"Two weeks," he said.
Rittsman snorted.
They settled on one month.
"What proof will I have?" Rittsman asked.
The marquess fixed him with a bleary eye. "What proof d'youwant?" he said. "D'youwantto stand at the foot of the bed?"
Someone—Maurice, he thought—indignantly declared that since Jack was a gentleman, his word must be trusted. Everyone else agreed, and Rittsman had no choice but to do so too.
"What are the stakes to be?" someone else asked.
"Five hundred pounds," Rittsman said.
"A thousand pounds," the marquess said recklessly and simultaneously.
They settled on five hundred guineas.
And at last there seemed to be no other detail to settle. The wager was duly written into the betting book and signed by the principals and two witnesses, and the marquess reeled his way home to bed. He left behind him a large group of gentlemen eagerly placing their own bets. Most of them bet—and heavily too—on the marquess.
Lord Crensford was looking pale and confused, and continued to mumble that they must choose, another female.
The Marquess of Kenwood, sinking into his pillows less than an hour later and closing his eyes so that he would not have to look into the dignified and sour face of his valet, wondered exactly what it was he had done at White's. Something suitably mad, he supposed, considering the fact that he did not often get drunk and so had little experience in avoiding rash actions when he did. He would sleep for a while. Perhaps it would all go away by the morning. Perhaps he would wake up sane and sober and headache-free.
Some chance!
Teddy Ingram. Thin and bookish and serious he had been when Lord Kenwood had known him. What the deuce could he expect the widow to be like?
This was a house party to be looked forward to, indeed. Perhaps he should fill up the china bowl on the washstand with water, plunge his head in, and forget to pull it out again.
He groaned and turned gingerly onto his side. He would swear off liquor from this moment on.Never again.He would never again touch a drop of the stuff.Devil's brew.
* * *
Mrs. Diana Ingram had a headache even before she went to bed. She dreaded having headaches. They did not come often, but when they did, they did not know when to leave again.
"Put off your journey for a few more days, dear," her mother suggested, rubbing her cold hands before she retired to her room for the night. "The earl's birthday is not for another two weeks, after all."
Diana sighed. "You do not know how you tempt me, Mama," she said. "But I must go tomorrow. If I put it off for a week, I will merely have to go through all this again. And Bridget has my trunk all packed."
"I don't like it anyway, love." Her father peered at her over the top of his book and over the top of his spectacles. "You goingall that way with only Bridget for company."
"But I will be leaving early in the morning, Papa, so that I might complete the journey in one day,"
Diana said. "And you know very well that if we should encounter any unfortunate highwaymen, Jimmy and Henry up on the box will frighten them away—Jimmy with his colorful language and Henry with those bushy eyebrows." She made an effort to smile.
"And Bridget with her shrieks," Sir Godfrey Winters agreed reluctantly. "One would have thought there was a whole army of mice in the pantry yesterday instead of just one. That woman must have been blessed at birth with a double set of lungs."
"I hate the thought of your going away, dear," Lady Winters said, squeezing her daughter's hands. "But perhaps the best thing for you at the moment is to be in company again. You have been very dull here in the last year."
"But it has been so peaceful," Diana said with a sigh, "and very much what I have needed. I can only just begin to think of Teddy without being in danger of becoming a watering pot. How can I possibly start looking about me for a new husband?"
Her father lowered his book. "You must assert yourself, love," he said. "It seems queer to me, anyway, that the countess would write to tell you that she is going to find you a husband among her houseguests or in the neighborhood when Ingram was her own son. You would think she would dread the time when you remarry."
"But the Countess of Rotherham has always been an incurable matchmaker, dear," his wife reminded him.
"Well, anyway—" Sir Godfrey removed his spectacles—
