ignored the automatic compliment. ‘Not with discreditable offers it is not,’ she said with feeling, then blushed again. ‘Oh dear, I should not have mentioned that, should I? But I feel I know you, Major Carlow.’
‘Is that why you were looking at me just now?’ he asked. ‘I hoped you wanted to make my acquaintance.’
She bit her lip in charming confusion. ‘I really do not know. It was very brassy of me, but there was something about you I thought I recognized.’ She recovered her composure a little and her chin lifted. ‘And you stared right back at me.’
‘True.’ Hal stooped to pick up the ball and sent Phillip chasing towards the fountain in its octagonal basin. ‘But then, I am a rake and we are supposed to stare at ladies and put them to the blush.’
‘You are? A rake I mean?’
‘Indeed. I am precisely the kind of man your mama would warn you about and, now I think on it, you may have leapt from frying pan to fire. I am absolutely the last man you should be seen walking with in the Parc.’
‘No, Major Fellowes is that,’ she retorted. ‘You rescued me.’
Hal was not given to flirting with young unmarried ladies. For a start, whenever he hove into sight, their mothers herded them together like hens with chicks on seeing a fox. And he had absolutely no intention of finding himself confronting a furious father demanding that he did the decent thing by his compromised daughter.
Society was full enough of carefree widows and dashing matrons—and the demi-monde of skilled light-skirts—to keep a gentleman of an amorous disposition amused without him needing to venture amongst the ingénues adorning the Marriage Mart.
But Miss Tresilian was not one of those young ladies either. She was, to his experienced eye, a good three and twenty, her manner was open and her wits sharp. She was not one of the fashionable set either: he did not recognize her name and her bonnet was a Season out of style. There was something about her that argued both virtue and a lack of sophisticated boredom.
‘My reputation is worse,’ he observed, reverting to Major Fellowes. ‘I have not heard of him—but he had heard of me.’
‘And he was very wary of you.’ Miss Tresilian nodded. ‘So you are a notorious duellist as well as a rake?’
‘I confess I fight, gamble, drink and amuse myself with some dedication,’ Hal told her with a shrug, feeling he might as well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb so far as his reputation with Miss Tresilian was concerned. He did not have to mention loose women in his list of sins: the slight lift of one eyebrow showed that she could add those herself.
A shadow passed over her face. ‘Gamble? What on, Major?’
‘Anything, everything. Cards, dice, horses, what colour gown Miss Tresilian will wear for her next appearance in the Parc.’
‘Do you often win, Major?’
‘Almost inevitably.’ She raised the brow again. ‘I play cards well, but I have the knack of calculating odds even better. I enjoy gambling, not throwing money away. You disapprove of gambling, Miss Tresilian?’
‘My mother and I are in Brussels on what is called the economical plan,’ she said, wrinkling her nose in distaste for the term. ‘In other words, we are compelled to live abroad where it is cheap in order to husband our resources. Many of the British community are here for the same reason, and for most of them, it is because the head of the household has gambled away a fortune.’
‘Your father is not with you?’
‘Papa died just before Phillip was born.’ Miss Tresilian looked round, sighting her brother standing hopefully in front of the refreshment stand. His nankeens, Hal saw with amusement, were now an absolute disgrace. ‘Thank you, Major Carlow, for rescuing me and for your escort. I am sure you must be wanting to rejoin your friends now.’ Whatever her reasons for staring at him so fixedly before, they were evidently nothing to do with flirtation. She was now intent on politely disengaging herself.
‘Not at all. At least, not until I have put a stop to any tittle-tattle that you being seen walking with me might arouse.’ Hal scanned the array of elegant ladies gathered in little parties around the pavilion. ‘What we need is a matron of influence and reputation. Ah yes, just the person.’ He tucked Julia’s hand under his arm and led her across the gravel to a lady sitting alone, delicately spooning vanilla ice from a glass. Behind her, in the shadows of one of the trees, stood her maid.
‘Lady Geraldine. How very lovely you look today.’
‘Major Carlow, a delightful surprise to see you doing something as tame as walking in the Parc, and at such an early hour! Perhaps you never got to sleep last night.’ Her ladyship smiled wickedly from under the brim of her hat as Hal bowed, returning a smile every bit as wicked.
‘May I introduce Miss Tresilian, ma’am? Miss Tresilian, Lady Geraldine Masters. I have just rescued Miss Tresilian from a rather slimy dragon. I have done my utmost not to flirt with her, but she will now have been observed by the censorious walking with me for quite ten minutes.’
‘And requires some respectable chaperonage? Indeed. Do sit by me, Miss Tresilian. My first duty is to warn you against associating with bloods of Major Carlow’s ilk. However, I must congratulate you upon escaping from a dragon’s clutches. Major, take yourself off so I may restore Miss Tresilian’s reputation as required.’
‘Ma’am.’ Hal bowed, repressing a smile at the expression of barely concealed alarm on Miss Tresilian’s face. Lady Geraldine, daughter of the Duke of Wilmington and wife of the indecently wealthy Mr John Masters, was one of the leading Ladies of the Park, as the reigning English set in Brussels Society were known. She was a handsome woman in her late thirties, kind, outspoken and apt to be amused by handsome young men of address of whom she had a number in her train. Her devotion to her husband was, however, in no doubt. He should know, he had tested it personally. ‘I leave her in safe hands. Good day, Miss Tresilian.’
‘Good day, Major. And thank you.’ She smiled, an expression of genuine sweetness, and her face, that he had thought merely pleasant, was transformed.
Hal swallowed, bowed and took himself off, pausing to direct a waiter to send ices and tea across to Lady Geraldine’s table. He handed the coins to pay for it to Phillip. ‘Settle the account, there’s a good chap,’ he said, amused by the delighted expression on the small boy’s face as he followed the waiter, the coins clasped tight in his grubby fist.
A charming pair, the Tresilians, he thought as he strode towards the Place Royale exit, heading for his hotel and a couple of hours’ sleep. One grubby urchin and one respectable young lady. One virtuous young lady, he thought and told himself to forget about her.
‘Tell me about your slimy dragon, Miss Tresilian.’ Lady Geraldine fixed her eyes on Julia’s face and smiled. Her regard wavered as someone approached their table.
‘My brother, ma’am,’ Julia apologised as Phillip marched up, waiter in tow, a huge grin on his grubby face. ‘He is not usually such a ragamuffin.’
‘Boys will be boys,’ her ladyship remarked, with a glance at Major Carlow’s disappearing figure. Julia dragged her own eyes away from broad shoulders in dark blue cloth. Did every officer have his uniform tailored to such a pitch of perfection? If they did, she had never noticed before.
‘However,’
