CHAPTER 5
“Are you sure you wouldn't like pillows to rest your leg on?” Marigold asked as she entered the sitting room at Edgerton House.
“Yes, I'm fine. Everyone needs to stop fussing over me.” Never mind that there was one person whose fussing she would welcome again quite readily.
“Your foot was swollen and bruised, and the doctor did say you should rest it. I don't think we're overreacting.” Marigold sat on the settee opposite the one Hyacinth was arranged on and rang a bell for tea.
“I do appreciate all the doting. Lily’s poultices have done wonders.” What Hyacinth didn't tell her twin was that bit of pain remaining was nothing compared to the pleasure of those moments of talking to Tristan in the Beckfords’ moonlit garden.
It had been even more intoxicating to dance in his arms. Without a doubt, it had beenthehighlight of her entire Season. Sitting with him, talking with him, had felt so right.
He had been so kind. Gentle. Protective. Helpful. She could still remember his easy smile, the warm fabric of his tailcoat wrapped around her shoulders.
“Goodness, you are smitten, aren’t you?” Marigold asked with a bit of mischief in her tone. “Did you two agree to meet out in the garden? You can tell me.”
“Shh.” Tristan had informed Lily and Griffin, her sister and brother-in-law, that he stepped on her toes while dancing, wishing to spare her from any talk of her having assignations with a gentleman in the garden.
Marigold seamed her lips together as if to indicate she’d say no more on the subject, but Hyacinth knew her twin too well. Her eyes were dancing, her cheeks full of color.
She leaned forward and whispered, “Did he kiss you?”
“No!” Hyacinth whisper-shouted back. “He was kind and behaved exactly as a gentleman should.”
Marigold watched her, as if expecting her to confess something more.
“Anything else?” she prompted finally.
Hyacinth had been trying not to be downtrodden about the circumstances that had drawn him to the garden in the first place, the lady he intended to pursue.
“No,” Hyacinth admitted. “If you’re asking if he made any overtures to me, the answer is no. I believe he may have his eye on someone else.”
That admission made her throat tighten and something in her chest throb.
“Lady Felicia Fairfax.”
Hyacinth snapped her gaze to her sister’s. “Who?”
Marigold swept a hand against the peacock-blue skirt of her gown. “He danced with her after you left the ball.”
Lily and Griffin had returned with Hyacinth early, and Marigold was left with Lady Pomeroy, a family friend, who stepped into Lily’s role as chaperone and delivered Marigold home in her carriage hours later.
“And you’re only tell me now?” Hyacinth couldn’t keep the anger from her tone. She felt unreasonably betrayed.
“I wanted to know first whether anything had happened between the two of you. Dancing with a lady at a ball doesn’t necessarily mean anything.”
Indeed, Hyacinth thought, it seemed her dance with Tristan hadn’t meant anything at all, except that he was an excellent brother who would do his sister’s bidding and aid a friend.
“How many times did he dance with her?”
“Only the once,” Marigold said softly.
There was more. Hyacinth could read her twin as well as her twin could read her.
“What part are you leaving out?”
At that moment, one of the maids entered the room with a tea tray, and Marigold busied herself preparing a cup for each of them, adding sugar and cream to Hyacinth’s, as she preferred.
“I did a little bit of inquiring after I saw them dancing together,” Marigold finally admitted after taking a sip from her teacup. “Lady Felicia is pretty and polite but has very little in the way of a dowry to speak of, apparently.”
