caught her eye in a look that seemed to reflect, with added amusement, a certain perception that was by no means enthusiastic. Without prejudice, her glance might have agreed with her sisters’ description of him as the most perfect tulip, the best-dressed, the most eligible parti, a Corinthian out of the very topmost drawer.
But Letitia was prejudiced by the other epithets she had heard, not so glowing, that although he was wealthy and titled—and who in their right minds could ignore that?—he was also a rake. And what was her mother doing to allow her younger sisters to be seen exclusively in his company, she would like to have known. Granted, her lovely sisters had reached their twenty-second birthday some months ago, quite a serious matter for any ambitious mother. But Lord Seton Rayne, younger son of the Marquess of Sheen, must by now have had every heiress in London hurled at him, despite his reputation, and still he had not made a permanent choice.
The look Letitia caught, the one that made her turn hastily away, seemed to have read her like a book. His slow blink returned to her, telling her in words as clear as the town crier that she might disapprove all she liked, but she had nothing to fear, that unmarried females who ran seminaries were of no interest to him except as objects of amusement, however well connected they might be.
But if Letitia hoped to avoid an introduction, it was not to be. ‘Come,’ said Garnet, gently urging her forward. ‘Will you not allow me to present Lord Rayne to you before we leave? My lord, you said how you longed to meet our elder sister. Well, here she is.’
He bowed from the saddle, touching the brim of his grey beaver with the silver knob of his whip, his dark eyes taking in her tall figure as if—she thought—he was about to make a bid at Tattersalls for a good general-purpose sort of hack. ‘Miss Boyce,’ he said, ‘I am pleased to meet you at last. I had begun to suspect that you were a figment of your sisters’ imaginations.’
‘I can well believe it, my lord,’ she replied, unsmiling. ‘I suppose you must meet so few women of independence, these days.’ Making it clear that this briefest of exchanges was at an end, she turned away to place a kiss upon her sisters’ cheeks, to shoo them into the carriage and to watch them move off, waving merrily.
Responding to a signal from his rider, the bay gelding took his place on the far side of the carriage and pranced away, swishing his tail as if to cock a snook at the lone figure on the pavement who could not quite understand why she felt so buffle-headed and gauche. Had she been unnecessarily defensive? Had she taken his greeting the wrong way? Would he have noticed? Did it matter if he had?
She walked back into the shadowy hall, studied the nearest brass doorknob, then turned it and entered the room, relieved to be back in her natural element. Seven heads lifted, sure that Miss Boyce would find something complimentary to say about their drawings of daffodils.
It was not that she begrudged her sisters a single moment of fun with the pick of London’s available bachelors, never having enjoyed being caught up in the social whirl of balls, routs and drawing-rooms, house-parties and assemblies. Her twin sisters did, and popular they were, too. Well mannered, well dressed and gregarious, they graced every event with their petite charm and blonde curling hair, not least because there were two of them. Good value by any hostess’s standards. By their demanding mother’s standards they were worth their weight in gold and a liability, for she could not conceive how one could be married without the other, and where did one find two equally wealthy titled bachelors, these days? The twins were just as sceptical.
The problem of mates for her eldest daughter had rarely occupied Lady Boyce’s sleepless nights as it did with the twins, for Letitia might as well have been a boy for all the interest she showed in finding a husband. For her, the schoolroom had never been a place to escape from, her father’s vast library had been a favourite haunt, and a visit to a museum, a lecture on the structure of the ode, or a discussion on Greek vases and their classification was more in her line than an obligation to dine with her mother’s gossipy guests in their gracious Mayfair home. She did, of course, do her duty in this respect, but most of her friends were artists, poets, politicians and writers.
Her late father had understood his daughter perfectly—her socialite mother did not. After her father’s sudden death in the hunting field, Letitia had made her bid for complete freedom away from her mother’s dominance. Her father would have approved, though it was her mother’s elder brother, Uncle Aspinall, who had helped her to purchase Number 24 Paradise Road in Richmond, in the county of Surrey. He had also been the only one of her relatives, apart from her sisters, to approve of her plan to open a seminary there.
‘A seminary?’ Lady Boyce had said, as if her daughter had blasphemed. ‘How do you ever expect to attract a husband, Letitia, if you’re stuck in a seminary with young gels all day? Really, how can you be so vexatious?’
‘I shall not be stuck in it all day, Mama,’ she had said. ‘It’s not going to be that kind of seminary. And they won’t be much younger than seventeen, just on the eve of their coming-out. There’s so much they ought to know at that age,’ she added, remembering the deficiencies of Mrs Wood’s Seminary for the Daughters of Gentlemen. ‘If Papa had not talked to me about interesting things, I would have been as tongue-tied as most of the other girls at Mrs Wood’s.’
‘And tongue-tied is one thing no one could ever accuse you of being,’ her mother retorted, not intending the compliment. ‘But I wish you would consider my feelings for once, Letitia. How I’m going to explain this to my friends I really don’t know. They may look on eccentricity in the older generation as something to be expected, but no one expects it from a twenty-four-year-old who ought to be turning her mind to raising a family. It’s most embarrassing.’
‘It was never my wish to be an embarrassment, Mama, and I have nothing against men, or marriage, or families, either. But I have never been able to understand why educating one’s mind is acceptable in a man, but frowned on in a woman. Papa never thought women’s brains were inferior to men’s, did he? It was he who taught me to read.’
‘Your Papa, God rest his soul, had radical views about most things, Letitia, but when he left you a sizeable legacy to do with as you pleased, I doubt if he ever thought it would please you to run completely wild, buy your own house and make an utter cake of yourself.’
‘Uncle Aspinall doesn’t think so, Mama. And thank heaven for it. Without his help I don’t think I could have managed half so well.’
This comparison did nothing to mollify Lady Boyce. ‘Aspinall,’ she snapped, ‘has no children of his own, which is why he knows so little about what parents want. I hardly expected he would side with me on this matter, and I was right as usual, but if he likes the idea of having a blue-stocking for a niece, there’s little I can do about it. Indeed I suspected you were inclined that way when you tried to conceal a Latin dictionary in your reticule when we went to Lady Aldyth’s rout party. Was there ever such a trial to a devoted mother?’ Lady Boyce’s imposing figure described a convincing swoon that would have done justice to Mrs Siddons, landing gracefully on a striped brocade settee with lion’s paws feet.
It was from both parents that Letitia had inherited the height that had not afflicted her sisters to the same extent. For a woman, she was taller than average, which had never done much to help when she was obliged to look down upon so many of her dancing partners. Sitting down with men to talk was more comfortable for both parties, Letitia being blessed with a serene loveliness that, combined with an ability to talk interestingly and without affectation on any number of current affairs, captivated the more liberal-minded men of her acquaintance. Whether it helped for her to have fine ash-blonde hair that strayed in wisps over her face and neck resisting all efforts to contain it, or to have large eyes the colour of thunderclouds rimmed by unusually dark lashes, or to have a figure
