‘Lady Finchley, she’s m’aunt.’
‘That accounts for it then,’ he conceded.
‘Your excuse?’ Cromer asked morosely.
‘Idiocy,’ Edmund replied, borrowing some of his friend’s abruptness.
‘Must be,’ Cromer commiserated as they turned back with their booty. ‘Though the Alstone icicle’s a beauty,’ he conceded generously.
‘Aye, but is she worth enduring the frostbite for, I wonder?’ Edmund asked in a thoughtful undertone as he watched her nod regally to an acquaintance.
‘M’father wants me to wed. Always liked Amelia Transome, but the thing is that she will talk. Much better tempered than my cousin Finchley, though,’ Cromer risked waxing lyrical.
Scanning the room and finally spotting Miss Finchley seated at a flimsy table with a widower of at least five and forty, who still looked hunted and not very willing, Edmund sympathised. Miss Transome was open and amiable, but the thought of being fluttered at over the breakfast table for the rest of his life must make the strongest man hesitate. Neither female bore the slightest resemblance to his dream wife, so he turned his attention back to Kate Alstone with a sneaking feeling of relief that he didn’t stand in Cromer’s shoes and could at least please himself whom he brought to supper, so long as she wasn’t the woman who pleased him all the way to the altar.
‘Oh, how perfectly lovely,’ Miss Transome gushed at the loaded plates.
‘Quite,’ Kate said with much less enthusiasm, and Edmund wondered if she’d been talked into a headache by Miss Transome’s busy tongue and dreaded carrying the burden of conversation with her on his own.
Kate nibbled unenthusiastically at her supper, despite poor Lady Finchley having pushed out every boat she could launch in the hope of netting her daughter a husband at long last by hiring an excellent chef. To be fair, the headache she felt tightening her hairpins and nagging at her temples had nothing to do with Miss Transome’s prattle, so the blame for that must lie at Lord Shuttleworth’s door. Wretched man, she decided, as she surreptitiously surveyed him with a disillusioned gaze.
Once upon a time he would have fallen at her daintily shod feet given the slightest hint of encouragement, but now that she’d finally steeled herself to accept a husband, he certainly wouldn’t be one of her suitors.
She hoped she was too proud to wilfully mistake his indifference to her tonight for a fleeting headache or a black mood on his part. There was too much distance about him to lay his behaviour at such a random and socially convenient cause and gaily expect tomorrow to bring amendment. He no longer desired her, now she finally wanted to become a wife and mother, and it was the frustration of it all that had caused her headache. It wasn’t as if she cared for him, other than as she might for any man she’d once known and come to value for his integrity and the dry sense of humour that had once lurked under his youthful enthusiasm.
Now it was gone, she decided guiltily that she’d always secretly revelled in Edmund’s apparent obsession with her and the certainty that he’d always long for her, even if he couldn’t have her. Had it been a guilty pleasure she knew she ought not to feel to know one person on this earth probably still thought of her as uniquely desirable? She really hoped not, since that would make her a tease or a shrew, then and now. And he certainly didn’t want her now, so why did it feel as if someone had taken away the most promising treat she’d ever pretended she didn’t really want in the first place?
So all in all it was little wonder that she was nursing the beginnings of a fine headache and an inexcusable grievance against Edmund Worth, just because he no longer felt inclined to make a fool of himself over the Honourable Katherine Alstone. Now that there was no chance of him offering for her ever again, she supposed she could acknowledge in her own head that it would have been wrong to accept him anyway, when he so obviously wanted to love his wife and she certainly didn’t want to love her husband. However, she wondered uneasily if she would have found it so wrong to accept him on such terms if he hadn’t made it so very clear they were no longer on offer.
Kate surreptitiously scanned the room under cover of Miss Transome’s interminable prattle for any likely bachelors, now the most promising one of all was struck off her list. Not one of those present made the idea of sharing the intimacy required to bring her children into the world seem anything other than a nightmare. There would be other balls and routs, of course; ones where the gentlemen were both more plentiful and a little more willing to be charmed, although the other ladies would also be both more sparkling and more innocent, if also more tongue-tied.
Most eligible gentlemen had spurned Lady Finchley’s rout for their clubs, which severely limited her choices. Sensible gentlemen, she decided, as she noted her fellow quizzes dotted about the supper room, trying their best to be all the things their desperate mamas bade them be. Miss Transome was projecting vivacity with such determination Kate wondered if she might sprout wings and fly up to the ceiling and circle about them all, still twittering frantically as she did so. Nearby, Miss Wetherby had cornered the market in pale and interesting and was reclining gracefully on a fragile chair that looked to be her only support in a failing world. And just what was Miss Alstone doing? Wilting too, Kate decided crossly; she was drooping like a wallflower and refusing to even try to be civil to those about her, just because she’d been disappointed in hope, if not in love.
‘Do you attend Mrs Flamington’s ridotto, sir?’ Miss Transome asked Mr Cromer with apparently artless curiosity, and Kate could have told her just from reading Mr Cromer’s hunted expression that it was unlikely.
‘No,’ he managed reluctantly, before courting even more silence by popping a bite of lobster patty into his mouth and consuming it very slowly as if to stop his reckless tongue committing him to something the rest of him didn’t agree with.
‘Are you planning to be there, Lord Shuttleworth?’ the lady asked earnestly.
Yes, how about you? Kate asked him with silent malice as she watched him swallow his chicken puff with gallant determination and even manage not to cough while he did so. Seeming to read her very thoughts, he cast her a repressive look and Miss Transome a warm smile that probably gave her far more encouragement than he ever dreamt it would, if the flush of sudden colour in her cheeks and the pleased sparkle in her eyes was anything to go by.
Kate sympathised with the foolishly romantic nature concealed under all the fluff and froth, even as she had to fight a primitive urge to ruthlessly crush any hopes of capturing Shuttleworth’s interest that might be stirring in Miss Transome’s receptive breast. He wasn’t hers to be possessive about, and had made that abundantly clear tonight. If he wanted to land himself with a wife who’d foolishly long for his love and affection for the rest of their days together, then that was his problem. Except that some annoying part of her argued it was hers as well, however hard Kate tried to ignore it.
‘I fear I’m otherwise engaged that day,’ he said with apparent regret.
‘Yes,’ Kate said with a hint of malice, ‘Lady Tedinton has a waltzing party, has she not?’
When she’d heard rumours that a lady with a Frenchified name, who might or might not be Selene, Lady Tedinton, had shared a lot more than a mere friendship with young Lord Shuttleworth while they were both in Bath one spring, Kate had dismissed them as mere gossip, even if the thought of him sharing that exotically beautiful lady’s bed had pained her with surprising sharpness while she did so. An honourable young gentleman like Shuttleworth wouldn’t cuckold a man of Tedinton’s venerable years and genial temper, she’d assured herself, even if her ladyship was twenty or thirty years younger
