five days’ time? You want the impossible, but I think we can manage.’ Her eyes danced, energised by the challenge. ‘It’s a mother’s job to know how to arrange these things. If you are set on this, then I will help see it done.’ She smiled softly. ‘My son is getting married. Goodness knows you’ve made me wait long enough. I should start planning the wedding while I’m at it since time is of the essence.’
‘Thank you, Mother.’ He was an only child, out of poor luck in that department. His mother should have had legions of children to command: daughters to march out on the marriage mart, sons to organise into professions. Instead, she’d got him, a gentleman scientist who preferred his camels and horses to the social whirl. His one foray into that world had not recommended it. Some experiments didn’t bear repeating.
There was one last piece to discuss. ‘As to the guests, I am aware the Season is slowing down and so many of the girls are spoken for.’ Sutton thought of the tea heiress, Pavia Honeysett, married now to his friend, Cam Lithgow. She would not have fit his uncle’s criteria but she, a girl of mixed birth and not title, had caught the eye of a marquis before her marriage, general proof that girls had been swept up early this year and the competition for well-born wives was fierce.
‘There’s always someone to marry.’ His mother was unbothered by his concern. ‘People are looking for something new now that Ascot and the Regatta are behind us. I’ll post an announcement in The Times and London will converge on Newmarket in five days.’ She gave him a reassuring smile. ‘Everyone will want to come.’ Her eyes twinkled. ‘And we’ll let them; let them vie for your attention. London will wait upon your favour. You needn’t beg, not with your good looks and the promise of that fortune.’
That’s what he was worried about. He didn’t want to limit his choices to the dregs, to wallflowers and fortune hunters, but he kept his thoughts to himself. There was only so much of the situation he could control, thanks to his uncle’s stratagems. It wasn’t the house party that would draw them, it was the mere presence of the fortune. Whether he was in Newmarket or in London wouldn’t matter. At least in Newmarket he could control who he spent his time with. Here in London he’d be at the mercy of other people’s guest lists. He bent to kiss his mother on the cheek and took his leave. He needed the sanctuary of his club, a drink and time to think. Who would want him, just him, now? Who would even see him, the man, standing there behind the fortune? In that regard, he’d just have to trust to luck that he’d be able to throw the net wide enough. But he was a scientist. Trusting to luck was not something he was used to doing.
* * *
There was a reason for that. Luck often failed and it was failing him spectacularly today. Sutton had barely set foot inside the asylum of his club before he realised his mistake. London had not waited for an announcement in The Times. From the buzz in the common room, it seemed the whole city already knew he had been named heir to Sir Leland Keynes’s fortune. By four o’clock that afternoon, London fully grasped the import of that. The Season now had an eligible parti nonpareil.
Sutton was bombarded with men wanting to shake his hand, some of whom he hadn’t seen since school days, others whom he’d never met at all but who claimed introduction through convoluted connections. Older men wanted to offer condolences on his uncle’s passing, younger men wanted to renew acquaintances or establish them. All of them had sisters, daughters, nieces, cousins, wards or god-daughters. The preponderance of females offered up to him made his earlier observation about the dearth of candidates laughable. Apparently, marriageable females were thick on the ground when one was possessed of a fortune.
But his instant popularity reinforced his earlier worry. He’d become nothing but a placeholder, a gateway to a fortune. Sutton made his way to an empty, isolated chair in the corner and ordered a drink. He didn’t kid himself the privacy of his seat would last long. He was a man no longer, but a thing to be used and manipulated for personal gain, the very reason he’d resisted the idea of marriage for so long. He didn’t want an alliance. He didn’t need an heiress’s money or a debutante’s father’s political connections. He wanted something more.
Not love, necessarily. The idea of love was an illogical concept when it came to the science of successful pairings. Animals didn’t mate for love or for alliances. They mated for strength, for compatibility. That’s what he wanted. Compatibility. Someone who loved animals, who would enjoy working beside him with his camels and his horses, who might enjoy him. Those wishes were now officially relegated to the dustbin of impossibilities.
A pair of young men approached his sanctuary and invaded with oblivious bonhomie, taking advantage of a very casual connection. They’d met once or twice at Tattersall’s. ‘Keynes, so good to see you. Dare say we’ll see more of you in London, these days.’
Sutton smiled and shook their hands, wondering just how long it would take them to mention the unattached women in their lives.
‘My sister is with me this Season,’ the first one said, and Sutton restrained the urge to laugh. Of course she was. It had taken the man all of thirty seconds. A record, to be sure. If his uncle wasn’t already dead, Sutton would kill him for this. His uncle had made his life a living hell.
Bermondsey Street, south-east London—Saturday, July 14th
The fast click of boot heels on the wooden treads of the boarding-house stairs alerted Elidh to her father’s return. From the sound of those clicks, he was excited and in earnest. That worried her. It usually meant he had concocted a new scheme to lift them out of the encroaching poverty of their life. Elidh set aside her mending and steeled herself for whatever came through the door. With her father, one never knew. Sometimes he brought home people, sometimes he brought home ideas. Once he’d brought home a monkey. She wished he’d bring home money. They could use some right now. She’d economised all she could and it still wasn’t enough. Not for the first time, she wished her father could be normal, that he would get up in the mornings and go to a clerking job for the Bank of London. A man could make a hundred pounds a year clerking and there was security. A clerk worked for life, until he chose to quit.
Right now a hundred pounds a year sounded like a fortune to her. They could move out of the dingy boarding house, even out of the dockside neighbourhoods, to a cottage, perhaps in Chelsea. They could eat their own meals instead of the general fare served downstairs in the dining room where they ate with the other boarders. But her father wasn’t a clerk. Clerking was beneath him. Just ask him. He was a playwright, the leader of an acting troupe. At least he had been three years ago, when her mother was still alive and every day had been full of adventure.
Her mother was dead now, lost to tuberculosis, and her father might as well be, too, stumbling through life without his wife, his love, his raison d’être. He had moments. Moments when he was inspired to write his next big play. The moments lasted a few days, long enough to conjure hope that this time it might end differently, that he might complete a work, that it might actually be good enough to sell. But it always ended the same way. Crumpled papers on the floor, a mad rage in which he declared his latest work was rubbish and he vowed never to write again. But that had to change. They’d been close to broke before, but nothing like this. There’d always been something to sell, something to be done to get them by. This time, Elidh wasn’t sure anything would save them. There wasn’t anything left to pawn, no prospects left to hope on that a play might be finished, that a patron might emerge to purchase it. She had counted their funds this morning. Counting her recent payment from a dress shop that gave her piecework during the Season, they had enough to pay the rent for another month, but that was an unreliable source, petering out when the Season ended. Such inconsistency
