She eyed it askance. “Are you daft?” she asked his lordship. “That is more than I and the lads earn in a year between us. Forthatold bag?”
“Please.” Neville smiled. “If ten pounds are not enough, I will double the amount.”
But Bessie Doyle had her pride. His lordship of the expensive muddy boots might be daft, but she was no robber. She emptied the contents of the pack onto the floor, handed it over with one hand, and took the ten pounds with the other.
The clean, misshapen pack that had been his sergeant’s lay on the carriage seat opposite the one on which Neville sat all the way back to Newbury. It would be Lily’s one memento of her father. He would have paid a hundred pounds for it—a thousand. But he felt disappointment too. Had Mrs. Doyle inadvertently burned a letter or some sort of package that had contained something more personal for Lily?
Neville had given himself a month to remain at Newbury before removing to his town house in London. Two weeks had passed by the time he returned from Leicestershire. Only half of a month with half still to go! And even then, the faint hope that had sustained him might well prove to have been illusory. Lily, he suspected, would not easily be persuaded to change her mind.
But just before the month was over, before he had decided upon an actual date for his departure, a small package arrived from Elizabeth.
“I have procured you this,” she had written in a shortnote, “having let it be known that you are planning to come to town soon. You may wish to be in attendance, Neville.”
The accompanying invitation was to a ball at Lady Ashton’s on Cavendish Square.
Neville nodded his head to the emptiness of the library. “Yes,” he said aloud. “Oh yes, Elizabeth. I’ll be there.”
18
Lady Ashton’s annual ball on Cavendish Square was always one of the Season’s great squeezes. It was the ball at which Lady Elizabeth Wyatt had decided to introduce her companion to society.
Elizabeth had many friends and acquaintances. A number of them had called upon her during the month since her return to town, and she had done a great deal of visiting herself. She had also attended a number of evening entertainments. But no one had met her new companion, Miss Doyle, or shown any great curiosity about her until Elizabeth let drop, as if by accident, at a dinner one evening shortly before the Ashton ball the information that Lily Doyle and the woman who had caused such a stir at the Earl of Kilborne’s wedding at Newbury earlier in the spring were one and the same person.
Everyone knew about Lily. She was perhaps the most famous, or the most notorious, woman in England during that particular spring—among members of thebeau monde, at least. Even her appearance in the church at Newbury, completely disrupting one of the greatesttonweddings of the year, was surely enough to have fed conversations for the whole Season and beyond. But long before that sensation had begun to die, the rest of the deliciously bizarre story was revealed—Lily was not after all the Countess of Kilbourne because her marriage to the earl had never been properly registered.
Lily’s story had been told and discussed in every fashionable drawing room and dining room in London. There were so many unanswered questions that there were unending issues for debate: Who was she? Why had Kilbourne married her? Why had he never told anyone? Where exactly had she been during all the time Kilbourne had thought her dead? What had happened when Kilbourne had discovered the truth about the legality of the marriage? Had she begged on bended knee that he marry her again? Was it true that she had threatened to throw herself off a cliff to be dashed on the rocks below? Had anyone heard for sure how large a settlement Kilbourne had been forced to make on her? Was she really as vulgar as everyone said she was? Where had she gone? Was it true that she had run off with half the earl’s fortune and one of his grooms to boot? When was Kilbourne to marry Miss Edgeworth? Would they decide upon a quiet wedding this time? Was it true that Miss Edgeworth had spurned the earl’s offer? And whowasthis Lily? Was she really just the daughter of acommon soldier?
And then it became known that the Miss Doyle who was living with Lady Elizabeth Wyatt as her companion was in fact MissLilyDoyle, formerly and briefly the Countess of Kilbourne. And that she was to attend Lady Ashton’s ball. It occurred to very few, if any, that as the daughter of a mere infantry sergeant, a member of the lower classes, Lily had no right to appear at a society ball or that Elizabeth was committing a serious breach of etiquette by taking her there.
The fact was that everyone was avidly eager to set eyes upon Lily Doyle, and if that could be done only at the Ashton ball, well then, so be it. Some of those who had already seen her in the church at Newbury remembered the thin, unkempt woman, whom all of them had mistaken for a beggar, and wondered in some fascination how Lady Elizabeth could have the audacity to think of introducing her to society—even if as a paid companion she would be expected to sit quietly in a corner with the chaperones. But most of those same people were glad for their own curiosity’s sake that Elizabethdidhave the audacity—they wanted a second look at the woman they had seen so briefly.
Those who had never seen Lily craved a glimpse of the woman who had somehow snared the Earl of Kilbourne into such an indiscreet marriage in the Peninsula and had then proceeded to set the wholetonon its ears. What must a woman be like, everyone asked, who had spent all her life with the riffraff of the army?Vulgar? How could she possibly be anything else?
Lady Ashton’s ball was always a well-attended event. This year was to be no exception. Indeed thebeau monde, usually flagging with a certain ennui this far into the Season, buzzed with eager anticipation of an entertainment that was sure to bedifferent.
And then two days before the ball the Earl of Kilbourne himself arrived at Kilbourne House on Grosvenor Square. One day before the ball the whole of London knew it—and that he had accepted his own invitation from Lady Ashton.
The Duke of Portfrey had arrived, Lily saw as soon as she entered Elizabeth’s drawing room. She had known that he was to escort the two of them to the ball, and so seeing him was no shock. But it was a meeting that played upon her nerves. He had been out of town since her arrival with Elizabeth—not that she would have seen him even if he had been there. She had seen no one except Elizabeth and the servants and the various teachers who had come to give her instruction. She wished the duke had stayed away from town even though she had convinced herself in the month since she last saw him that there was nothing sinister about him.
She stopped not far inside the drawing room door, but not too far into the room—she had been taught the exact distance—and curtsied. It had taken her an absurd amount of time to learn to curtsy correctly. A mere bending of the knee and bobbing of the head was not good enough—it made one look like a servant. The opposite extreme—almost scraping the ground with both her knee and her forehead—was far too lavish except perhaps when being presented to the queen or the prince regent. And it sent Elizabeth into whoops of infectious laughter. Actually, Lily was forced to admit, the learning had been fun—to borrow the word Elizabeth liked to use about the activities of the past month. There had been a great deal of shared laughter.
“Your grace,” she said, keeping her eyes modestly lowered while she curtsied, raising them as she rose to look directly at him—not too boldly, but with her chin held just so, and her back and shoulders straight but not as stiff as a soldier on parade would hold them.Relaxed, dignified gracewas the term Elizabeth used frequently.
“Miss Doyle?”
The duke made her a slight but elegant bow. Everything about him was elegant, from the fashionably disheveled Brutus style of his dark hair on down to his equally fashionable dancing pumps. Lily had learned something of fashion during the past month—both gentlemen’s and ladies’ fashions—and recognized the distinction between good taste and dandyism. His grace dressed with immaculate good taste. He was really very handsome for an older man, Lily thought. She did not wonder that Elizabeth had accepted him as her beau. But he was looking closely at her too, even using his quizzing glass with which to do so, and she was reminded of the discomfort he had caused her at Newbury.
“Extraordinary. Exquisite,” he murmured
“But of course,” Elizabeth said, sounding very pleased indeed. “Did you expect otherwise, Lyndon?” She smiled warmly at Lily. “You do indeed look lovely, my dear. More than lovely. You look like—”
“A lady?” Lily said into the pause that Elizabeth had filled with an expressive hand but no words.
Elizabeth raised her eyebrows. “Oh, that, yes, without a doubt,” she said. “Butpoisedis the word I was searching for, I believe. You look—oh, to the manner born. Does she not, Lyndon?”
“You will perhaps, Miss Doyle,” the duke said, “do me the honor of dancing the first set with me?”
“Thank you, your grace.”
