Page 6 of The Subtle Craft of Courting Kate

“I do hope,” Kate said wryly as Elliot planted himself into his seat across from them, “that discretion doesn’t intend to imply that you mean to send us to whichever modiste your mistress prefers.”

Mama’s eyes widened behind the lenses of her spectacles. “Kate!” she chided, horrified at the suggestion. “I’m surprised at you.”

“I’m not,” Elliot said, one corner of his mouth twitching upward in a wry grin. “What sort of man do you take me for, Katie?”

“Just the sort that begs his friend to find him a wife.”

“Touché.” A wheeze of a laugh drifted across his lips as he rapped upon the roof of the carriage. “I have got friends in London, you know. Rebecca—Lady Crewe; the wife of my friend Richard from my university days—is considered quite fashionable. It’s her favored modiste of whom I was speaking.”

Oh. Of course. Elliot was convivial, amiable, genial—of course had friends in London, and a social life there which did not include her. It had just never seemed to follow him home here, as if that nebulous world he inhabited when away from the countryside had gone hazy and murky, paused in his absence. He trotted it out only on those occasions when he sought to entertain her with his stories, and packed it away neatly once more when he had finished.

But they wouldn’t be just stories any longer, those people he knew, those members of the Ton which he counted amongst his friends and acquaintances. Kate’s hands, once laid properly in her lap, linked before her. Beneath the thin fabric of her gloves—also new, having arrived along with a few dresses this morning—she knew her knuckles has gone white.

“And these friends of yours…” Her voice had come out just a bit strained, as the magnitude of the task she had agreed to weighed more heavily still upon her shoulders. “Will this scheme not cause you trouble with them?” To drag a stranger into their midst; a woman who would plainly not belong amongst them. To foist her presence upon them?

“Not at all. That is to say, Rebecca and Richard have got two young children and their own social schedules to manage besides. Probably they will be quite grateful to you for saving them the effort themselves.”

Her shoulders slipped down into a more natural slope, tension dissipating minutely. Even if he was wrong, she reasoned, probably it wouldn’t matter. Once she’d found him a wife and returned to the countryside, the likelihood that she would ever encounter anyone from her brief time in London again would be practically nonexistent.

Mama peered out through the window, sighing at the sight of their little village disappearing into the distance as the carriage made the main road at last, heading south toward London. “Lord Elliot,” she said, “if it is not too terribly much trouble, might we find the time to visit the theatre in London?”

“Of course we’ll go to the theatre,” he said easily. “You haven’t truly been to town if you’ve not experienced the theatre. And there will be dinner parties and balls and musicales—all manner of entertainments. You are doing me a monumental favor, after all. I promise you, you’ll both have the grandest time I can give to you.”

A favor. Yes; to sort through the veritable cavalcade of eligible women who would cast themselves into his path and to determine which might make a suitable Lady Elliot Holbrook. Somehow, she had never considered that Elliot would find himself in so much demand, and the thought landed awkwardly in her head, as if it didn’t fit quite comfortably. An unwieldy thing, it took up far too much space in Kate’s mind, shunting other thoughts aside.

Elliot, an eligible bachelor now in his own right. Elliot, the playmate of her youth. Elliot, whose nose she had bloodied a time or two on those rare occasions that he had deserved it, who had taught her to lace her own boots, and who had in their teens thrashed the butcher’s son when he’d called her a foul name. Elliot, who she had seen hale and healthy, drunk and sickly, and once, when he’d somehow contracted cowpox, speckled with unsightly sores. Elliot, who had let her cry upon his shoulder when her father had passed on, and who had cried upon hers when that same grief had been visited upon him.

It seemed a curious blend of impossible and inevitable. But a tiny corner of her heart ached at the thought of it, of the inexorable procession of time. Time which would carry him farther and farther afield, and away from Northampton. It would have to. Elliot might have grown up here at Longthorpe Manor, but it belonged now to his brother Devon, the duke.

Perhaps Devon’s eventual duchess would not wish to have her scapegrace brother-in-law so frequently underfoot. Perhaps Elliot’s eventual wife would have no particular liking for the countryside. So he would have to have a home of his own somewhere else entirely. And where would that leave Kate?

Alone, most days. With her sheep.

“Though I can’t say I agree with your brother’s methods,” Mama said conversationally, settling herself back in her seat in preparation for what promised to be an incredibly long journey, “I suppose most young men must marry eventually.”

That affable smile firmly affixed to Elliot’s face grew strained, no longer appearing quite so natural as it had only moments ago. “Eventually,” he conceded, with the smallest inclination of his head. “When the right woman presents herself.”

What a peculiar turn of phrase. “Have you not considered,” Kate said, “that the right woman might present herself this Season, and you won’t have needed me at all?”

And there—his lips twitched in the subtle relaxation of the tension that had held his face frozen for the space of several long, agonizing seconds. “Even if the right woman happened to be in London this Season—which, thus far, she has not—I’d have been hard pressed to catch so much as a glimpse of her through all the wrong ones barreling at me. Perhaps, when the field has been cleared, I’ll be better able to see who’s left standing.”

Mama gave a muffled flutter of laughter behind the shield of her fingers. “The way you describe it, Lord Elliot, one would think you were speaking of war.”

“It’s the marriage mart,” Elliot said. “Of course it’s war. A frightfully civilized sort of war, but a war nonetheless.”

Mama’s eyes widened in astonishment. “Is it really?”

“Oh, yes. I am besieged, I tell you—not by generals commanding troops, but by the most fearsome, fierce, and determined of all creatures.” Elliot let a moment pass in silence, and Mama canted her head in confusion.

Kate gently nudged Mama in the ribs and said, “He means the women.”

Mama blinked, stunned, as she adjusted her spectacles once more. “Surely not.”

“You doubt my assessment? I have seen a woman feign a faint in such a manner designed to force the man of her choosing to catch her in his arms.”

Mama gave an appalled gasp, and her fingers fished her handkerchief out of her pocket only so that she could clutch it to her chest like some sort of scandalized damsel. “What a shameless ploy. They’re not truly so bold as all that?”

“Oh, they are, and I can tell you that with some certainty, as the man intended to catch her was me.” There was the familiar hitch of the corner of his mouth in that saucy, devil-may-care grin. “I would have let her fall and pretended ignorance, but the man beside me proved more gentlemanly than me.”