If Jack was being gentler with her… If Jack sometimes now seemed to realise she was a woman… It only made their friendship harder. She was still poor. She was still a no one, and, if she stayed on her current path, she would be worse than that. She’d be a social outcast. Reviled. No rich lady artist dabbling for her own amusement, but a professional painter. A viscount would sooner marry a shopkeeper’s daughter.
“Take care,” was all she said.
He gave her one last smile before his head disappeared from sight, rueful and strangely serious. “I’m trying to. For the first time in my life, I’m trying to.”
Twenty-Seven
Even if she’d had an uneventful evening and a good night’s sleep, Lucy would’ve found the arrival of the entire Orton family overwhelming. As it was, her smile was already fraying by the time Nell, Nora, their mother, and Jack had crowded into Caroline’s parlour, the women all taking her hand most warmly, Jack’s mother pressing a scented kiss to her cheek before embracing her tightly in an even more heavily scented embrace, and Jack himself meeting her eye with a knowing glance and the most correct of his bows.
“MydearestMiss Fanshaw!Lucy!”cried the dowager viscountess. “It has been forever and a day since I last saw you. Howhaveyou been? Quite wonderful, I’m sure, from the look of you—positively blooming and grown so beautiful!”
Very aware of her tired, pale face and the shadows under her eyes, Lucy blushed and murmured, “I am hardly regarded as such, madam.”
“Perhaps not in the common way, but you’ve always had a charm most peculiarly yours.” She turned abruptly to her son. “Don’t you agree, Jack?”
Jack startled, looking as horrified by the question as Lucy. The colour that flamed to his cheeks would’ve made her laugh if she hadn’t felt so mortified. But he coughed slightly, recovered his composure, and with only the faintest trace of awkwardness, said, “Lucy is incomparable.”
His mother beamed at this and turned a satisfied smile to Lucy. For her part, Lucy felt Jack’s answer had been more diplomatic than rapturous, but she smiled wanly, shoving the sting of disappointment deep down where it jostled for room with the countless others.
What a ridiculous thing to worry about now anyway, when she needed to be doing her best to persuade the woman Jack wasnoton the verge of declaring himself. It was provokingly obvious wedding bells were ringing in his mother’s head just as loudly as they rang in his sisters’. Wedding bells—or the clink of coins. The two seemed to be the same.
Caroline came to Lucy’s rescue, asking Jack’s mother about her journey then turning the conversation to some mutual acquaintance from the Herefordshire area. Lucy risked a look at Jack and found him looking back. His smile was sympathetic—heunderstood the awkward misery of the situation. Or that’s what he seemed to be trying to convey, but he didn’t understand it at all. He thought her on the verge of announcing a triumphant betrothal to another, not enmeshed in an agonising lie.
Lucy jumped as the door opened and a tall, red-coated figure stepped into the room.
“Ah, what perfect timing!” Miss Sedgewick said with a smile at her brother. “Lady Orton was just asking how you fared.”
Captain Sedgewick gave a smart bow, smiling broadly at the assembled company. “All the better, my dear lady, for theopportunity to meet you. And to find your delightful daughters here too. My sister said you might call today, and I’m afraid I shirked my duties most disloyally for the chance to call. Lady Ashburton.” He smiled at Nell, then Nora. “And Miss Orton, how delightful to see you again. You were not tired after the Howarth’s ball last night? I declare you danced every set.”
“I never tire of dancing, Captain Sedgewick,” said Nora with an arch but very pretty smile. “Not when I have such a partner.”
The captain smiled, coming over to where Lucy sat and giving her the faintest wink as he took an empty chair positioned near the end of the sofa where she sat with Caroline. “Miss Fanshaw, how do you do? Your young friend here is very flattering to my vanity but very misleading. Would you believe Miss Orton only permitted me a single dance? I was quite heartbroken. But so, I’m selfishly glad to say, was every other young man in the place, for she’d only dance a single dance with any of them. And yetstillher card was full.”
Nora gave a simpering giggle at this and would no doubt have attempted to provoke the captain into further gallantry, but her mother, surely as aware of the captain’s financial state as anyone with an unmarried daughter might be, said quellingly, “And quite right. Nora conducted herself very properly, I am sure.”
The captain murmured his assent, then, as the conversation moved on—Caroline smoothly turning it to a general discussion of the Howarth’s brood—he found Lucy’s eye again, inviting her to share in his amusement. She did not, keeping her expression neutral and dropping her eyes to her skirts where her restless fingers began to pleat the material, a habit she deplored but could never cure herself of.
She’d never had any taste for the captain’s flirtations, especially not now they’d intensified following the rumour of her fortune. This attempt to play her off against Nora was something she could stomach even less. He’d marry anyone withmoney who’d have him, but as far as she could tell—a suspicion confirmed by various offhand remarks from Caroline—he wasn’t yet financially embarrassed enough to put himself to any great effort. He flirted, tested the ground in multiple places, kept his eye forever on the options within reach, and would probably end up marrying whichever sufficiently endowed lady fell most easily into his lap. It would certainly not be Lucy. And though Nora, with her tempting dowry, was vain enough to be an easy conquest, it would not be her either. Surely not, with Nell and Jack and now her mother in town to keep a guard on her.
The topic of the Howarths was eventually depleted, and the dowager viscountess returned to what appeared to be uppermost in her mind: Lucy, Jack, and Lucy’s supposed inheritance.
“How is your dear aunt, Lucy? I confess to having had very mixed feelings towards the woman at one time—how cruel it was of her to take you away from us! And yet how thankful I was that you were to be so well provided for when I couldn’t do so myself. Two daughters, you know, and a son at Oxford, and sadly made a widow soon after too… As much as we all missed you, I was always pleased to know you were in the lap of luxury, where the generous Mrs Bodlam, with no other demands upon her, could lavish you with single-minded care and devotion.”
Recalling her bare bedroom, the draughty, cold house, the shabby furniture her aunt had been too tight-fisted to ever replace or repair, and most of all, her aunt’s frosty manner, Lucy could only say, “Well… Yes…”
But then, catching Jack’s sympathetic eye, she summoned all her fortitude and forced a bright note into her voice. “You will be overjoyed to know she is in very good health, Lady Orton. She wrote to me just the other day.”
This was a lie. Despite writing dutifully every week, Lucy’s last two letters had gone unanswered.
“I made the gift of a small lap dog when I left, and she has taken to walking it around the gardens for hours and hours. Her health has never been better! She has grown quite robust, she wrote to tell me, and feels decades younger.”
She unfortunately happened to catch Jack’s eye again at that point. His amusement at her tactic—because of course he saw through it, knowing her as he did—made it almost impossible to keep a straight face. It didn’t help that he was sitting with his elbow propped upon the table at his side, and that the hand behind which he was barely managing to suppress his laugh was the hand she’d spent the night drawing. She placed her attention firmly back upon his mother.
“Hmm,” commented the woman. “How wonderful. Especially when one hears so many dreadful things about the weather up there. It’s so cold, is it not? So often wet? I had a dear friend, a Mrs Fielding, who once went on a walking tour to that part of the country. They were meant to go as far as Scotland, but she caught the most awful cold on her first stop in Northumberland and,” she finished in triumph, “was dead within a week!”
A silence met the abrupt ending of this story. Lucy didn’t dare look at Jack but was well aware of the laughter that would be dancing in his eyes. Keeping her voice level with a manful effort, she managed to say, “Fortunately my aunt is…quite stout.”
“A hardy type,” Jack put in, only the faintest quiver of laughter in his voice. “Didn’t you say so once, Lucy—ah, Miss Fanshaw? Very strong lungs. All the Bodlams have them.”
