good deal more jawing than you like,” Longmore said. “How well I understand.” He gave her a wry smile, and bowed.
He was a man who could fill a doorway, and seemed to take over a room. He was disheveled, and disreputable besides, but he bowed with the easy grace of a dandy.
It was annoying of him to be so completely and gracefully at ease in that big brawler’s body of his. It was really annoying of him to ooze virility.
Sophy was a Noirot, a breed keenly tuned to animal excitement—and not possessing much in the way of moral principles.
If he ever found out how weak she was in this regard, she was doomed.
She sketched a curtsey and took her sister’s arm. “Yes, well, we’d better not dawdle, in any event. I promised Leonie I wouldn’t stay above half an hour.”
She hurried her sister out of the room.
Longmore watched them go. Actually, he watched Sophy go, a fetching bundle of energy and guile.
“The shop,” he said when they were out of earshot. “Meaning no disrespect to your duchess, but—are they insane?”
“That depends on one’s point of view,” Clevedon said.
“Apparently, I’m not unbalanced enough in the upper storey to understand it,” Longmore said. “They might close it and live here. It isn’t as though you’re short of room. Or money. Why should they want to go on bowing and scraping to women?”
“Passion,” Clevedon said. “Their work is their passion.”
Longmore wasn’t sure what, exactly, passion was. He was reasonably certain he’d never experienced it.
He hadn’t even had an infatuation since he was eighteen.
Since Clevedon, his nearest friend, would know this, Longmore said nothing. He only shook his head, and moved to the sideboard. He heaped his plate with eggs, great slabs of bacon and bread, and a thick glob of butter to make it all slide down smoothly. He carried it to the table and began to eat.
He’d always regarded Clevedon’s home as his own, and had been told he was to continue regarding it in the same way. The duchess seemed to like him well enough. Her blonde sister, on the other hand would just as soon shoot him, he knew—which made her much more interesting and entertaining.
That was why he’d waited and watched for her. That was why he’d followed her from Maison Noirot to Charing Cross. He’d spotted the newspaper in her hand, and deduced what it was.
By some feat of printing legerdemain—a pact with the devil, most likely—Foxe’s Morning Spectacle usually slunk onto the streets of London and into the newspaper sellers’ grubby hands not only well in advance of its competitors, but containing fresher scandal. Though many of the beau monde’s entertainments didn’t start until eleven at night or end before dawn, Foxe contrived to stuff the pages of his titillating rag with details of what everyone had done mere hours earlier.
This was no small achievement, even bearing in mind that “morning,” especially among the upper classes, was a flexible unit of time, extending well beyond noonday.
Curious about what was taking her to Clevedon House at this early hour, he’d bought a copy from the urchin hawking it on the next corner, and had dawdled for a time to look it over. By now familiar with Sophy’s writing, Longmore knew it wasn’t the sort of thing to take on an empty stomach. He’d persevered nonetheless. Though he couldn’t see how she could have had a hand in the Sheridan scandal, that was nothing new. She did a great deal he found intriguing—starting with the way she walked: She carried herself like a lady, like the women of his class, yet the sway of her hips promised something tantalizingly unladylike.
“I married Marcelline knowing she’d never give up her work,” Clevedon was saying. “If she did, she’d be like everyone else. She wouldn’t be the woman I fell in love with.”
“Love,” Longmore said. “Bad idea.”
Clevedon smiled. “One day Love will come along and knock you on your arse,” he said. “And I’ll laugh myself sick, watching.”
“Love will have its work cut out for it,” Longmore said. “I’m not like you. I’m not sensitive. If Love wants to take hold of me, not only will it have to knock me on my arse, it’ll have to tie me down and beat to a pulp what some optimistically call my brains.”
“Very possibly,” Clevedon said. “Which will make it all the more amusing.”
“You’ll have a wait,” Longmore said. “For the moment, Clara’s love life is the problem.”
“I daresay matters at home haven’t been pleasant for either of you, since the wedding,” Clevedon said.
Clevedon would know better than most. Lord Warford had been his guardian. Clevedon and Longmore had grown up together. They were more like brothers than friends. And Clevedon had doted on Clara since she was a small child. It had always been assumed they’d marry. Then the duke had met his dressmaker—and Clara had reacted with “Good riddance”—much to the shock of her parents, brothers, and sisters—not to mention the entire beau monde.
“My father has resigned himself,” Longmore said. “My mother hasn’t.”
A profound understatement, that.
His mother was beside herself. The slightest reference to the duke or his new wife set her screaming. She quarreled with Clara incessantly. She was driving Clara to distraction, and they constantly dragged Longmore into it. Every day or so a message arrived from his sister, begging him to come and Do Something.
Longmore and Clara had both attended Clevedon’s wedding—in effect, giving their blessing to the union. This fact, which had been promptly reported in the Spectacle, had turned Warford House into a battlefield.
“I could well understand Clara rejecting me,” Clevedon said.
“Don’t see how you could fail to understand,” Longmore said. “She explained it in detail, in ringing tones, in front of half the ton.”
“What I don’t understand is why she doesn’t send Adderley about his business,” Clevedon said.
“Tall, fair, poetic-looking,” Longmore said. “He knows what to say to women. Men see him for what he is. Women don’t.”
“I’ve no idea what’s in Clara’s mind,” Clevedon said. “My wife and her sisters will want to get to the bottom of it, though. It’s their business to understand their clients, and Clara’s special. She’s their best customer, and she shows Marcelline’s designs to stunning advantage. They won’t want her to marry a man with pockets to let.”
“Are they in the matchmaking line as well, then?” Longmore said. “If so, I wish they’d find her someone suitable, and spare me these dreary nights at Almack’s.”
“Leave it to Sophy,” Clevedon said. “She’s the one who goes to the parties. She’ll see what’s going on, better than anybody.”
“Including a great deal that people would rather she didn’t see,” Longmore said.
