a plain stuff gown with her hair scraped back and hidden in that net, she should never have merited a second glance. Which was, of course, her intention. And it had taken him a while, even with those watchful green eyes, to recognise her in today’s outfit.
The problem was that she found herself wishing with a positively reckless abandon that her nameless man would spare her a second glance. And that kind of foolishness threatened the entire plan of campaign she had set in motion at the age of seventeen and which had cost her so dear. Idiot, she lectured herself. If he looks at you seriously it will be as a mistress, a possession, not a wife. And marriage was only a dream, not a possibility, for her.
‘Bonjour, madame.’ She opened the door and dipped a respectful curtsy to Lady Harington, who swept in with a brisk nod. She was a regular customer who obviously had no idea that she had spent quite fifteen minutes in conversation with Phyllida in her respectable guise only two evenings previously at a musicale.
‘I have received a small consignment of the most elegant fans from the Orient, madame.’ She lifted them from their silk wrappings and laid them out on the counter. ‘Each is unique and quite exclusive to myself. I am showing them only to clients of discernment.’ And they are very, very expensive, she decided, seeing the avid glint in her ladyship’s eyes. Earning the money to drag them back from the edge of ruin and to bring Gregory into complete respectability was everything. Nothing must be allowed to threaten that.
‘Thank you for my present, Ashe.’ Sara slid her hand under his elbow as they made their way from St James’s Square and turned right into Pall Mall. ‘Why did you let the shopkeeper believe we were married?’
‘I corrected her soon enough. It is no concern of hers.’ She was interested, though.
‘You were flirting with her.’
‘And what do you know of flirting, might I ask? You are not out yet.’ One of the problems with being male, single and all that implied was that Ashe was only too aware of the thoughts, desires and proclivities of the other single males who were going to come into contact with his beautiful, friendly, innocent sister. It was enough to make him want to lock her up and hide the key for at least another five years.
‘I was out in Calcutta. I went to parties and picnics and dances. Everything, in fact.’ She tilted her head and sent him a twinkling smile that filled him with foreboding. ‘It is just that you were in Kalatwah and didn’t know what I was up to.’
‘That is different. It is all much more formal here. All those rules and scandal lurking if we trip up on as much as one of them. Especially for you, which is unfair, but—’
‘I know. Young ladies must be beyond reproach, as innocent as babies.’ Sara sighed theatrically. ‘Such a pity I am not an innocent.’
‘What?’ Ashe slammed to a halt, realised where he was and carried on walking. If he had to take ship back to India to dismember whoever had got his hands on his little sister, he would. ‘Sarisa Melissa Herriard, who is he?’ he ground out.
‘No one, silly. I meant it theoretically. You don’t think Mata is like those idiotic women who don’t tell their daughters anything and expect them to work it all out on their wedding night, do you? Or leave them to get into trouble because they don’t understand what men want.’
Ashe moaned faintly. No, of course their mother, raised as an Indian princess, and presumably schooled in all the theory of the ancient erotic texts, would have passed that wisdom on to her daughter as she reached marriageable age. He just did not want to think about it.
He had been away from home too long and his baby sister had grown up too fast. On board ship he hadn’t realised. She had been her old enthusiastic, curious self and there had been no young men to flirt with except the unfortunate Mr Perrott, so Ashe had carried on thinking of her as the seventeen-year-old girl he had left when he went to their great-uncle’s court. But she was twenty now. A woman.
‘Then pretend, very hard, that you haven’t a clue,’ he said.
‘Of course,’ his oh-so-demure little sister said. ‘So, were you flirting?’
‘No. I do not flirt with plain French shopkeepers.’
‘Hmm. I’m not so certain she is plain,’ Sara said. ‘I think she would like to appear so. Perhaps because she has trouble with rakish gentlemen like you.’ They stopped before a rambling pile of red brick with two scarlet-coated guards standing in front. ‘What on earth is that?’ she asked before Ashe could demand why she considered him rakish and how she would know a rake if she saw one.
He had been doing his homework. ‘St James’s Palace. It is very old.’
‘It is a sorry excuse for a palace, in my opinion—the most junior raja can do better than that.’ Sara wrinkled her nose in disapprobation.
‘Come on, we’ll go through to the park.’ Ashe took her past the guards before they could be arrested for lèse-majesté or whatever crime being rude about the sovereign’s palaces constituted.
‘So, are you looking for a mistress?’ she enquired as they went through the improbably named Milkmaids’ Passage and into Green Park.
‘No!’ Yes. But he certainly was not going to discuss that with his little sister. It was far too long since he had been with a woman. There had been women after Reshmi—he was not a monk, after all—but the voyage had lasted months and the ship might as well have been a monastery.
‘You will be looking for a wife, though. Mata said you would be. At least there are lots more women in London to fall in love with than there were in Calcutta society.’
‘I have no intention of falling in love. I need to find a wife suitable for a viscount.’ And one who was heir to a marquisate at that.
‘But Father and Mata made a love match. Oh look, cows wandering about. But they aren’t sacred, are they?’
‘Shouldn’t think so.’ He spared the livestock a glance. ‘Not unless the Church of England has developed some very strange practices. Look, there are milkmaids or cow herds or something.
‘Our parents met and fell in love before they knew Father’s uncle had died, making grandfather the heir,’ he reminded her. ‘Mata even ran away when she found out before the wedding because she did not think she would make a good marchioness.’
‘I know, but it is ridiculous! She is clever and beautiful and brave,’ Sara said fiercely. ‘What more could be needed?
‘She is the illegitimate daughter of an East India Company merchant and an Indian princess—not the usual English aristocratic lady, you must agree. She only agreed to marry Father and to take it on because she loves him—why do you think he stayed in India until the last possible moment?’
‘I thought it was because he and his father hated each other.’
That was one way of describing a relationship where a bitter wastrel had packed his own seventeen-year-old son off to India against his will.
‘Father made his own life, his own reputation, in India. He never wanted to come back, especially with Mata’s anxieties, but they know it is their duty.’ He shrugged. ‘And one day, a long way away, I hope, it will be mine. And I’m not putting another woman through
