“She hit Jardine over the head with a book,” he said dryly, “when he was, ah, disrespectful. That is all, Angeline. The gentleman is alive and well, and it turns out that the stolen property was not stolen at all. A very dull story, in fact. But Lady Sara is not to be allowed to hover on the brink of society. She will need respectable people of goodtonto draw her in.”
“All of which Lady Webb will arrange for her,” she said. “Why should you be interested, Tresham?” But she stopped after an uncharacteristically brief monologue, stared at him for a moment, her cup halfway to her mouth, set it down in its saucer again, and resumed her hilarity. “Oh, Tresham, you areinterested! How absolutely famous! Oh, I cannot wait to tell Heyward. But he has gone to the House, provoking man, and I daresay he will not return until it is time to take me visiting. Tresham, you aresmitten.”
Jocelyn used his quizzing glass despite the fact that it enlarged the garish bonnet. “I am delighted to have caused you such amusement,” he said, “butsmittenand the Tresham name are mutually exclusive terms, as you ought to be aware. I will, however, be marrying Lady Sara. You will be pleased to learn that you are the first to know, Angeline, apart from the lady herself, of course. She has said no, by the way.”
She stared at him, and for one fascinated moment he thought she had been robbed of speech.
“Lady Sara has said no.” She had found her voice. “To you? To the Duke of Tresham? How absolutely splendid of her. I confess I scarcely noticed her when she was your nurse. She looked so very drab in gray. Whoever would wear gray when there are so many other colors to choose among? I was quite struck with her when she sang at your soiree. And she knew how to waltz. That should have been a clue, but I confess I did not pick up on it. But now she has refused you. I am going to like her. She must be a woman of spirit. Just what you need. Oh, I am going to love her as a sister.”
“She has said no, Angeline,” he said dryly.
She looked at him in incomprehension. “You are a Dudley, Tresham,” she said. “Dudleys do not take no for an answer. I did not. Heyward was quite averse to marrying me for all of one month after I was first presented to him, I do assure you. He thought me empty-headed and frivolous and too talkative. The fact that I had you and Ferdie for brothers did not endear me to him either. But he did marry me. Indeed, he was horridly dejected the first time he asked and I said no. I feared he would go home and shoot himself. How could he not have fallen for my charms when I was determined that he should?”
“How indeed?” he agreed.
He was subjected to almost half an hour more of her incessant chatter before she took her leave. But he felt that the morning had been well spent. Jane’s respectability was assured. And by dropping a word in a fertile ear, he had lined up on his side powerful forces with which to storm the citadel of her mulish determination not to have him.
He did wonder briefly why he would want to storm her defenses. He could not admit, after all, to any personal need of her. It was just her very stubbornness, of course. Jane Ingleby had always had the last word with him.
Well, Lady Sara Illingsworth would not. It was as simple as that.
He found himself wondering what he would wear when he paid her an afternoon call. Just as if he were some moonstruck schoolboy.
23
OU ARE LOOKING PEAKED, SARA,” LADY WEBBsaid. “It is quite to be expected, of course, after all you have gone through. We will soon put the roses back in your cheeks. I just wish we could go outside this afternoon for a walk or a drive. The weather is so lovely. However, this is one of the afternoons on which it is known that I am at home to visitors. Vexing as it may be, my dear, we must be ready to receive them.”
Jane was wearing a fashionable, high-waisted dress of sprigged muslin. It had been in the trunk of her belongings that had been delivered during the morning by Phillip and the Duke of Tresham’s coachman. Her hair had been dressed by the maid who had been assigned to her care. But ready as she appeared to be to face an afternoon of socializing, she broached the subject that was troubling her.
“Perhaps it would be best,” she said, “if I remained out of sight of your guests, Aunt Harriet.”
Lady Webb, who had been looking out through the window, came to sit down on a chair opposite Jane’s. “That is precisely what you must not do,” she said. “Although neither of us has put it into words, Sara, I am fully aware of how you have been living for the last little while. Appalling as it is that you felt driven to such a life, it is over. No one need know. You can be very sure that Tresham will silence anyone of his acquaintance who suspects the truth. And of course he means to marry you. He is a gentleman and knows he has compromised you. He is not only prepared to do the honorable thing but will doubtless try to insist upon it.”
“He is very good at that,” Jane said bitterly. “But he knows better than to believe it will work with me.”
“The Duke of Tresham has possibly the most unsavory reputation of any gentleman in town,” Lady Webb said with a sigh. “Though perhaps I exaggerate. He is not known for any particular vice but only for wildness and the tendency to be at the center of every brawl. He is exactly like his father before him and his grandfather before that.”
“No!” Jane said more hotly than she had intended. “He is not.”
Lady Webb raised her eyebrows. But before she could say anything more, there was a tap on the drawing room door and the butler opened it and announced the first visitors—Sir Conan Brougham with Lady Brougham, his mother, and Miss Chloe Brougham, his sister. They were followed not many minutes after by Lord and Lady Heyward, the latter of whom made it very clear that she had come for the specific purpose of talking with Jane and scolding her for hiding her true identity while she was at Dudley House.
“I was never more surprised in my life as when Tresham told me about it,” she said. “And never more gratified than to know he had discovered you and brought you here, Lady Sara. The very idea that you were an ax murderer! I go off into peals of laughter whenever I think about it, as Heyward will testify. I daresay Mr. Jardine was unpardonably rude to you. I met him once and received the distinct impression that he was a slimy villain. It was most forbearing of you to slap him merely with a book, and very poor spirited of him to make a fuss about it and run sniveling to his papa. In your place I would have reached for an ax.”
“Lady Webb has been offering you this chair for the last two minutes, my love,” Lord Heyward said, leading his wife away.
A large number of guests arrived after that. A few were Lady Webb’s friends. Many were people Jane had met at Dudley House on various occasions—Viscount Kimble, Lord Ferdinand Dudley, and Baron Pottier among them. It did not take Jane long to understand who had sent them all or why they had come. The campaign was on to make her respectable again. Far from gratifying her, the knowledge infuriated her. Did he really believe that she could not manage her own life without his helping hand? She only wished he would come in person so that she could give him a piece of her mind.
And then he did.
He arrived alone, looking immaculate in a blue coat and biscuit-colored pantaloons so well fitting that he must surely have been poured into them and Hessian boots that one might have used as twin mirrors. And he was looking insufferably handsome, of course, although when she had started to think of him as handsome Jane did not know. And suffocatingly male. And armed with all his detestable ducal hauteur.
She hated him with a powerful hatred, but of course good manners prevented her from either glaring at him or demanding that he leave. This was not her drawing room, after all. She was as much a guest here as he.
He bowed to Lady Webb and exchanged civilities with her. He bowed distantly to Jane—just as if she were a speck of dust that had floated into his line of vision, she thought indignantly. He acknowledged with the lift of an eyebrow those of his relatives and friends who were clustered about her—Lady Heyward, Lord Ferdinand, Viscount Kimble among others. And then he proceeded to converse with Mrs. Minter and Mr. Brock-ledean for all of fifteen minutes.
She wasdeterminednot to speak to him, Jane had thought as soon as he was announced. Howdarehe give her no opportunity to ignore him? Of course, she also wanted a chance to tell him that he need not have bothered to send people here to visit her or to try to restore respectability to her life. Howdarehe not approach her to be upbraided and told to mind his own business?
“It is really a very splendid new curricle, Ferdie,” Lady Heyward was saying. “It is far more dashing than the last one. But you are bound to accept a wager from someone to prove its superiority to any other. You must absolutely not accept. Only consider my nerves if there were another race like the last. Though I never tire of hearing about that final bend in the road, around which you accelerated despite all Tresham’s and Heyward’s warnings that you must drive with caution. Idowish I had been there to witness it. Is it not tiresome sometimes, Lady Sara, to be a woman?”
