“Well, it will be someone like Giles,” the earl said jocularly. “It’s what one does, isn’t it, when one is a fine clever girl with a pedigree stretching back to the Conqueror? You’ll marry an heir of some sort. She can have her pick of them. After all, a dog doesn’t marry a cat.”
It wasn’t the most accurate comparison, but his point was made: there was the aristocracy. And then there was everybody else. He wasn’t even being ironic or pompous.
Lillias didn’t quite close her eyes. But she’d gone still again. There was a rather internal look to her as though she wished to be invisible. Hugh couldn’t bear to look at her in that moment. He looked down instead, as if an explanation for all the things he felt in this moment could be found between the lines of that odious poem.
The “everybody else” in the room struggled not to exchange looks. But it was, typically, simply how things were, mostly without question.
“Perhaps cats don’t marry dogs,” Mr. Delacorte said reasonably, “but I know a fellow who once saw a lion and a tiger making lo—”
If Delacorte were a dartboard and eyes were darts he’d be bristling, such were the warning glares sent his way. He was stared into silence.
The silence lasted a tick or two.
“Well, how do you suppose mules are made?” Delacorte stubbornly, and a little more quietly, pressed.
“Howarethey made?” Claire wondered.
The dart glares aimed at Delacorte strengthened. All apart from Lady Vaughn, who closed her eyes, perhaps at last giving up.
Claire looked at him expectantly.
“A horse proposes to a donkey, and they get married and have a family and that’s a mule,” Delacorte said kindly.
“I’m fifteen, not eleven,” Claire muttered.
“I shouldloveto go to a donkey wedding,” Dot breathed.
“Thank you for bringing them in, Dot. It was very kind of you. But would you please take them away?” Lillias had recovered her composure, and her voice was cool and polite. Hugh had to admire that self-possession. She was a lot of things, but she wasn’t fragile. “Perhaps you can spread them about the rooms here at The Grand Palace on the Thames.”
Hugh stood then, slowly and casually, as if to stretch his legs.
Lillias watched him rise, her gaze every bit as tethered to him as his was to her, apparently.
He delivered the poem to her table. He laid it gently down before her. “Doubtless you’ll want a souvenir, Lady Lillias,” he said evenly.
She stared at it. She began to look up at him, but he’d already turned his back, and his back was all she was to see for the rest of the evening.
“I think Faro would be grand,” he said to Mrs. Pariseau as he resumed his seat. As though nothing at all of note had just happened. As though Lady Lillias Vaughn had never arrived at The Grand Palace on the Thames. As though he’d never speak to her again.
Chapter Eleven
Lillias awoke to the smell of roses.
She growled and sat bolt upright in bed. A quick sweeping inspection of the room located the culprit: a fluffy portion of the dismembered bouquet had been stuffed into the little vase on her writing desk. Some well-meaning maid must have installed it there as she’d built up the fires. She wondered what Lord Eshling—had she even ever met him? She could not recall—would say if she told him that she’d shared his bouquet with everyone in a boarding house near the docks.
And then she wondered if one of those roses made it into Mr. Cassidy’s room.
She lowered her face into her hands at the thought.
She left her face there for quite some time.
The scent of roses had lingered in the parlor long after Hugh had departed for the smoking room. He had not looked at her from the moment he’d delivered the poem to her. And she couldfeelthe severing of his attention, like a physical thing. It left a sudden, shocking void, as if he’d kicked down one of the walls of her house the way he’d kicked that bear away from his dog.
His icy, thorough, casual shunning made thejealous antics of the bloods of thetonseem like child’s play. He did not do things by halves.
If it had only been jealousy, that would be one thing. But she knew he’d formed a judgment, and it was a patently unfair one. His self-righteous implacability made her furious. As did the brutal effectiveness of it. It very nearly made her want togrovel, and she had never groveled for a thing in her life.
She would not like him for an enemy.
