tooth to be turning her nose up at you, Sir Benedict.”
“Excuse me,” Benedict said coldly, and walked away.
Fitzwilliam fell into step with him. “You’re welcome to Miss Carteret,” he said generously, “for I have found something better. Lady Serena Calverstock is no longer young, but she’s a damned fine female all the same. I don’t mind mutton, if there’s no lamb to be had. King has promised to present me at the cotillion tomorrow. You do not dance the cotillion, I collect?”
“Why wouldn’t I?” said Benedict, bristling. “I am not an invalid.”
Fitzwilliam frowned. “You wouldn’t poach, would you? I saw Lady Serena first. She’s ripe for the plucking, too! Now that her sister, Lady Redfylde, is dead, Serena can no longer live with her brother-in-law, you know. She has been cast out into the cold, cruel world.”
Benedict snorted. “Lady Serena is perfectly able to keep her own house. And it would hardly be proper for her to live with Lord Redfylde now that he is a widower.”
“You know her ladyship?” Fitzwilliam said jealously.
“She was my sister’s matron of honor. I have known her for years. And she is possessed of a pretty independence. If she marries, it will not be in desperation, Mr. Fitzwilliam.”
“Setting up house is a most tedious undertaking for a single lady,” Fitzwilliam argued. “Even a wealthy woman will resent having to spend her own money on necessities when she never had to before. The more she spends on food and rent, the less there is for clothes and jewels and carriages. I doubt Lady Serena has ever had to pay a butcher’s bill in all her life. And tradesmen always do cheat a woman, if they can. Depend on it: right now Lady Serena is feeling all the disadvantages of spinsterhood.”
Benedict looked at Fitzwilliam thoughtfully.
“It would be remiss of me not to pay my respects,” he said.
Although she was a near-total invalid, Lady Agatha Vaughn still took interest in society when she felt up to it. Today she felt up to it, and, as she was eating a meager breakfast of biscuits and beef tea, her eldest daughter dutifully read the society columns to her. Cosy was continually amazed by how many people her mother still knew, even though she had been out of society for decades.
“Did you say Sir Benedict Wayborn, my dear?”
Cosy blanched. Her mother had been a Wayborn before her marriage. Now, as it turns out, the devil who had propositioned her in the kitchen was a Wayborn, too. “He’s not one of your brothers, is he, ma’am?” she asked anxiously. How nasty it would be if he turned out to be my uncle, she thought.
But, fortunately, Lady Agatha had no brother by that name.
Cosy sighed with relief.
“I wonder! Could he be one of the Surrey Wayborns?” Lady Agatha mused. “How long does he mean to stay in Bath? Is he ill? Is he a knight or a baronet? Is he married?”
“It doesn’t say, Mother. Probably he’s no relation to us at all.”
Lady Agatha finished her tea. “I think I will be well enough to get up tomorrow.”
When Lady Agatha felt well enough to get up, she would put on her auburn wig and paint her face with white lead. She had been badly scarred by smallpox as a child, and she never allowed anyone but her family and her maid, Nora, to see her without her face on, as she put it. She had no idea that the deadly poison was slowly killing her.
“Perhaps Lady Dalrymple will visit us again.”
Cosy silently cursed Lady Dalrymple. It had been Lady Dalrymple who had first put the idea of coming to Bath into Lady Agatha’s head. Then the old witch had dropped her mother like a hot potato when she found out the Vaughns had lost all their money. The woman, and her son, and her daughter, had spent three months with the Vaughns in Ireland, eating them out of house and home, but now, apparently, they couldn’t be bothered to maintain the “friendship.”
“Perhaps,” she said, turning over to the personal advertisements. She had placed an advertisement in the paper a week ago herself, in the hopes of earning a little money by giving piano lessons, but there had been no response. Yesterday, she had finally sold the beautiful Erard pianoforte she had dragged, at great expense, all the way from Ireland, in order to pay the chemist for her mother’s medications. She had hoped the sale would fetch enough for her to buy her mother a Bath-chair, but that had not been the case. Today was the last day that the fruitless, yet not inexpensive, advertisement would run. It would be the height of irony if today’s paper contained a response, and she dearly needed a laugh.
There was no response today either, but, halfway down the page, an interesting item caught her eye. “Sizeable reward,” she read aloud. “For the return of a gentleman’s property. No questions asked.” A watch and a ring were described in detail. The ring she was certain of instantly, but she had to go down to the kitchen and take the watch out of the man’s valise to be sure. Opening it, she saw the inscription: “To my son, B. R. W. Tempus Fugit.”
She had no idea what “Tempus Fugit” meant, if anything, but that would not prevent her from claiming the sizeable reward. How sizeable? she wondered greedily. Twenty pounds would be enough to buy a Bath-chair secondhand. A hundred pounds, and she could put her sister back in that snooty English school. A hundred pounds was a sum that took her breath away.
Ajax Jackson walked in just as she was pocketing the watch and the ring.
“There’s a reward offered!” She showed him the newspaper, forgetting in her excitement that he could not read. “Sizeable, it says. I think I’ll go over and collect it. There’s his direction. Number Six, Camden Place. Right across the street. I’ll be back in a flash with the cash.”
Giddy with excitement, she put on her bonnet and ran out of the house. Pausing in the park between Upper and Lower Camden, she pulled the layers of her veil over her face. She would have to disguise her voice, too, she decided. Her Irish accent might give her away to the servants. Fortunately, her mother was English; she could do a fair imitation of a hoity-toity English lady. She went confidently up the steps, and rang the bell.
The door opened, and a portly man of middle years stood before her. He was elegantly dressed in knee breeches and buckled shoes. His head looked like an egg with a face drawn on it. She guessed he was the butler. Pickering would have been insulted. He was not a butler. He was a gentleman’s gentleman.
“Mrs. Price?” he whispered, looking both ways down the street. Distracted by his furtive manner, Cosy looked up and down the street, too, but saw no one. Apparently satisfied, the servant pulled her inside and closed the door. “In here, Mrs. Price, if you please.”
Of course, she ought to have corrected the man’s mistake at once, but his manner was so strange that curiosity got the better of her. Who was Mrs. Price? And why would a married lady be visiting Sir Benedict’s butler in the middle of the day? Or maybe she was visiting Sir Benedict himself. A married woman!
That man is a menace, she thought.
Pickering put her in the study.
A generous fire crackled in the handsome fireplace of carved marble, drawing her to it. She warmed her hands and looked around. The beveled glass doors of the bookshelves gleamed as if teams of slaves had been polishing them all night. The walls were paneled
