Page 10 of Her Passionate Duke

Her hazel eyes were filled with something like confusion, and colour flushed her cheeks, most prettily. Eventually, after the three people behind him had cleared their throats pointedly, he managed to drag his eyes away, to take her hand, and bow, and to actually speak. It was an achievement which he was proud of, in the moment.

Once he had greeted her, and been delighted by her support of his position on the matter of orphans, he offered her his arm to lead her in to the refreshments, much to the relief of those whose path they were blocking.

As they turned and stepped forward, he looked across the room, and frowned. Near the far wall stood the dark-haired young woman who had been with Lady Linnet at the modiste’s – deep in conversation with Monsieur Fournier. That gave him pause. Could these young women be somehow involved in…?

He shook the thought away – it seemed so improbable, yet… he would need to investigate, somehow.

***

Linnet spent the rest of the musical soiree in a somewhat dazed state. He had talked to her, as if that conversation she’d had with Lady Caroline, in which she’d said those embarrassing things about possibly marrying him, had never occurred.

Could it be that he hadn’t actually overheard?

Or was he just being the consummate gentleman?

She didn’t know, but she was, now, all the more worried about giving that speech in front of him. What if it was terrible? How would she ever cope?

She managed, somehow, to continue to converse with him, whilst she drank the ratafia and nibbled on a small cake, all the while aware of her mother watching her approvingly, and of almost every other young woman there watching her enviously. It was only as they moved back into the other room for the second part of the musical entertainment that she noticed Lady Caroline, who was standing with Monsieur Fournier.

The Frenchman was paying most particular attention to Lady Caroline, and the sight of it made Linnet feel uneasy. Surely Lady Caroline did not really intend to let the man court her so obviously?

If she did, there would be gossip, without a doubt, and Linnet worried for her friend. Still, there was nothing she could do.

She took her seat for the recital, and determined to not think at all whilst the music was played – for thinking was entirely too confusing an activity at present.

Chapter Five

As promised, Lord Theodore called on the morning after the musical soiree, wearing a high-collared black shirt beneath his well-cut jacket. It made him look like a priest, and Linnet shuddered again at the very thought of him ever touching her, let alone marrying her. Her mother was obviously quite mad to think that she would contemplate it.

Reluctantly Linnet led him upstairs to her room, trailed by a footman for propriety’s sake, and pointed him to the dresser where she had seen the mouse. The dresser which still contained her unmentionables, for Emily had flatly refused to dig too deeply into them, lest the mouse run over her hand.

“I don’t know if it’s still in there,” she said. “It’s been days since I last saw it. I think that there must be some other place where it goes when it sneaks out.”

“If there is, we’ll soon discover it,” said Lord Theodore, confidently flexing his arms. He hardly ever got to use his skills to help others, except their family, for most of the ton regarded him as far too oddly idiosyncratic to be encouraged.

Linnet could tell that he was enjoying himself.

Tugging open the top drawer, he said in a quiet, high voice, “Wee little mousie! Sleek little mousie! Where art thou?”

Linnet’s heart gave a violent shudder as he gingerly removed the top layer of clothing with dexterous fingers and set it down on top of the dresser. He continued doing this until almost the whole drawer had been emptied. She would have Emily wash every one of those items, twice over, as soon as he was gone.

It was one of those moments which she wished she could speed up until it was over.

“Ah, there you are!” he cried at last in a tone of triumph. Linnet heard a dismayed squeak and when she peered into the drawer, she saw not one, but two mice, staring back at her, looking badly frightened. One of the mice was much smaller than the other. “It appears that she has a family. Well, we shall soon fix that.” Linnet expected him to reach his large gloved hand into the drawer and scoop the mice up. But instead he knelt down and opened his black leather bag. “You should have warned me that there would be more than one.”

As she wondered how he might have expected her to have known that there was more than one mouse, he pulled out a large net and swung it around three or four times in the air in dramatic arcs, like a swordfighter remembering his skill with a blade.

The net, however, proved too large for effectively capturing even one mouse – indeed, she suspected that its original purpose had more to do with butterflies than mice. When he brought it down on the drawer it caught on the top of the dresser. Lord Theodore had to jam it ungracefully into the drawer, by which time the two mice were already beating a hasty retreat towards a small hole in the back of said drawer.

“NOO!” Lord Theodore bellowed, and desperately jerked the dresser to one side to catch them in flight. But it was too late - just as he brought down the net over the floor they disappeared into a hole in the wainscoting, a hole that Linnet couldn’t remember being there the year before – not that, she reluctantly admitted to herself, she spent very much time inspecting the wainscoting – so perhaps it had been there, all along.

No one spoke for a moment. Lord Theodore stood over the hole, opening and closing his mouth like a fish, a look of absolute defeat on his face.

“So what are we do to now?” Linnet enquired, when he had been doing this for some time.

“All is not lost,” said Lord Theodore, stuffing the net back into his bag. When it wouldn’t go in, he got very angry and forced it in. “One way that this could have been prevented was by building a more architecturally sound house. For instance, you could have avoided cracks in the structure by building your supporting walls higher, up to the level of the floor-beams, rather than basing them on brick piers which are flimsy and liable to cause shrinkage.”

This was the last thing that Linnet wanted to hear at that moment. It was so typical of Lord Theodore, to consider the entire structure of a century old house to be to blame for the habits of mice. She took a calming breath.