faces. You won’t have to brave the lion’s den alone.”
A strange silence from the opposite side of the carriage, and briefly Phoebe wondered if she had overstepped, or miscalculated. At last, he asked, “You didn’t want to attend yourself?”
She managed a light laugh. “I’ve endured ten years of Seasons,” she said. “And I have spent every one of them doing my best to avoid an unwanted marriage. Had the choice been my own, I would have accepted only invitations from those who could not be convinced to rescind them under any circumstances. I daresay even those would keep my social schedule quite full.”
“You do have an awful lot of siblings.”
“Laurence will likely be present this evening,” she said. “Probably I should have warned you. I know he’s a bit—”
“Conceited?”
“Protective,” she corrected. “He’s had seven sisters to look out for all his life.”
“He’s a pretentious arse,” he said, and the gritty inflection to his voice made her wonder if perhaps her brother had, at one point or another, been the unwitting victim of his petty vengeance.
A line of carriages had taken up most of the street. They would have to walk the rest of the way to the house. Phoebe pitched her voice low as the coachman hopped down from his seat. “He improves upon further acquaintance,” she said.
“I don’t,” Chris said, and slid toward the door as the coachman threw the carriage door open. He braced the point of his cane upon the ground, gingerly stepping down, suppressinga wince as he landed. She had learned, in the short time since their marriage, that his knee tended to pain him terribly when it rained. The last three days had been nothing but rain, and he had spent the bulk of them stretched out upon the couch in the library in his banyan with a succession of hot cloths draped over his naked knee.
Phoebe smoothed her skirts, turning for the door of the carriage—only to find his hand thrust toward her. “What—”
“I’m meant to help you down, am I not?”
“Yes, but…” But she hadn’t taught him that. Hadn’t expected him to know it. There were few enough people on the street at the moment, and none were paying any particular attention to them.
“Come on, then,” he said impatiently. “In precisely two hours, I’m casting this cravat straight into the fire, company be damned. Let’s not waste time.”
Phoebe bit her lip against the inclination to inform him that they’d likely not be even halfway through dinner in two hours. It was his first dinner party, after all. It wouldn’t do to have him cut and run out of sheer annoyance before they’d even set foot through the door. She set her hand in his and climbed down from the carriage onto the pavement—and paused.
It had been dark when they had set out, and he’d been held up by some bit of business in his study. She’d not gotten more than a glimpse of him before the carriage had whisked away from the house, and the curtains at the carriage windows hadn’t admitted any more than faint streams of light from the lamps on the street outside, just tiny flashes of it, really, not nearly enough to see by.
But he looked like a gentleman. His hair, which he was wont to ruffle with agitated motions of his fingers at the slightest hint of an inconvenience, had been neatly trimmed and combed into an appropriately elegant style. His cheeks and jaw were shavenclean, with just the sharp, angular sideburns expressive of the current fashion leftover. He’d managed to resist the temptation to fuss with the folds of his cravat, which flowed in a tidy ripple. His tailcoat was of a dark blue superfine, which she supposed must be new. Even his trousers were perfectly pressed, and his shoes polished until they gleamed.
His brows lowered over his eyes. “What?” he asked. “Have I got something in my teeth?”
“You look like a gentleman,” she blurted out. It shouldn’t have been quite so shocking. He’d shown up for dinner every evening dressed appropriately—more or less. It was just that outside of those few hours, he was much more likely to flout conventional attire altogether. She’d lost count of the times she’d heard him stomping about in bare feet, or lounging about in his banyan. Once she’d even caught him in the orangery in nothing but a simple pair of linen trousers, which had made him look rather piratical.
And they’d only been wed a week.
“Ah,” he said, and something of a smirk played about his mouth as he offered her his arm. “That’s what the valet is for, yes?”
He’d left the hiring of one to her, and she’d chosen an older gentleman called Haddington. He was a stern, serious sort of man—one of only three men who had applied for the position—and she’d chosen him because he had an air about him that suggested he was unlikely to allow himself to be bullied into compliance by a man too accustomed to wielding his formidable temper to get his way.
