“It spread before we even knew of it,” Rafe said. “If Josie had laughed in the face of curiosity, or carried herself with dignity, it would have faded into nothing. But…”
“They’ve turned on her.” Mayne had seen this sort of thing happen before.
“She’s invited everywhere. But she isn’t asked to dance, and she has no suitors of her own age. I have no doubt but that there are many men who would like to have greater acquaintance with her—as you say, she is beautiful and funny—but they are not braving the eyes of the ton.”
“Fools,” Mayne said.
“I need you to help while we’re gone.”
“This isn’t as simple as when you asked me to accompany Imogen to Scotland. What the hell can I do for Josie?” His voice was rough because he was angry. The very thought of anyone insulting Josie, with her shining eyes and funny, cynical little remarks made him so enraged that he felt breathless.
“Be her friend,” Rafe said simply. “Her sisters have not allowed her to go anywhere alone. Tess and Felton have been going to Almack’s every week. Annabel will attend our wedding ball, though her babe is hardly four months old. Her husband told me he would like to return to Scotland, but just that Annabel flatly refuses to leave until the season has drawn to a close.”
“Next year will be different,” Mayne said slowly, remembering the many seasons he’d drifted in and out of balls. “The pariah of one year can be the belle of the next. Why the hell didn’t I know about this?”
“You’ve been with your lovely Sylvie.”
“Sylvie can help Josie. She has a French air of disdain that Josie can copy.”
“Do you think that her sisters haven’t tried to teach her to look confident? Why, Imogen drilled her in holding her chin up and not looking miserable until I felt as if Josie were being kitted out for the Royal Fusiliers. But it’s not working.”
“These things never last more than one season. Remember how everyone made fun of the Wooly Breeder one year? That was Darlington as well. As if the poor girl was to blame for her father making so much money sheep-farming. The following season she came back as if nothing had happened, and people were tired of the game. She married respectably.”
Rafe sighed. “I tell you, Mayne, I bloody well can’t wait until this season is over. I’ve never seen a girl so miserable. It’s enough to make you rethink the whole idea of having daughters.”
“Wards are bad enough, are they?” Mayne said with a grin.
The door opened, and Lucius Felton walked in, followed by Rafe’s brother Gabriel. “Forgive us for interrupting,” Lucius said with his usual imperturbable gravity, “but Brinkley asked us to make our own way to you.”
“You’re just in time,” Mayne said. “I’m about to lecture Rafe on the trials and tribulations of the wedding night. It’s been so long since the man was bedded, I’m afraid he’s forgotten the process.”
Lucien smiled and seated himself. “Somehow I doubt that.”
“As do I,” said Gabe with an uncharacteristic chuckle.
And Mayne, looking at Rafe and seeing the smile in his eyes, came to the same conclusion.
Not everyone in St. Paul’s Cathedral felt the same mixture of anticipation and wild affection that the Duke of Holbrook’s wedding inspired in Mayne. Josie, for one, felt nothing other than abject misery. But since that was becoming a way of life for her, and she was well aware how utterly despicable it would be for her to diminish her sister Imogen’s pleasure, she pasted a smile on her face.
It was a smile she was getting very good at. She’d practiced it in the glass at home. She curled the corners of her mouth up until her lower lip pouted out a little bit. Her mouth was probably her best feature, although she had no doubt but that anyone who saw her smiling would think of nothing but her round cheeks.Imogen, of course, looked absolutely exquisite. Of the four sisters, Imogen looked most like her, in a cursory kind of way. They both had dark hair, and the same arching eyebrows. Meant for laughing, her sister Tess had told her years ago. But Imogen’s face was slender and heart-shaped, whereas her own was pie-shaped and round. Pie-shaped.
Josie wrenched her mind away. Tess said she should think about her best features, but to be honest, she was sick of thinking about whether she had good skin or not, when the only thing she really wanted was to see a few bones sticking out under that skin. Imogen was looking up at Rafe in a way that made her even sicker. With jealousy.
At least she was woman enough to admit it. Tess squeezed her hand and Josie glanced at her eldest sister. Her eyes were filled with tears. “Isn’t it wonderful?” Tess whispered. “Imogen looks so happy, finally.”
Josie felt a bolt of guilt. Of course, she wanted Imogen to be happy. Poor Imogen had had a horrible few years, what with eloping and then losing her young husband within a few weeks. Josie tipped the edges of her smile even higher. “Of course,” she whispered back. Tess’s husband Lucius was looking down at Tess with precisely the same adoration with which Rafe looked at Imogen.
She didn’t even want to look to her right, because the Earl of Ardmore always had that look in his eyes when he looked at Annabel, even when Annabel grew round as a lighthouse. That had made Josie like Ardmore even more than she had before: he seemed just as in love with Annabel as he ever was, even though Annabel’s little son was only a few months old and she hadn’t lost all the weight.
Too bad most men weren’t like him.
But that was veering into a dangerous thought, the kind that led to tears, so Josie looked back at the altar. The bishop was taking an unaccountably long time with his sermon, blathering on about love and forgiveness and such-like topics. The importance of marriage as an institution within which a man and woman loved and respected each other.
For goodness’ sake, Imogen and Rafe had already chosen each other. They didn’t need the lecture. But the bishop wandered on to the importance of marriage as an institution that cherished harmony in the family and the home.
I would marry anyone, Josie thought desperately. The thought of the little book she’d carefully created over the past two years, a list of all the ways by which heroines in novels made their admirers ask for their hands in marriage, sickened her now. The reality was so much worse than she’d pictured. She had no admirers.
She never thought that a man would have to undergo ridicule if he even danced with her. It wasn’t that she was left at the side of the room. Her eldest sister, Tess, if not Griselda and Imogen, would never allow it. She no sooner was returned to her chaperone than a friend of one of her brothers-in-law would bow before her. But she saw through them. They were dancing with her as a favor, and although she quite liked some of them, they were old. They were funny, and complimentary, and one of them—Baron Sibble—even seemed to like her for herself. He asked her for two dances at every single event, and even Tess could not have demanded such devoted service.
“Young men are fools,” Lucius Felton had told her on the way home from her first ball, when not a single man her age asked her to dance. “I was a fool as a youth.”
“Like this?” she had asked, sobbing so hard that she could hardly speak.
There was a moment’s silence. “Never like that consciously,” he said finally. “But Josie, young men are like sheep. They follow each other’s lead. There were quite likely young men in the room tonight who would have asked you to dance, but they can’t quite brave the ridicule.”