Arabella found it easy to sympathize with people who had little confidence in themselves. She knew exactly how they felt. Poor Mr. Lincoln had been languishing after the quite plain and ordinary Miss Pope since the start of the Season, yet could never summon the courage to talk to her or invite her out for a ride as he did with perfect ease with Arabella. And Mr. Browning was quite convinced that no one could take him seriously as a gentleman when he looked for all the world like a schoolboy. She had advised him to take up some manly sport like boxing—she had even offered to ask his lordship if he would befriend him and be his sparring partner on occasion. Mr. Browning had been horrified.
But she could not be impatient with either one of these two friends. She was like them in many ways. She was only just beginning to realize that her small stature, her plain looks, and her childish features did not therefore make her a person of no account. She had not found that she had made fewer friends than Frances or any of the other ladies around her. Ladies did not scorn her; gentlemen did not shun her. And it was true what his lordship had said on one occasion: there are no perfect people; we all have to make the most of our assets. Of course, there were some people who were very nearly perfect, like his lordship himself, for example, but really they were not many.
Her attempts to be more confident and more friendly with her husband had not prospered well in the last two days, but they would, she assured herself. He would see that she was no longer the timid, dull Arabella he had married, and he would like her better. And he would see soon that she looked more grown-up and feminine than she had when he married her. He might not realize that the reason was that she had lost weight, but he would notice the result. She had had her maid take in the seams of several of her favorite garments already.
There was this strange mood of his, of course. She felt a dull ache of something low in her stomach when she thought of it. But she would not think of it for this evening, or brood on the fact that he had not come with her after saying almost certainly two days before that he would. The mood would pass. After all, she could not even say that it was a bad mood. He had been kind to her that afternoon at Kew. And he had spoken gently to her in her bedchamber the night before and had kissed her for the first time—oh, splendid moment! She had wondered for weeks what his mouth would feel like against her own. And now she knew that it felt quite as good as she had imagined. But there was something, something disturbing.
Arabella smiled brightly and crossed the room to join Theodore, who was standing and bowing as Lady Harriet moved away.
“Hello, puss,” he said with a grin. “Are you enjoying yourself?”
“Yes, I am,” she said. “And you really ought not to call me that now, you know, Theo. I am a married lady and quite grown-up. I nearly died when you used that name in his lordship’s hearing.”
“Did you?” he said. “I am sorry to have wounded your dignity. I could never have imagined you with such an air of consequence. So what is it to be? ‘Arabella’? ‘Bella’? ‘Lady Astor’? ‘My lady’? ‘Ma’am’?”
She tapped him on the arm with her fan. “ ‘Bella’ will do nicely,” she said. “Only his lordship is to call me ‘Arabella.’ Oh, and Lady Berry does too, of course.” She sat down in the place recently vacated by Lady Harriet, and he joined her.
“I am pleased to see you cutting such a dash, Bella,” he said. “And your mama will be pleased too. I think she does not quite believe your letters. She is convinced that you are putting the best face on a bad situation.”
“Nonsense,” she said. “And so I shall tell Mama myself. His lordship is going to take me home for the summer, you know. He has business there.”
He smiled. “Frances is doing very well too,” he said. “I knew she would, of course. I am glad that you and Lord Astor have given her the opportunity, puss.”
“Don’t you mind?” she asked hesitantly. “I thought it would make you angry or sad, Theo, to see her so very popular.”
“Well, there you are wrong,” he said. “I mean to marry Frances, Bella. And I mean it to be a love match and a happy marriage. How could we be happy when she has never tried her wings beyond Parkland? And how could she—or I—be sure she loved me if she had never had the chance to form an attachment to any other man?”
“But what if she does not wish to return to Parkland? And what if she grows to love another man?” Arabella watched him with rounded eyes.
“Then I have a choice,” Theodore said. “I can crack her over the head with a club and drag her home by the hair or I can let her go. If she ever marries me, Bella—and I am confident that she will—she will do so because she freely wishes to do so. I would rather risk losing her than be married to a wife who thinks she might have done better for herself.”
“I am not sure I could be as wise,” Arabella said. “I don’t think I could risk losing his lordship. But why did you come to London yourself, Theo, if you wanted Frances to be free?”
He shrugged. “I was restless and, frankly, I was afraid, puss,” he said. “I had to give myself a reasonable excuse for coming, of course. Frances should see me as I look in this new world of hers. She should be able to make comparisons. She should be able to see, for example, that I am not quite as handsome as that milksop with her now, whose front teeth I would dearly like to plant in his throat.”
“Oh, Theo,” Arabella said after a startled laugh, “you are ten times as handsome as Sir John Charlton, and Frances would have to be blind not to see it. And she had better see it because I refuse to have him for a brother-in-law. I want you.”
“Well,” he said, grinning, “if I miss Frances, there is always Jemima, you know. Did you know she climbed a tree last week and stayed up there for three hours until your mama was ready to call out the militia, thinking her lost? She was afraid to come down, it seems. She might still be up there if the vicar had not heard her screeches as he rode down the lane. Wicked little hoyden! I had better marry Frances. If I married Jemima, I would doubtless turn into a wife-beater.”
“You had better not tell Frances that story,” Arabella said, “or she will have a fit of the vapors and then soak ten handkerchiefs with her tears.”
They giggled like a pair of childish conspirators. “Do take me into the music room, Theo,” Arabella said, “if you can bear to leave off your contemplation of Sir John’s front teeth, that is. I am a respectable married lady, you know, and I should be able to say in all truth tomorrow that I listened to and appreciated the music.”
“Come on, then, puss,” he said, getting to his feet, “though I don’t think you will deceive anyone into seeing you as a staid and respectable matron. I must see the singer, anyway. I have heard that she is a quite delectable female.”
“You have no refinement of taste whatsoever, Theo,” Arabella said, taking his arm and clucking her tongue. “It is a singer’s voice that one is supposed to show interest in. Who is the lady, anyway?”
“A Miss Virginia Cox,” he said. “And I shall listen to her voice too, Bella. I promise on my honor as a gentleman.”
“Hm,” Arabella said. “I remember you promised on that that time when you swore you would not let me fall off those wobbly stepping-stones into the stream.”
“And neither would I,” he said, “if you had not bellowed out that you were going to fall and snatched your hand away from mine to saw at the air. Let us go see—and hear—Miss Cox, puss.”
Lord Astor dined alone at White’s. He was feeling thoroughly blue-deviled. He should have gone to Mrs. Pottier’s soiree with Arabella, he thought. He had said he would. They had been married for less than three weeks, and he did not wish anyone to begin whispering that he had tired of his bride already. That would not be fair to her. And how could he expect her to grow easy with him and begin to like him if he did not spend his time with her?
Besides, he wanted to be with her. Coping with his sister-in-law’s tedious conversation and his wife’s self-conscious attempts to converse with him was preferable to sitting alone at White’s. Where was everyone tonight? Had there been some mass conspiracy to eat elsewhere?
His thoughts irritated Lord Astor. Why should he not dine at his club? Why should he not plan an evening with his mistress, who was being paid handsomely to do less and less work? Why should he feel obliged to live in his wife’s shadow? Other men did not. Indeed, he would become the laughingstock if he appeared everywhere she went. People would begin to think he was in love with her.
