Montaigne laughed. Leith didn’t give him enough credit, although he supposed he could not be too offended, given how often he played the undisciplined bounder.
“I already know how to do that, brother. I know all about the Mappertons, you see, and who they are to Olivia.”
“But you don’t care a fig for gossip.”
“I’ve made an exception, given the circumstances.”
“What do you need me for, then?”
Montaigne smiled. He could tell, from the way Leith asked the question, it was rhetorical. However, there was nothing illusory or unfinished about his plan. He had already spoken with his younger brother, Percy, about his scheme. When the boy had said yesterday morning he had made the acquaintance of the most beautiful girl he had ever seen at the Royal Theater, it had been a rather inconsequential detail. His brother fell in love several times a week. But what had been a piece of superfluity was now a golden opportunity.
And he did, indeed, have something very specific to ask of Leith.
It would take every ounce of credit that their years-long friendship had accrued to him to extract this favor. But he would do it.
Because he knew how he would get back in Olivia Watson’s good graces. And nothing could keep him from doing so.
Chapter Three
“Mother, please,” Natashapronounced, her teeth gritted, “This dress is more than sufficient.”
“I just wonder, darling, if something a bit more…demure—”
“It’swhite, mother, what could be more—”
“But perhaps the light pink—”
“I am not changing again,” the young lady bit off. “If these gentlemen can’t fall in love with me in white, then I don’t stand a chance in pink.”
Eloisa sighed. “I suppose you’re right.”
“I hardly think that we have to worry, Eloisa, about young mennotfalling in love with Natasha,” Olivia teased, trying to ease the tension between her friend and her daughter. “She is a vision in white.”
Natasha gave the beatific smile of a fashion-plate lady. “And she knows it.”
Olivia had to laugh at Natasha’s stark confidence. Many young ladies in her situation would feel ill at ease making their debut but Natasha seemed to feel no trepidation. Olivia couldn’t imagine a young lady better equipped to take on the London season than Natasha. And she included the girls who had been reared their entire lives for it in that number.
Olivia knew that Eloisa worried about whether London society would accept her daughter. After all, Natasha and her brother, Nathanial, were claimed by some to be illegitimate, even though, in the eyes of their parents, they were anything but. Twenty years ago, their father, Mr. Mapperton, had married Eloisa, but his parents had objected to the match. Because he had been below the age of one-and-twenty, the union had been invalid in the eyes of the law, even though everything else about it had been done correctly. Mr. Mapperton’s parents were now dead, but they had not recognized the marriage when they were alive. All of this made the marriage, in the eyes of society, suspect.
Soon after their wedding, Eloisa and Mr. Mapperton had moved to France with the enormous fortune that he had inherited from his grandfather as a boy. After two children and ten years together, Mr. Mapperton had died, leaving all he owned to his wife, Natasha, and Nathanial. While the lesser society milieu that Eloisa had targeted for her daughter’s season was willing to include Natasha because she was an heiress, the question about her legitimacy did not enhance her appeal as a marriage prospect.
Furthermore, Eloisa and her children would be regarded, by many of the people they met in society, as foreigners. Eloisa had been born in the West Indies, but her mother had been a Hyderabadi woman. Employed by a British army office in India, she had retained her place when he switched posts, traveling with him to the Caribbean. By the time the man had died, he had gotten Eloisa’s mother with child. Whether by force or with her consent, Eloisa said that she didn’t know.I doubt my mother had much choice either way, no matter what she thought, Eloisa had reflected to Olivia more than once. Eloisa’s mother had died when she was still a girl and soon after Eloisa found employ as a servant to a wealthy British family departing back to London. There, one day, attending her mistress in Hyde Park, she met Mr. Mapperton. He had fished her mistress’s parasol out of the Serpentine—and fallen in love with Eloisa in the process. They had run off together not long after.
In the working neighborhoods of London, Olivia knew that biographies such as Eloisa’s were not rare. The higher orders were, however, much less accepting on this score. Most wealthy English families would not like that Eloisa’s light brown skin marked her as foreign to England, nor would they like what it suggested about the fortune her children carried—that their money was of colonial extraction. That their fortune from Mr. Mapperton was, perhaps, the most English thing about Natasha and Nathanial, who had spent nearly their entire lives in France, would not change these feelings. As Eloisa had explained to Olivia long ago, the British loved the fortunes they stole from India and the Caribbean, but they didn’t like the people who lived in those places to come along back to England with said money.
This history made Natasha’s marriage into English society uncertain. Even though Natasha’s olive complexion was hardly darker than that of the many debutantes whose families had been in Britain for generations, it would not matter to some. Potentially, it would matter a great deal to anyone of fortune or consequence. Thus far, however, their introduction had gone better than Eloisa had hoped—but it was still in its early stages.
“I thought Englishmen preferred docile women,” Nathanial retorted, sauntering into the room. He was eating one of the oranges that his mother had piled artfully in a bowl in the entryway.
“Nathanial, those are fordisplay,” Eloisa protested.
“I don’t think the Englishmen will need oranges to convince them that we are rich—report of Natasha’s fifteen-thousand-pound dowry should have achieved that feat before they step foot in the house.”
As it happened, Nathanial was the third thing that made Natasha’s integration into English society a difficult proposition. At the tender age of seven, soon after the death of his father and when Napoleon still ruled France, Nathanial had been named a count in the French nobility. The large fortune that his father had left him and the estate that Eloisa had purchased with her own portion of that inheritance made him an ally that Napoleon wanted to collect. Given that the Battle of Waterloo was still quite fresh in the hearts and minds of most Englishmen, and that not an insignificant number of eligible bachelors had actuallyservedin the campaign, it wasnotan asset for Natasha to have a French count—Count Mapperton, as he insisted upon being called—as a brother.
“What a mansayshe wants and what heactuallywants are two different things,” Natasha replied, “although I suppose you aren’t learned enough in the ways of the world to have grasped that fact.”
Nathanial blanched and Olivia watched his mother stifle a laugh at his expense. Despite affecting the persona ofworldly French count, Nathanial was only eighteen and hardly a sophisticate when it came to courtship, as his sister well knew.
