“Oh, thank you.” Lady Lavinia rolled her eyes. “It’s so thoughtful of you to say that.”
“You don’t need to get defensive. I mean it,” he said. “I’m not trying to insult you. You think there’s something wrong with your personality, and I’m telling you that it may not be as dreadful as you think.”
“Your Grace, you must have heard from the gentlemen at this party how odd they all find me. How no one wants to remain in my company once they’ve experienced it. I’m an awkward, uncomfortable person. I wouldn’t have said my personality wasdreadful, but we don’t need to pretend it isn’t odd. You canchange the way I look and the way I sit in chairs, but you can’t changethatno matter how much effort you put into teaching me how to behave.”
“You don’t think so?” Seth asked. “I wouldn’t be so sure. I don’t think you should doubt me, Lady Lavinia.”
“It isn’tyouI doubt. It’s just difficult, sometimes, to understand what I could be doing to drive people away from me, and that’s not a question I believe you have the answer to.”
“Well, perhaps you should place a little more faith in me,” he told her firmly. “Do you think I would have offered to help you if I wasn’t confident I could accomplish the job, Lady Lavinia? Do you think I would be meeting with you in the middle of the night if I thought we were wasting our time? I don’t believe we’re doing that at all. And you’re right—I have heard tales from the other gentlemen at this party. I do know what they think of you. I know that not all of them hold you in high esteem, and some of them find you downright strange.”
Lady Lavinia stepped back. “You don’t have to say such cruel things.”
“I’m only repeating what you said yourself. I’m agreeing with you. That is what you said, isn’t it?”
“It is,” she agreed. “But you do this far too often, Your Grace. You could have said something kind to me.”
“Is that why you spoke of how strange the gentlemen of thetonfind you?” Seth asked. “Were you trying to elicit a compliment from me? Because if that was your intention, it doesn’t surprise me that people find your presence off-putting. What a disconcerting thing to do.”
“Of course that isn’t what I was doing,” Lady Lavinia said. “But I didn’t think you were going to agree with me. I thought you might tell me there was nothing so shocking about me that it couldn’t be overcome. I thought you might tell me that you had encountered someone stranger than me before.
“At the very least, I thought you might change the subject to something else—something that wouldn’t make me feel so ashamed of myself. You want me to be confident, and yet you persist in saying things that would destroy anybody’s confidence!”
Seth felt frustrated. “I merely agreed with what you had just finished saying yourself,” he said.
“There’s a difference between the unpleasant things a person thinks about herself and hearing someone else confirm them,” Lady Lavinia said. “I suppose, if you are as wise a gentleman as you seem to be, that you must often wonder whether your character makes people feel bad about themselves. Well, I’m here to tell you that it does. When you told me you would have married Lady Genevieve to spare her from scandal, I thought you were uncommonly kind. I was impressed by you. And now you tell me that my personalitymay not be as dreadful as Ithink. Well, that’s the kind of help I don’t need. This was a mistake. I should never have come here.”
She turned toward the door.
“Where do you think you’re going?” Seth demanded.
“I’m going back to bed,” she said. “You’ve been very noble to volunteer your time, Your Grace, but I see this now for what it really is. You’re trying to settle the debt you think you owe me by making yourself feel as if you’ve done me some great service.”
“And wouldn’t it be a great service if I were to help you find a husband?” he demanded.
“Yes, but I don’t believe you care if I find a husband or not. You don’t see me as a person you can assist. You see me the way my father does—as a lady full of flaws in need of repair. I don’t wish to be repaired by anyone, Your Grace, and certainly not by you. Good evening.”
She left the room. He watched her go, astonished.
He would never have thought her capable of taking such a stand.
CHAPTER 14
“Matthew, I’m so glad you’re here,” Lavinia said, smiling up at her elder brother. “I thought you had decided not to come to this party, and when you came walking in the other day, I can’t tell you enough how pleased I was to see you.”
“I also thought you weren’t coming,” Edwina spoke up. She was walking on Matthew’s other side as the three siblings made their way along the garden path. Unlike Lavinia and Matthew, who kept a steady pace together, Edwina kept stopping to examine a flower or a marble statue and then hurrying along to catch up with them. She had just finished examining some delicate looking purple flowers that Lavinia couldn’t identify and had come away with one plucked from the vine and tucked behind her ear.
Matthew looked at her with fond amusement. “You shouldn’t be picking the Duke of Harbeck’s flowers, Edwina.”
“He has so many! He’ll never know what I did,” Edwina said, laughing.
“No, but it’s still not right of you to do it.”
“You’re such a stickler for the rules,” Lavinia told her brother. “You always have been. You must know that you haven’t a chance at getting Edwina to change her behavior. She’s always been free-spirited, and she always will be.”
The truth was that Lavinia found herself spending a lot of time thinking about the concept of people changing their behavior to make others happy. Was it something that should be expected of them? Was it even possible? She didn’t know. What she did know was that it was impossible to consider ideas like that without thinking of the time she had spent with the Duke of Loxburgh, who had thoroughly ignored her since she had walked out of his library the previous night.
She couldn’t decide how she felt about that. On the one hand, she had been sincerely offended by the way he had spoken to her. Perhaps she should have seen it coming. Maybe she should have realized that the only possible reason he could have for wanting to help her was that he believed her incapable of helping herself.
