Reaching above one’s stationwas just as unpardonable a sin as being unable to read. Had Lady Roundtree glimpsed Nora’s interaction with the elegant gentleman, the baroness would have been just as likely to sack Nora for daring to converse with him as for dumping lemonade on his suit jacket. Her fingers trembled.
Distant cousins or not, Lady Roundtree would have no truck whatsoever with a companion who did not know her place.
Nora lifted her chin. She didn’t expect a baroness to be friends with her. Nora just needed to keep her post for the next six to eight weeks. She didn’t mind at all if her cousin never thought of her as anything more than the help.
If the baroness even thought of her at all.
To Lady Roundtree, Nora was no more noticeable than the molding around the ceiling. Which meant she was privy to all sorts of scandalous information about personages she’d never meet firsthand.
Some duke had compromised some debutante in a closet. Someone else had been spotted attending a salacious masquerade. Someone else had run off to the Scottish Highlands. Each tale was more riveting than the last. During their afternoon carriage rides in Hyde Park, Lady Roundtree gossiped about every single soul they passed with gleeful attention to detail.
As a break from her habit of designing richly drawn fashion plates, Nora had begun to sketch little cartoons of all the overheard stories for fun. She sent the best ones home to her brother with little, painstakingly drawn captions. The last one she’d dubbedThe Lord of Pleasure, after an earl who apparently made matrons and debutantes alike swoon with palpitations at the mere glimpse of his golden curls. She grinned at the fanciful notion.
Sketching, whether in her head or on paper, was not only the best way to keep sane as she traversed the upside-down world of thebeau monde, but also a way to document the humor she spotted in each situation. The foibles, the hypocrisy, the boundless riches, the decadent feasts, the thousand-and-one ways that High Society differed from life back home.
She reminded herself to direct her focus to her patroness.
“Bryony Grenville?” the baroness was saying to the lady on her left. “I vow, were that chit less skilled with a violin, she would not receive invitations to soirées like this one.”
Nora straightened with interest. The Grenville siblings were a frequent subject of gossip among the baroness and her friends, but they had not put on one of their famous musicales in the week since Nora had arrived in London, so she had yet to put faces to the names.
She leaned forward to whisper to Lady Roundtree. “Which one is Bryony?”
The matron on the baroness’s other side sent Nora a look sour enough to curdle milk. “I daresayyouare in no position to speak ill of your betters.”
Nora’s face heated with embarrassment. She faced forward again without meeting anyone else’s eyes. Curse her tongue. She hadn’t spoken ill of Bryony Grenville or anyone else. She’d simply asked who the others were gossiping about.
And yet the point held true.
The Grenville siblings and everyone else who had received an invitation to the ball were indeed Nora’s betters. She knew it as well as they did. Farm girls like Nora did not belong among them as anything other than a servant.
Nor was she complaining.
It wasn’t even difficult work. She’d been granted every comfort and more: delicious meals, new gowns, an entire stack of sketchbooks. In return, all she had to do was keep Lady Roundtree happy… and keep herself quiet. Being as bland as the woodwork was literally the job.
A companion was like a bell pull—silent and unnoticed, except when given a sharp tug.
Help the baroness in and out of her wheeled chair? Yes. Fetch lemonades and pour tea and ring for extra laudanum? Yes. Indulge in gossip or anything even peripherally related to scandalous topics?
Absolutely not.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered to Lady Roundtree when the other pinch-faced matron wasn’t looking.
“Oh!” the baroness gasped with a glance over her shoulder. “And quite well you should be, Winfield! Humiliating me like that. You are not paid to gossip.”
Nora nodded tightly. She would do better. This post was too important.
“But since you asked…” Unable to help herself, the baroness pointed her fan toward the doors leading to the garden. “That’s Bryony Grenville walking past the terrace with her brother. She’s the chit with the bone-straight hair. Her mother never could get it to hold a curl. Mr. Grenville is the gentleman with the unsightly stain on his elbow.”
No.
It couldn’t be.
Nora followed the line of the baroness’s painted fan straight to the handsome gentleman she’d been speaking with earlier.
It was.
A week’s worth of overheard gossip came flooding back as Nora picked through her memory for scraps of information about the handsome lord.
