“Least said about you and Imogen the better,” Rafe growled, and there was a note of deep warning in his voice.
But it had to be said, clearly, before the wedding. “We never even kissed, not really,” he told Rafe. “I kissed her twice, to make her see that our friendship was nothing more than tepid.”
“I should kill you for those two kisses.” There was a swirl of danger in Rafe’s voice.
“She didn’t enjoy them, and neither did I.”
“Damned if you haven’t made hay with all my wards. You were engaged to Tess, and stood her up at the altar—”
“Not my fault!” Mayne put in. “You know perfectly well that Felton asked me to leave.”
“Jilted one of my wards, kissed another one twice—”
“I’ve had nothing to do with Annabel,” Mayne said hastily. “Nor Josie either.”
“Well, on that subject,” Rafe said. “I want you to help me with Josie. Not with your usual shenanigans.”
“I’m almost a married man.” At least, he would be as soon as he could talk Sylvie into setting a date.
“Josie is having a difficult time on the market. And it’s only going to be more thorny once Imogen and I leave on our wedding trip.”
“What’s happening to her?” Mayne was genuinely surprised. “I would have thought she’d take like wildfire: she’s intelligent, witty, and damned beautiful. And didn’t you and Felton give her a dowry, besides the horse from her father, I mean?”
“She made an enemy of some neighbors of Ardmore’s in Scotland, a couple of ne’er-do-wells by the name of Crogan. Apparently, one of them was courting her up there, wanting the dowry but not her. Well, once she learned the truth of it, she—she—”
“She what?” Mayne asked, trying to picture Josephine Essex growing violent. “Struck him?”
“She dosed him with a medicine that cures colic in horses,” Rafe said flatly.
“Colic in horses? Dr. Burberry’s Colic Juice?”
“Apparently it’s something she created herself. Stop laughing, Mayne! The lad was near death for a week, apparently, and lost over two stone in weight.”
Mayne was bellowing with laughter. “That’s Josie! Did I tell you about the time she arranged for Annabel to be thrown from a horse so that Ardmore could rescue her?”
“Apparently this Crogan was an ass. Josie says he should be grateful for the slimming program.”
“You’ve unleashed a poisoner onto the innocent male population of London,” Mayne said with relish. “If she doesn’t like one of her suitors…” He snapped his fingers.
“Crogan said he wasn’t attracted to her because she was too fat.”
“Fat?”
“She does have a generous figure.”
“So what?”
“Crogan took revenge. He wrote to several friends of his. Oh, he didn’t say anything about the colic medicine; no man wants to confess that he’s lost two stone because he was unable to leave the privy for days. He called her a prime Scottish hoglet.”
Mayne’s lips tightened and every impulse toward laughter disappeared. “Ugly. But who would pay attention to the opinion of some Scottish farmer?”
“He was sent to school at Rugby.”
“Darlington!” Mayne said.
“Precisely. Darlington. Apparently Crogan was a schoolboy acquaintance.”
“That’s very bad luck.”
“It’s Darlington’s wit that’s the problem.”
“Darlington generally limits himself to scandal of the sexual kind. Surely Josie has not embroiled herself in that sort of thing? Why, she’s only been on the season for a few weeks.”
“We’re six weeks into it,” Rafe said. “You simply haven’t noticed.”
“Sylvie loathes being bored, and I’m afraid that Almack’s is nothing if not tedious.”
“Josie hasn’t created a scandal. But Darlington has swept up a storm of gossip on behalf of his despicable friend Crogan by putting a wager in the books at White’s that the man who marries Josie will have a liking for pork.”
Mayne said something under his breath.
“Men of sense have paid no attention to it, of course. But young men tend to be fairly shy in their matchmaking, and there’s a sour group of young bucks watching whoever dances with Josie and then making fun of him. The truth is that she’s lost the boys of her own age, the ones who should be courting her.”
“Give me their names,” Mayne said between clenched teeth. He’d spent so much time with the Essex sisters over the past two years that he felt as if they were his own wards. Or his own sisters.
“It spread before we even knew of it,” Rafe said. “If Josie had laughed in the face of curiosity, or carried herself with dignity, it would have faded into nothing. But…”
“They’ve turned on her.” Mayne had seen this sort of thing happen before.
“She’s invited everywhere. But she isn’t asked to dance, and she has no suitors of her own age. I have no doubt but that there are many men who would like to have greater acquaintance with her—as you say, she is beautiful and funny—but they are not braving the eyes of the ton.”
“Fools,” Mayne said.
“I need you to help while we’re gone.”
“This isn’t as simple as when you asked me to accompany Imogen to Scotland. What the hell can I do for Josie?” His voice was rough because he was angry. The very thought of anyone insulting Josie, with her shining eyes and funny, cynical little remarks made him so enraged that he felt breathless.
“Be her friend,” Rafe said simply. “Her sisters have not allowed her to go anywhere alone. Tess and Felton have been going to Almack’s every week. Annabel will attend our wedding ball, though her babe is hardly four months old. Her husband told me he would like to return to Scotland, but just that Annabel flatly refuses to leave until the season has drawn to a close.”
“Next year will be different,” Mayne said slowly, remembering the many seasons he’d drifted in and out of balls. “The pariah of one year can be the belle of the next. Why the hell didn’t I know about this?”
“You’ve been with your lovely Sylvie.”
“Sylvie can help Josie. She has a French air of disdain that Josie can copy.”
“Do you think that her sisters haven’t tried to teach her to look confident? Why, Imogen drilled her in holding her chin up and not looking miserable until I felt as if Josie were being kitted out for the Royal Fusiliers. But it’s not working.”
“These things never last more than one season. Remember how everyone made fun of the Wooly Breeder one year? That was Darlington as well. As if the poor girl was to blame for her father making so much money sheep-farming. The following season she came back as if nothing had happened, and people were tired of the game. She married respectably.”
Rafe sighed. “I tell you, Mayne, I bloody well can’t wait until this season is over. I’ve never seen a girl so miserable. It’s enough to make you rethink the whole idea of having daughters.”
“Wards are bad enough, are they?” Mayne said with a grin.
The door opened, and Lucius Felton walked in, followed by Rafe’s brother Gabriel. “Forgive us for interrupting,” Lucius said with his usual imperturbable gravity, “but Brinkley asked us to make our own way to you.”
“You’re just in time,” Mayne said. “I’m about to lecture Rafe on the trials and tribulations of the wedding night. It’s been so long since the man was bedded, I’m afraid he’s forgotten the process.”
Lucien smiled and seated himself. “Somehow I doubt that.”
“As do I,” said Gabe with an uncharacteristic chuckle.
And Mayne, looking at Rafe and seeing the smile in his eyes, came to the same conclusion.
Not everyone in St. Paul’s Cathedral felt the same mixture of anticipation and wild affection that the Duke of Holbrook’s wedding inspired in Mayne. Josie, for one, felt nothing other than abject misery. But since that was becoming a way of life for her, and sh
e was well aware how utterly despicable it would be for her to diminish her sister Imogen’s pleasure, she pasted a smile on her face.
It was a smile she was getting very good at. She’d practiced it in the glass at home. She curled the corners of her mouth up until her lower lip pouted out a little bit. Her mouth was probably her best feature, although she had no doubt but that anyone who saw her smiling would think of nothing but her round cheeks.
Imogen, of course, looked absolutely exquisite. Of the four sisters, Imogen looked most like her, in a cursory kind of way. They both had dark hair, and the same arching eyebrows. Meant for laughing, her sister Tess had told her years ago. But Imogen’s face was slender and heart-shaped, whereas her own was pie-shaped and round. Pie-shaped.
Josie wrenched her mind away. Tess said she should think about her best features, but to be honest, she was sick of thinking about whether she had good skin or not, when the only thing she really wanted was to see a few bones sticking out under that skin. Imogen was looking up at Rafe in a way that made her even sicker. With jealousy.
At least she was woman enough to admit it. Tess squeezed her hand and Josie glanced at her eldest sister. Her eyes were filled with tears. “Isn’t it wonderful?” Tess whispered. “Imogen looks so happy, finally.”
Josie felt a bolt of guilt. Of course, she wanted Imogen to be happy. Poor Imogen had had a horrible few years, what with eloping and then losing her young husband within a few weeks. Josie tipped the edges of her smile even higher. “Of course,” she whispered back. Tess’s husband Lucius was looking down at Tess with precisely the same adoration with which Rafe looked at Imogen.
She didn’t even want to look to her right, because the Earl of Ardmore always had that look in his eyes when he looked at Annabel, even when Annabel grew round as a lighthouse. That had made Josie like Ardmore even more than she had before: he seemed just as in love with Annabel as he ever was, even though Annabel’s little son was only a few months old and she hadn’t lost all the weight.
Too bad most men weren’t like him.
But that was veering into a dangerous thought, the kind that led to tears, so Josie looked back at the altar. The bishop was taking an unaccountably long time with his sermon, blathering on about love and forgiveness and such-like topics. The importance of marriage as an institution within which a man and woman loved and respected each other.
For goodness’ sake, Imogen and Rafe had already chosen each other. They didn’t need the lecture. But the bishop wandered on to the importance of marriage as an institution that cherished harmony in the family and the home.
I would marry anyone, Josie thought desperately. The thought of the little book she’d carefully created over the past two years, a list of all the ways by which heroines in novels made their admirers ask for their hands in marriage, sickened her now. The reality was so much worse than she’d pictured. She had no admirers.
She never thought that a man would have to undergo ridicule if he even danced with her. It wasn’t that she was left at the side of the room. Her eldest sister, Tess, if not Griselda and Imogen, would never allow it. She no sooner was returned to her chaperone than a friend of one of her brothers-in-law would bow before her. But she saw through them. They were dancing with her as a favor, and although she quite liked some of them, they were old. They were funny, and complimentary, and one of them—Baron Sibble—even seemed to like her for herself. He asked her for two dances at every single event, and even Tess could not have demanded such devoted service.
“Young men are fools,” Lucius Felton had told her on the way home from her first ball, when not a single man her age asked her to dance. “I was a fool as a youth.”
“Like this?” she had asked, sobbing so hard that she could hardly speak.
There was a moment’s silence. “Never like that consciously,” he said finally. “But Josie, young men are like sheep. They follow each other’s lead. There were quite likely young men in the room tonight who would have asked you to dance, but they can’t quite brave the ridicule.”
“I just don’t understand why this happened,” she had whispered, broken-hearted.
“It’s Darlington,” Lucius had told her. “Unfortunately, he is dictating fashion this season.”
“Why would he care about me?” she’d cried, from the depths of her heart. “I’ve never met him, have I? Do I know him?”
“Perhaps it’s because he’s English and you’re Scottish. There are Englishmen who resent the fact that your sisters have made excellent marriages amongst English aristocracy.”
“That’s—That’s not my fault!” It was the eternal cry of the unjustly accused.
“You are not the only one,” he added gently. “Cecilia Bellingworth will have a difficult time shaking the label Silly Billy, and that’s merely due to her unfortunate brother not being right in his head. Darlington didn’t make up that label; I’m not sure who did. But who will be brave enough to marry her?”
“I’d rather be silly than fat,” Josie had said flatly.
“No, you wouldn’t,” Lucius had said. “And you are not fat, Josie.”
But Lucius Felton had no idea of the depths of longing Josie felt to be thin. To dance around the ballroom, gowned in a diaphanous costume gathered with fragile ribbons under her breasts and floating around her like a cloud of pale silk…The whole world could see that Miss Mary Ogilby never wore a corset; why should she? She was as slender as a reed. But Josie wore a corset. If she could, she’d wear three corsets, one on top of each other, if only they could rein in all the flesh that seemed to pop out wherever she looked.
Not that she looked.
She’d had the mirror taken out of her bedchamber months ago and felt life was better without it. No diaphanous gowns for her. Imogen’s modiste—the very best in London—had pointed out that seams were needed to construct an agreeable shape. The words were emblazoned in Josie’s memory.
Well, thanks to that modiste, she had an agreeable shape, presumably. She certainly had a lot of seams. The dress she chose to wear to Imogen’s wedding was designed to hold her in and cover her up in as many ways as possible.
Josie wrenched her attention back to the altar. Finally the bishop seemed to be droning to a halt. Not that Imogen showed any sign of listening to him. She was just looking at Rafe, looking at him in such a way that Josie actually got a lump in her throat. Beside her, Tess was blotting away tears with a handkerchief her husband must have given her, since it was twice the size of her hand. Josie gritted her teeth. If she cried, there was no one to give her a handkerchief.
Her eyes would turn red.
They would swell and her skin would turn blotchy.
They would—
Rafe leaned down, cupped his new wife’s face in his hands, and said quietly, but so that Josie could clearly hear him from where they stood in the first row, “All my life, Imogen.”
In the end, Lucius Felton had two handkerchiefs, which was just like him.
3
From The Earl of Hellgate, Chapter the First
…She removed her stockings with the greatest delicacy imaginable, Dear Reader. I was transfixed at the sight of her ankle, slender, exquisite. In one rash moment I laid my heart—and my lips—at her feet and worshipped that dear part of her body as it so clearly deserved…
The Duke of Holbrook’s wedding fete
15 Grosvenor Square
Lord Charles Darlington was feeling rather morose. There was no doubt that life was difficult when cravats were so expensive, and the ton so tiresome. Of course, there were pleasures in life, although small.
The pleasure of a well-turned retort was one. One might think that Darlington was something of a monster, but he was not. He knew perfectly well that he was a trivial person, and he never failed to promptly acknowledge the fact, as did his friends.
“You are excessively tedious tonight,” Berwick remarked. “At this rate it would be almost more interesting to prance around the dance floor, listening to
some chit giggle at me.” Young girls had a tendency to fall into nervous laughter faced with Berwick’s sulky good looks, although his lack of a fortune kept him (in Darlington’s opinion) from becoming fatheaded.
“If I sparked wit for you it would be a misuse of precious resources,” Darlington retorted. “Do you suppose that anyone realizes we are here?”
Berwick looked around the crowded dance floor. “Not a chance of it. The butler of Holbrook’s practically whispered our names—that is, the names we gave him.”
Wisley and Thurman trotted up to them like eager little spaniels. “By Jove, you did get in, Darlington!” Thurman bellowed. “I bet Wisley here five guineas that you couldn’t get yourself invited to Holbrook’s wedding fete.”
Darlington preferred not to mention that he had received no invitation. It was the first time that he had been cut from an important event. Hang it, he was the son of a duke, albeit the third son. Why his mother had to keep turning out males when there wasn’t an estate to keep them in handkerchiefs, he didn’t know. But now he carelessly adjusted the line of his coat (a blush-colored superfine wool that he found immensely soothing to the eye) and said, “Of course I had an invitation, you idiot.”
He did too. He had an invitation addressed to one of his brothers.
“Well, she’s here,” Thurman said cheerfully. “The Scottish Sausage. Except I’m thinking we should come up with a new name. How about the Scottish Saucepan? How do you like that, eh?” He beamed.
“Like what?” Darlington said, an edge to his voice.
“Scottish Saucepan! It came to me in the middle of the night. I hadn’t drunk my chocolate before bed, you see, and I couldn’t sleep, and I was thinking about what a clever turn of the tongue you had, and there it was! Came to me in the night, like—like that writing on the wall they talk about in the Bible.”