“I’ll speak with my father,” he said, rising. “Are you certain that we will make it to the summer?”
“Unless something changes, you still have a few months before you must face the worst. But may I suggest in the strongest terms, my lord, that you begin cutting back on your spending?”
Henry gave a grim smile as he rose. “Unfortunately, sir, I am not the one you would have to convince, and the likelihood of that is slim indeed. I shall have to take matters into my own hands.”
Mr Pickford was too polite to ask, but Henry understood his questioning glance.
“Marriage,” he clarified. No matter what his feelings around the prospect of finding a rich wife were, he would have to do so, or they would all be ruined.
Chapter Two
Of all Louisa’s friends, her favourite was Caroline, the widow of Lord Augustus Spenser—a lady of voluptuous beauty and dubious reputation. Louisa delighted in the way Caroline toed the line of scandal again and again, entertaining lovers as and when she chose, but the thing that had initially bonded them was their mutual disinclination to marry. Their continued determination to remain widowed despite the pressure on them to enter matrimony’s unglamorous fold.
It was Caroline, therefore, to whom Louisa turned when she was still seething from Mr Knight’s proposal.
“Mymother,” she said as they strolled along the paved walkway of Hyde Park’s promenade, the trees bare and stark beside them.
“Having met your mother, I’m hardly surprised,” Caroline said, patting her hand. “Although at least she has not near cut you off like mine has.”
“Is that a blessing or a curse?”
“Both, I suppose, in equal measure.”
Once, Louisa had asked why Caroline’s mother had cut her only daughter off, and had been greeted with a wave and a “oh, you know, darling” that was so airy, she had not dared ask again. Caroline had her past, and she had hers.
“Well, I doubt he’ll come sniffing around again,” Caroline said. “Nothing like a bruised ego to dash a man’s ardour.”
Louisa cast her friend an amused glance. “It was not his ardour that inspired him to propose.”
“What was it, then?”
“My fortune.”
“Ah, greed. Man’s old companion. But if that were a gentleman’s only motivation, I would have had no offers of marriage. Perhaps he has fallen madly in love with you.”
Despite Louisa’s best attempts, the words reminded her irrevocably of the only man who had ever, to her knowledge, fallen madly in love with her. And the way that had ended.
As usual, a surge of bitterness accompanied the thought. Nine years had not been enough to dampen her hurt, or her anger.
“Like your suitors do with you, you mean?” she asked, doing her best to keep her tone light.
“I do my best to dissuade them, darling, but sometimes all it takes is a good tumble and they’ve decided I might be the next mother of their children.” She wrinkled her nose.
Caroline had not conceived with her late husband, although whether that was due to his failing or hers, Louisa didn’t know. She, too, had thankfully not borne Lord Bolton any children, though that was almost certainly due to her defect; his bastards were scattered across London. That was another reason she disliked the thought of marrying again: either she would be expected to play mother to someone else’s children, or she would be inevitably disappointing a lord who expected offspring from her. Offspring she strictly did not want.
“I would not object to a child of my own if I happened to have married well the first time around,” Caroline was saying, “but I have no interest in someone else’s brats. And despite my age, you know, some gentlemen seem to think the breadth of my hips means I am particularly fertile. A monstrous thought.”
Caroline was five-and-thirty years old, with grey eyes and a delectably plump figure. Her hair was a soft blonde impervious to grey, and she had the perfect little rosebud of a mouth. A positive Venus, as the gentlemen she’d graced with her company had apparently claimed. If Louisa had ever been given to envy, she might have been jealous.
As it was, she was merely amused by Caroline’s exploits.
“If you charmed them less, you might be propositioned less often,” Louisa said, smiling.
Caroline waved a dismissive hand. “And where would be the fun in that? But enough of me—I would much rather talk about your situation.” She squinted ahead of them, though Louisa couldn’t see what she was staring at. “I have it on excellent authority that Lord Eynsham is on the hunt for a wife.”
Louisa almost shivered at the sound of Henry’s title. Once, she had craved the sound of it; now it was like swallowing something bitter. “What has that to do with me?”
“Nothing,” Caroline said in a voice that meanteverything. “Only that I know you were betrothed when you were younger.”
