Pride afflicted her with an urge to break the arrangement first, but that would be foolish indeed. Innards churning with nerves, she sat and waved him to a nearby seat. Ruth mentioned last-minute arrangements and left, but Kitty saw her only from the corner of her eye. She couldn’t stop looking at Lord Dauntry, rather as one might watch a predator that seemed likely to attack. His eyes were a light and rather icy blue.
He sat on a facing chair and crossed his legs. “Well, Mrs. Cateril?”
“Very well, sir.”
“I wasn’t asking how you are, ma’am. What questions do you have for me?”
Questions?Her mind went blank. “Mrs. Lulworth told me the essentials, sir.”
“Are you not curious about the inessentials?”
The wretched man was toying with her! “I assume she didn’t conceal that you are stark, staring mad?”
No reaction apart from a raised brow. “I might have concealed it from her, but indeed, I’m not. Are you?”
“No.”
“Excellent. I also have all my teeth.”
“So do I.”
“Yet more harmony.”
Oh, you wretch.Now she understood his abrasive manner. He’d come here to end the arrangement, butwas going to avoid any hint of jilting her by making her do it. Well, he could work for his prize. She’d play his game, returning every shot, forcing him to produce the coup de grâce.
Now he was using silence. She saw the small piano in the corner of the room. “Is there a pianoforte in... the Abbey, my lord?” Thank heavens she’d spotted the hazard and not attempted the full name. Ruth and Andrew spoke of his house as the Abbey, so she’d not yet heard anyone say “Beauchamp.” She still didn’t know how it was pronounced.
“There is,” he said, “though I’ve heard no one play it.”
“Has the house in general been neglected, my lord?”
“Not as far as I can tell, but I know little of such matters. I was in the army, and since leaving, my home has been rooms in London.”
For a moment she envisioned rooms similar to the ones in Moor Street she’d lived in with Marcus, but she dismissed the notion. No one had such deep polish and surety without luxury and privilege from the day they were born.
“I have no living family,” she said. “Is that the case with you, too, my lord?”
“My parents and three of four grandparents are dead. I have two much older sisters, both married. We’re not close. Some distant female cousins dangle on the family tree, but I don’t know ’em.”
Solitary, but careless of it. Like a cat. A fine-blooded cat, sure of its position in the world and that all should do it reverence. The cat was playing with a mouse, but this mouse wouldn’t be trapped. She let silence settle.
“Of course, I have my new family,” he said. “At the Abbey.”
The reason for all this.“The previous viscount’s motherand daughter, I understand. The situation must be difficult for them.”
“And for me. Your husband was the son of a baron?”
“My father was a shopkeeper.”There’s your exit, sir. Take it.
“A bookseller, I understand, and a scholar of some repute.”
Dammit.Of course Ruth would have told him that.
He continued. “Your husband was an officer gallantly injured at Roleia.”
“He was, my lord. You, too, were a soldier. You escaped without injury?”
She didn’t mean it to be as insulting as it sounded. She would have apologized, but he seemed unmoved. “Superficial wounds only. I’m sound in wind and limb. Are you?”
