“I have no idea,” Oliver replied.
“Because they philosophize.”
He frowned again.
“Feel-loss-of-eyes,” Lady Windingham explained.
“I know no jokes of that sort,” he stated categorically.
“It’s not just a matter of jokes, Mr. Berwick.”
“Oliver,” he said.
She smiled at him. “My sister had one of the best seats in the county and she used to love nothing more than going out for a long ride. She adored playing games and she was ferociously competitive. Now she just sits about reading gothic novels.”
Oliver nodded.
“I don’t suppose you’ve read any, but Lizzie absolutely adores an author called Lucibella Delicosa. They’re the sort of novels in which people are always trying to sleep in a room with an insomniac ghost rattling chains.”
“Ah. Those ghosts tend to be awake at the wrong moments.”
“They’re so impolite, aren’t they? I would take a rest and oil my chains. So that’s where you come in, Oliver,” Cat said. “You are going to make Lizzie happy again. You are going to use all that cleverness you honed in your misspent youth to make my sister fall about with laughter.”
“I can try.”
“I just don’t understand why she’s so sad, given that her marriage was never a love match,” Cat confided.
“I expect she’s ashamed,” Oliver said. He had some knowledge of that debilitating emotion.
“She has nothing to be ashamed of!” Cat cried. “Nothing! All the shame belonged to Adrian the Alligator. No, my father deserves some as well, since he insisted on the marriage. He regrets it now, but it’s too late. She hasn’t paid him a visit for years.”
“On occasion, shame attaches itself where it needn’t,” Oliver said. “I will do my best.”
“That will be more than enough,” Cat said with a warm smile.
Oliver had the strangest feeling, as if a rock had lifted off his heart. He had been forgiven for the most dishonorable period of his life, and it felt wonderful. “Lord Windingham is a very lucky man,” he said, meaning it.
She wrinkled her nose. “So am I. If I were to calculate the odds the way my father does, I would venture to say that Joshua and I have forty or more happy years ahead of us. I want that the same for my sister, and I have just the right man in mind.”
“Who is it?”
“Mr. Benjamin Jagger,” Cat said. “You may not know him.”
“I do know him. We have both invested in the new railway line at Stockton-on-Tees. He is an excellent man.”
Oliver didn’t think Ben was a good choice for Lizzie Troutt, though. Jagger was a rough-and-ready sort of fellow, and Cat’s sister looked as if she needed delicate handling.
“Mr. Jagger confided to my husband that he intends to marry. So all I have to do is put them together and he’s sure to fall in love with Lizzie. Don’t you think?”
“Yes,” Oliver said slowly. “Yes, of course he will.”
Chapter Six
The following afternoon
“ARE WE ALONE for tea?” Lizzie asked. Not that she was interested in Mr. Berwick’s whereabouts, because she wasn’t. Not at all.
“Joshua took the girls and Mr. Berwick off to see the tour of Madame Tussauds’ waxworks that’s two villages over. I thought it might make you more melancholy, since most of the exhibit is made up of guillotined members of the French royal family.” Cat shuddered.
“I’m not melancholy,” Lizzie protested. “I’m quiet. By nature.”
Cat handed her a cup of tea. “I’ll never forgive Adrian for turning you into a sad, silent ghost. He’s the one who’s dead, Lizzie, not you.”
She hadn’t become ghostlike, surely? Lizzie nibbled on a scone. Sometimes she did feel as if she were drifting along, invisible to most people.
“We missed you last night at dinner.”
“I enjoyed myself reading,” Lizzie said stubbornly. “Besides, I know what you really mean: Mr. Berwick has been invited to audition for the part of my husband.”
“No,” Cat said baldly. “He only came because young Hattie forced him to.”
“Oh,” Lizzie said, rather disconcerted. “Well, my point is that the mere idea of handing myself over to another male makes me dizzy. I won’t do it.”
Cat gave her a hard look over her teacup. “Is this really the life that you want, Lizzie? No babies of your own?”
“Children are so repetitive, aren’t they?” Lizzie said apologetically. “It’s not that I don’t have masses of love for your children, because I do. But I truly don’t think I could do it myself. I can’t bear the way your nanny speaks to you, let alone them. It’s as if she considers you another child.”
“That’s just Nanny’s manner,” Cat said philosophically. “She’s used to training people and she forgets that Joshua and I are adults. Just think, if you never have a husband or children, someday you’ll be all alone. I’m older than you, so I’ll die first.”
“I might take a lover,” Lizzie said. “When I’m an octogenarian, I mean.”
Her sister clearly knew how preposterous that suggestion was, since she ignored it all together. “You’ll be sitting around in your eighties all in black, and everyone will pity you, because you are still mourning a man who treated you like the dirt under his boot.”
“I am wearing violet today,” Lizzie pointed out.
Her sister snorted. “Half-mourning. A dress that doesn’t show even a hint of décolletage. No lace. No flounces. I expect you haven’t had a new bonnet since . . . since the funeral!”
Over the years of her marriage, Lizzie had lost interest in clothing. Fashion existed to tempt men, after all. What most ladies didn’t understand was that an opera dancer was enticing without wearing a shred of clothing. A proper lady didn’t have a hope of keeping a man to herself.
Her brother-in-law Joshua seemed thoroughly smitten with Cat, but she counted him an exception.
“I suppose I could acquire some new clothes,” she said, unenthusiastically.
“Does that mean you will give up your blacks and your half-mourning?”
“If you insist. Is there a seamstress in the village? I haven’t seen the singing butcher, so I might go after tea.”
“The butcher has disappeared! Everyone thinks that his wife may have accidentally shot him one night, believing he was a burglar, you understand. And no one feels that a fuss should be made, so that’s that.”
“I admire her,” Lizzie said. “If I was a more forthright person, I could have taken after Adrian with a dueling pistol.”
“Only if you cared about him. One doesn’t shoot people whom one hardly knows. At any rate, we have no need for the village seamstress. I’ve been waiting for the right moment to tell you.”
“Tell me what?”
“Well, when Sarah and I went to Paris in November, I acquired a gown or two for you.”
“You didn’t!”
“Yes, I most certainly did. It was easy enough; you’re just Sarah’s height, if a bit slimmer, and she needed an entirely new wardrobe, appropriate for a young lady who is no longer in school.”
“I wish you hadn’t,” Lizzie said. “I won’t be able to repay you.”
Her sister’s brow darkened. “Don’t ever say something like that to me again.”
“Well, but—”
“No buts. Joshua has made heaps of money with his steamship. In fact, I’ve invited one of his partners, Mr. Jagger, to the house party.” Cat busied herself by dripping honey on a scone, rather obviously not looking at Lizzie. “You can wear one of the dresses I bought you to dinner with him, and that will be thanks enough.”
“You know, in all your matchmaking fervor, you’ve forgotten the fact that Adrian’s death made me notorious,” Lizzie
pointed out. “Men don’t like that sort of thing in a wife.”
“You think you’re notorious?” Cat snorted. “Don’t you remember what happened to me in my first season?”
Lizzie frowned. “I was away at school. All I remember is that Joshua took one look at you and fell in love.”
“That was my second season; my first was a disaster. I was labeled the ‘Woolly Breeder,’ thanks to Papa’s sheep farms. I had to be taken back to the country to rusticate in disgrace.”
She popped a bite of scone into her mouth, looking completely unperturbed.
Lizzie’s understanding was that polite society was made up of people treating each other in astonishingly impolite ways, so she wasn’t terribly surprised.
“How horrid that must have been,” she said. “Do you think that our hair had something to do with the nickname?” They both had white-blonde corkscrew ringlets that curled so thickly they were hard to pin up. “I have sometimes thought that I resemble a Scottish sheep, the really wooly kind. Perhaps I should shear it off.”
“Don’t,” Cat advised. “My husband adores my hair. My point is that Joshua didn’t give a damn what people were calling me. We danced and then he showed up the next morning and asked Papa for my hand.”
“Joshua is a prince among men,” Lizzie said, letting her tone reveal her suspicion that her brother-in-law was the only man of his ilk.
“I was not the only young woman in the marriage mart bequeathed with an ugly nickname,” Cat said, catching a drop of honey on her finger.
Lizzie took another bite of her scone, but it tasted like sawdust and regret, so she put it down. “Oh, yes?”
“Josie was given a horrible label in her first season as well, which gave us an instant bond. Yet now she is happily married to the Earl of Mayne. Public humiliation didn’t stop him from marrying her.”
Presumably Josie was so beautiful that the earl took one look and fell at her feet, just as Joshua had at Cat’s. Unfortunately, no man had ever shown an inclination to sprawl on the ground in front of Lizzie.
“So what was Josie’s sobriquet?” she asked.
“Sobriquet? Darling, you really must stop reading so much. It makes you sound like a bluestocking.”
Lizzie rolled her eyes.
“The Scottish Sausage,” Cat said. “Isn’t that dreadful? Between us, I’d rather be a Wooly Breeder. Do you want the last scone, or shall I have it?”
“You have it.”
“I’m so hungry that I’m beginning to wonder whether I might be enceinte again,” Cat confided.
“That would be wonderful!” Lizzie said, meaning it. She didn’t want children herself, but she was very fond of her little nephews.
“Odd, though. It’s been four years.”
“I hope you have a girl next,” Lizzie said. “I must say, I think the real oddity is that you and the countess became good friends on the basis of your wretched experiences.”
“No, here is the truly odd thing. Mr. Berwick—Oliver—is a member of the group who gave me the label Wooly Breeder. He didn’t make it up, though. That was Darlington.”
Lizzie’s mouth fell open. “And you invited him to the house?”
“Well, of course I did,” Cat said. “I’ve never seen the point of holding grudges. That grudge you’re holding against your husband is only hurting you.”
Lizzie chose to ignore the fiftieth piece of sisterly advice to come her direction in the last day or so. “Do you suppose that Mr. Berwick will grace me with a nickname?”
“The Woeful Widow?” Cat asked. “I doubt it. He apologized in the most magnificent way for his youthful foolishness.”
Adrian had never even considered apologizing. Why should he? To his mind, he was practically doing charity work when he married her.
“But now you have a title,” he would say, when Lizzie complained. “You were a mere sheepherder’s daughter, or as near as makes no difference, and I’m a member of the peerage. If anything, you owe me.”
Her father owned hundreds of sheep and acres of land, not to mention the wool mills, but there had been no point in explaining the distinction to Adrian. He didn’t care.
Cat hopped up. “There’s the last scone gone. Come along, Lizzie. I have a trunk’s worth of clothing to show you.”
“A trunk! I thought you said a gown or two.”
“Perhaps a few more,” her sister said unrepentantly. “What’s more, I brought back a French seamstress to make adjustments. You really ought to take her as a lady’s maid. I can’t imagine how you have survived without one.”
Lizzie got up reluctantly. “The upstairs maid is good with buttons,” she said, glancing down at her lavender morning gown, which was embellished with a long row of pearl buttons.
“Your gown was designed to be worn by a widow who lives with seven cats in a cottage in the country,” Cat announced. “She is the vicar’s right hand, reads novels from the Minerva Press in private and her prayer book in public, and carts around extra vegetable marrows from her garden, so everyone’s heart sinks as soon as they see her.”
Lizzie felt a little nauseated. She had been thinking of buying a cottage; she couldn’t live in Adrian’s house forever. But she didn’t want to dwindle into a marrow-loving widow.
“Come along,” Cat said coaxingly. “That partner of Joshua’s, the one I told you about, hasn’t married because he went to India and came back with a fortune from tea.”
“I like a man who made his own fortune,” Lizzie said cautiously. “Perhaps if he’s been in India, and not in society, he won’t know about Adrian.”
“Of course, he’s in society,” her sister said, pulling her toward the door. “Do you think that I would match my sister with a merchant?”
“Papa was a merchant,” Lizzie pointed out.
“Do you want your daughter labeled a ‘Woolly Breeder’?”
“You’d prefer a ‘Tempting Tealeaf’?” Lizzie said, smiling.
“That’s more like you,” Cat said, starting up the stairs. “You won’t believe how lovely these gowns are, darling. Do come along!”
Chapter Seven
LIZZIE SPENT THE afternoon being poked and prodded by a French seamstress, which left plenty of time to think.
Bitterness was like a poison. Cat was right: She had to get rid of it. For the first time since Adrian died, she tried to imagine a future that included more than a blue bedroom and an endless supply of novels.
The problem was that every possible future she could think of included a man. She didn’t want a man. But perhaps she wanted more than a stack of books.
When it was time to dress for dinner, she had two choices: she could wear her much-worn blue evening dress, or one of the Parisian gowns that her sister had bought for her.
The blue evening dress had been made years ago from excellent cloth. In the first year of her marriage, she had tried to take revenge by spending Adrian’s money. But his estate had been entailed to a distant cousin, and it turned out that he didn’t give a damn if she chalked up debts against the estate. He and Sadie were living on Lizzy’s dowry.
It wasn’t until she’d ordered an entire wardrobe suited to a lady that she discovered her husband had no plans to take her into society. He was ashamed of his marriage, ashamed of her.
“Why didn’t you simply take a paid position, if you found the prospect of marrying a merchant’s daughter so humiliating?” she had asked him.
“What?”
“Take a position as an estate manager or some such?”
Adrian had sighed. “Gentlemen don’t work, Lizzie.”
That was that.
In the end, she put on the old blue dress because she didn’t want Mr. Berwick to think she was trying to entice him. Normally she wouldn’t care, because she found it easy to ignore men.
Even
in the few moments she’d talked to Mr. Berwick, she had found him impossible to ignore.
He was so big, for one thing. Tall, with broad shoulders, but that wasn’t really it. He was beautiful, the way some Greek statues are beautiful, in an otherworldly type of way.
When she looked in the mirror, though, and saw the gown’s unfashionably high waist, and the way it made her look as if she was trying to be girlish, she tore it off and donned one of the Parisian gowns.
The tiny bodice was boned to form its own corset and rather to Lizzie’s surprise, it gave her a bosom whereas her old dresses made her look flat.
She wasn’t dressing for Mr. Berwick, precisely. She was . . . she didn’t know what she was doing.
The moment she walked into the drawing room, his eyes lit up and he began walking toward her. It gave her a distinct thrill to see that he was . . . well . . . interested. In her. She could see that in his eyes.
He moved toward her with the kind of whip-smooth movement that told her he was a rider, and probably a good one. His hair wasn’t pomaded or arranged in any particular fashion; it tumbled around in thick curls.
She was late because of changing her dress, so Cat ushered everyone directly into the dining room. The girls were with them, and for some reason Cat launched into a lecture about how to manage suitors. True, both girls would debut the following spring, but Lizzie hated to think about it.
What if they didn’t have any suitors? What if they found themselves at the side of the ballroom? All that instruction would go to waste.
She adored Cat, but her elder sister spent 80 percent of her time instructing someone about the right way to do things. Joshua was chiming in now, lending a gentlemen’s perspective.
Mr. Berwick seemed to have as little to contribute on the subject as she did. It had been so long since Lizzie had conversed with someone other than a family member that she couldn’t think of anything to say.
For his part, Mr. Berwick looked completely unperturbed at the silence between them. He had accepted an outrageous amount of beef pie and was eating it.