shrewd and significant nod in the languorous and lovely Countess of Tedinton’s direction.
‘That, my dear, rather depends on whether she’s intent on wearing him on her bonnet or her sleeve,’ her friend replied with heavy significance.
‘Surely not even she would do that, especially during her daughter’s come-out Season when it would be more fitting if he caught the chit rather than the mother?’
‘The girl’s only her stepdaughter, don’t forget, and not ten years younger than the painted hussy her father married in some fit of madness. Tedinton should have known it would end in disaster once he’d made such a ridiculous second marriage.’
‘That woman can’t pull the wool over the ladies’ eyes, even if the gentlemen hang on every word that falls from her painted lips. She’s little more than a strumpet and not a very well-bred one at that.’
‘I pride myself on always being able to read a person’s true nature, despite any shoddy façades they may care to throw up to confuse people. Even Tedinton won’t be able to fool himself her affairs and her low appetites don’t exist for ever, for all that she’s a beauty.’
‘True, but she’s nowhere near as clever as she thinks she is. The woman has risen too high and now thinks she can have whatever, or whomever, she wants. Such arrogance will prove her downfall one fine day and it won’t be a moment too soon for me when she tried to condescend to me last time we crossed each other’s paths.’
‘Well, I doubt she’ll try it twice, my dear, but there’s no mistaking exactly what, or rather whom, she wants right now,’ the other lady replied meaningfully. Lady Tedinton was watching her stepdaughter chatter animatedly with Lord Shuttleworth whilst reclining on a nearby sofa and eyeing him as if she’d like to pounce and never mind how many spectators saw her do it.
‘Her thoughts are written all over her face, for all she thinks we’re too stupid to read them, yet he looks more entranced by the girl. Tedinton would be a fool to turn down such a match on the say-so of a wife who wants Shuttleworth herself. So that match would put the cat among the pigeons, and set others with their eye on him in their place once and for all,’ the first lady said sweetly.
Kate did her best to look serenely unconscious of their spite while she fervently hoped they were wrong. She wasn’t well acquainted with the girl, but she was pretty enough and might be charming as well for all she knew. However, she was clearly no equal match for Edmund Worth. He deserved a woman who wouldn’t bore him before the honeymoon was over and, if he met that lady, Kate supposed she’d have to shrug her shoulders and look about her for that perfect husband a little more diligently than she was doing at the moment.
‘Certain ladies need to realise that it’s never wise to be too finicky and risk coming back Season after Season, don’t you agree, dear?’ the second of her detractors continued relentlessly, with a significant nod in Kate’s direction she pretended not to see.
‘Luckily our darling girls are in no danger of finding out that pert opinions and overweening vanity will almost certainly land them on the shelf for good.’
‘Quite—I never could abide such precocious chits myself,’ her friend agreed while Kate planned their imminent demise in minute and purely theoretical detail, to keep from verbally grinding them under her chariot wheels as her restless temper demanded she must.
‘Our dance,’ pronounced Mr Cromer concisely at just the right moment to stop her leaping to her own defence in a reckless fashion.
‘Indeed,’ Kate replied gratefully, having come to value his sparse conversation over the last weeks, as he began to court Miss Transome in earnest.
Who would have dreamt a few years ago that Amelia Transome and Kate Alstone would ever come to enjoy each other’s company so much, when each had eyed the other during their début and decided they had little in common? Now Kate valued Amelia’s kind heart and generous nature and wondered at herself for not seeing past her chatter and fluttery manner before. And at least Amelia regarded Mr Cromer dancing with Kate as the lesser of two evils, since she couldn’t dance every dance with him herself. In her company at least he wasn’t being giggled over or eyed speculatively by one of the eager newcomers or their husband-hunting mamas, and Kate felt at ease with at least one of her dancing partners, so all three were content. Yet Mr Cromer had a good friend in Lord Shuttleworth and every now and then Kate would glance up and find him standing by the other gentleman’s side and watching her, as unreadable as he was unsmiling while he did so. His lordship hadn’t asked her to dance again and she told herself that she was relieved.
‘Shuttleworth ain’t serious about that chit, y’know?’ Mr Cromer informed her during one of the country dances.
‘He gives a very good impression of it, then,’ she replied, just as if she had every right to feel bitter, which she most certainly did not.
‘Chivalrous to a fault, always was. Easing her path into society quiets his conscience, I suppose.’
Then it was true. Edmund had been Lady Tedinton’s lover and evidently he still felt guilty about that and, considering the wretched woman was another man’s wife, so he should. How could he have fallen for that heartless female’s overblown charms? No, there was no need to wonder about that; Kate only had to flick a look at the sultry beauty doing her best to look faintly amused by her stepdaughter and his lordship to know exactly why a gentleman would find such lazy sensuality irresistible.
Yet Kate thought from the downward curve of her pouting lips that the lady was secretly furious at his defection. Turning the situation over in her mind, Kate shivered as she contemplated the sort of marriage she’d fooled herself she wanted. The very idea of casually following in the footsteps of Lady Tedinton and taking lovers once she’d borne Edmund’s heirs made her want to weep now. Then, imagining how she’d feel if they’d actually wed and she’d found out about the exotic Lady Tedinton afterwards, she felt a strong temptation to go into strong hysterics. So maybe it was as well this was neither the time nor place to consider what her revulsion at the very idea said about her own feelings toward Edmund Worth.
‘Bestholme,’ Mr Cromer remarked obscurely after they’d finished their dance and he was escorting her back to where Eiliane and Miss Transome were sitting.
‘Yes?’ Kate said encouragingly.
‘Fortune hunter,’ he warned with a shake of his head for emphasis.
‘Ah, I thought so,’ she said with a grateful smile.
It set the cap on a hateful evening that Mr Bestholme seemed even more desperate to corner her attention when she refused to take to the dance floor with him. He besieged her with sly comments and overfamiliar touches whenever he could force himself closer to her by using the crush of guests as an excuse and if she didn’t get away from his damp, cruel hands and hungry eyes soon she was going to be sick. Eventually she disgusted herself by taking to her heels and fleeing his far-too-persistent and public pursuit, even resorting to the ladies’ withdrawing room where even he wouldn’t have the gall to follow her.
Sure the man would think nothing of compromising her into marriage if that was the only way he could get his repellent hands on her fortune, she quit her temporary sanctuary and trespassed into the private part of the house to plan a rapid retreat to Derbyshire and the safety of Kit’s fearsome protection, if her determined evasion of Mr Bestholme didn’t persuade the human leech she wasn’t going to be tricked, pressured or just plain forced into marriage.
It seemed a coward’s
