One was Sebastian, Viola saw with a sinking heart. And the other, trembling, terrified, was poor Mr Mainwaring.
“I merely suggested that the approach might be?—”
“You suggested. Yes. You are full of suggestions. They cost you nothing.” Sebastian’s voice was dripping with contempt. “If you have indeed suggestions for a better and more efficient approach, I invite you to submit your scheme to Parliament, where it may be debated properly. Lady Beringbroke’s drawing room is hardly the venue.”
“What on earth is happening?” Viola whispered to Georgiana, who was so caught up in the exchange that she didn’t notice that she had dropped her fan. Viola bent to pick it up.
“Fane and Mainwaring are duelling. Blood is flowing. And the winner is clear.”
“But…why?”
“Heaven knows. Fenleigh said that it started in the billiard room. As soon as the gentlemen retired, Fane steered straight towards poor Mainwaring with singular determination as though he’d marked him as a prey from the very first. The man never had any chance to begin with. The debate has been going on ever since and carried over to the drawing room.” She extended a hand towards the duelling pair. “With evident results.”
Mr Mainwaring, flushed and utterly humiliated, conceded defeat. He made a curt bow to his hosts and left.
“That’s just…infernally bad-mannered,” Viola muttered and wondered what on earth had got into Sebastian.
Just then, Sebastian lifted his eyes, and their gazes locked. Viola scowled at him. He narrowed his eyes ever so slightly. Then that ever-present Lady Beringbroke approached him, simpering, and he turned to speak to her.
Viola found that she’d had quite enough and was glad when Georgiana suggested they leave.
Viola was exhaustedfrom the day’s events. She’d run into Sebastian twice in one day. He really made it difficult for her to ignore him when he insisted on appearing everywhere she went. Viola tossed the brush onto the dressing table with a clatter. How were they to maintain their distance from each other and pretend to be strangers when he made it so very hard?
Besides, other than the few sentences at the graveyard, she hadn’t written a single word the entire day. She would have to do so now.
She was sitting in her nightgown, cross-legged, smack in the middle of the bed, alternately writing, reading, and underlining passages in a book. She’d decided the best course of action was to pull out all her books and to go through them one by one andto study how, and in what manner, she might create something that was similar, yet entirely new and different. Regarding Peregrine’s demand to write ‘explicitly more explicit’ material, she would ignore that for now; for that was not relevant to her storytelling, the heart of her writing. If there was no story, there was no point in writing explicitly. It was the story that mattered. The story that enticed the reader.
Within an hour, she had assembled a sound outline for a book. She was quite satisfied with it.
Her books and papers were strewn about her, and she pushed her spectacles up her nose.
The clock had long since struck midnight, and Viola was wondering whether Sebastian was still at Lady Beringbroke’s dinner or had returned to his club, when the door opened and he strode in.
She started violently. “Good heavens. Have the decency to knock.”
“Evening, wife,” he said, his gaze sweeping over the papers strewn across the bed. “Might one find some small portion of mattress left for rest? I ask for very little, merely half of my marriage bed.”
“You certainly are in a vile mood tonight,” she muttered, then scampered about gathering her books and papers and setting them aside.
“Yes, I am.” He tore off his neckcloth with one impatient move. “How the devil did you meet that Mainwaring? He is one of the most incompetent, ignorant, idiotic lackeys ever to set foot in the Commons.”
“Truly, he can’t be as bad as all that.”
“I can’t abide people who talk big, yet in truth know nothing at all.” He walked into the dressing room.
“That would be half the world’s population, if not more,” she called after him. She wrapped her arms around her legs and wiggled her toes.
He emerged, still scowling, and his eyes dropped to her bare feet.
She curled her toes and pulled a blanket over them.
“You behaved abominably toward him,” she said. “He is a bore, I grant you, but that is no reason to humiliate him in public.”
“He is an idiot, and he deserved to be humiliated in public.”
“I happen to like him,” she said, just to be contrary. It was not true at all.
His jaw tightened. “Yes. Well. Your taste in company is your own affair.”
