ChapterEighteen
He didn’t come.
Andrew always arrived at one in the afternoon.Georgiana depended on his punctuality.She needed the dependable, the familiar, the comfort of habit more today than ever.She needed work to restore her balance.She needed to work while they talked, while they reasoned, calmly and logically, through what had passed between them.She needed Andrew.She didn’t get him.
Instead, the long form of her brother Richard lounged with sophisticated ease on her gold brocade settee.He had arrived a day early.
Damn you, Richard.She knew with total certainty that everything in Richard’s world happened by design.He invaded my privacy for a purpose, the traitorous swine.
Georgiana’s ormolu clock chimed the quarter hour, fifteen minutes after one and no sign of Andrew.With Richard here, relief warred with desperate disappointment.
“You look well, Georgiana.”
She needed Andrew, not Richard.She needed work, not this foolish pretense of civility.What she got was her brother, his silk-clad legs stretched across her fine Axminster carpet, and awkward conversation.She forced herself to respond to his small talk.
“Thank you.Your suggestion of Mr.Peabody was a blessing.He has been a lifesaver in every sense of that word.”
Georgiana poured herself another cup of tea.“Your color is excellent,” her brother went on, “and you appear more animated than when last I visited.”Richard had declined tea in favor of a fine sherry, which he held gracefully in the slender fingers of one hand.
Richard’s eyes, so like hers in color, lacked her warmth and revealed nothing.The same could be said of his words—no light and little warmth.
“I take the air with more regularity,” she responded.“And Mr.Peabody’s regime has had a salubrious effect.”Georgiana’s mind wandered.Does last night’s adventure show plainly in my face?Where is Andrew?I hope he doesn’t come, not with Richard here.I don’t want to face them together.Drat it, where is he?
“I understand you order kegs of water from a particular spring in Yorkshire.Fascinating that iron in water could?—”
“What brings you here so suddenly, Richard?”
Her brother raised a well-bred brow at the interruption but didn’t comment on it.“There is to be a house party at Murnane House.The Earl of Chadbourn, you may recall, is the Duchess of Murnane’s brother.He is to marry a distant connection.”
“Will is getting married?I am glad for him.I wish him happiness.”William Landrum, the Earl of Chadbourn, was one of a handful of Richard’s true friends, his boon companion when they came up from Cambridge before the war—like Andrew.
“Her Grace wishes you to attend, and I have been commissioned to bring you there directly.”
“Absurd.”Georgiana put her cup down with enough force that it teetered in the saucer.
Richard’s cultivated brows rose simultaneously.“I beg your pardon.”
“Mother hasn’t wished my presence at Mountview these years, much less at a house party.”
“She wishes it now.”
“She does or you do?”
One of his rare smiles, slight but sure, lit his icy Hayden eyes.“Does it matter?”
“Certainly.If she doesn’t wish to see me, she won’t see me, even if I’m in the same room.”
“That doesn’t become you, Georgiana.”She noticed he didn’t answer her question.“Chadbourn was once your friend, too.”
She acknowledged the truth of that; Georgiana genuinely liked Chadbourn, but she was never close to him—unlike Andrew.“Does Will wish my attendance?”
“He is too besotted to know what he wants.”Richard’s tone spoke his disapproval.“He has succumbed to the most banal and mawkish of sentiments.”
“You mean he has the poor taste to be in love with his intended?”It amused her.The Haydens had long savaged those whose sentiments were plebeian, those with sentiments like the ones Andrew expressed last night.
“Who is she?”she asked.
“She is—she is respectable.”
