"No, I believe she is quite new," Mrs. Fulgens said. "Everyone is saying that Holbrook discovered her, whatever that means." She said it with the clear hope that the discovery did not involve intimacy; Mrs. Fulgens was having a difficult time launching her only daughter into matrimony, and she was holding out hope for the newly sober duke. But if that duke was exhibiting his mistress to the ton in his family theater… well, even a desperate mother would reject him as a potential son-in-law.
"Is that Lord Pool over there?" Lady Blechschmidt said. "My goodness, his hair seems to have quite changed color: from gray to black. It must be from grief at his wife's passing."
"I heard he was acting like an old fool, but I can't see him," Mrs. Fulgens said, squinting. "Lady Godwin is in the way. Could she really be carrying another child?"
"It seems so," Lady Blechschmidt said with the severity of someone who was rather more pleased than not when no children graced her marriage. Just look at how much difficulty Mrs. Fulgens was having with Daisy. Of course, the girl's spots made the whole business of marriage thorny.
"They are remarkably devoted," Mrs. Fulgens said, watching Lord Godwin help his wife to her seat with the possessive air of a man whose wife has grown more dear to him with each day.
Lady Blechschmidt counted it as a sad failing in herself that she found Lord Godwin far more interesting when he had Russian dancers prancing on his dining room table. Happy marriages were so rare in the ton that one would think they should be fascinating, and yet they were remarkably tiresome to watch.
Just then there was a peal from a trumpet played by a footman.
"Finally!" Lady Blechschmidt said. "I must say that I am all agog to see dear Lady Griselda in costume. I would never do such a thing myself; so lowering to one's dignity."
The curtain rose and there was a collective sigh at the sight of the Duke of Holbrook, dressed like a Restoration rake and sprawled at the dressing table.
Daisy, on the other side of Mrs. Fulgens, pinched her mother rather sharply, which Mrs. Fulgens rightly took to mean that Daisy wholeheartedly agreed with the idea of marrying the duke.
A thrum of excitement careened through the room. For onto the stage strolled a man who must be the duke's illegitimate brother—the man who had been one of the foremost subjects of conversation amongst the ton for the past months. There was no mistaking the resemblance between the brothers: they had the same shadowed eyes and the same cheekbones.
"His brother is the very image of him," Lady Blech-schmidt said with some delight. "Shocking, isn't it?"
"He actually looks like a professor, doesn't he? It's a pity he's ineligible."
A gentleman in front of them turned about and raised a sardonic eyebrow.
"Who's that?" Lady Blechschmidt said loudly.
"Lord Kerr. He's a shareholder in the Hyde Park Theater," Mrs. Fulgens murmured. "Cruikshank did a wicked drawing of those gypsy eyes. Hatchard's had it in their window for a month."
They watched the play in silence for some time. Lady Blechschmidt was rather appalled by the loose principles being demonstrated by all the characters. Really, Griselda was showing an altogether different side of her character in accepting the role of a would-be mistress to Dorimant.
"The duke is quite good, isn't he?" Mrs. Fulgens whispered, after a time.
The duke wasn't nearly as good as Miss Loretta Hawes. They could both see that, and presumably Lord
Kerr felt the same, because he leaned forward each time the girl came on the stage.
Finally, Mrs. Fulgens had to ask. "Do you think she is the duke's chere amie?"
Lady Blechschmidt had been watching the foibles of men and women for longer than she cared to admit, and she saw nothing loverlike in Dorimant's brisk exchanges with Mrs. Loveit. In fact, the duke cast off Mrs. Loveit with a thoroughly convincing lack of interest. "Absolutely not," she told Mrs. Fulgens.
That worthy matron lapsed into her chair and ceased to pay any attention to the play, lost in a happy dream in which her daughter, Daisy the Duchess, figured prominently.
But Lady Blechschmidt was caught up in the play, frivolous though the characters were. It was Dorimant's exchanges with Harriet, the country girl, that made her eyes narrow. In fact, she was so struck by them that by Act Four, she called Mrs. Fulgens's attention back to the stage.
Mrs. Fulgens watched the duke flirting with Imogen Maitland for five minutes and then discarded her dreams for Daisy.
Chapter 34
Temptation Takes Many, and Varied, Forms
The evening after the play, Rafe leaned against the orchard wall with a pleasurable sense of exhilaration. He was thinking of the carriage. Perhaps they wouldn't even make it as far as Silchester. Then he heard the whisper of skirts coming through the fallen leaves. He straightened and wondered, just for a second, whether he would always greet Imogen with this blistering sense of anticipation.
But it wasn't Imogen; it was unmistakably Josie coming down the path. He drew farther back into the shadow of the old apple tree. It still flummoxed him that Imogen hadn't recognized him, even with the mustache, but Josie was sharp as a tack.
She stopped before him. "I'm to tell you that my sister is not coming," she said without preamble. "She's very grateful for the adventure, sir, and thanks you for your company." She held out a note.
Rafe took it, feeling a creeping unease. "Is she feeling well?"
"Of course. She does not wish to go to Silchester. I believe she explained everything in her note."
Rafe shut his mouth. He could hardly ask Josie for the reasoning. A girl as young as Josie should have nothing to do with the "adventures" of a young widow. So he bowed, and watched Josie trot back up the path to Hol-brook Court.
It was times like these that a brandy-soaked evening sounded appealing. Instead, he read Imogen's brief note (which said nothing), made his way back to his own bedchamber, and waited until the middle of the night, for the hours when the dark is as thick as velvet, and dawn seems an impossibility. Even the birds had stopped twittering, when he finally walked, mustache-clad, down the corridor.
Imogen slept on her stomach. He put his candle down on the bedside table and looked for a moment at her cheekbones. Her face looked different when her eyes were closed: as if it belonged to a more docile woman. He sat down next to her, and the bed tilted a bit, just enough so that she opened her eyes blearily.
"Hello there," he said.
"It's you," she replied, rather ungraciously. Then she rolled over and yawned.
Rafe watched her nightrail catch against her breasts and beat down a fiery impulse to drop on her like a stone from a great height.
"Why didn't you wish to go to Silchester?" he asked, his voice taking on Gabe's cadence as if it was his own. "I read your note, but it was hardly informative."
She leaned forward and patted him on the arm, for all the world as if he were a pensioner who'd asked for bread. "I am so grateful to you for your companionship, which I tremendously enjoyed, but I have decided to live a more celibate existence."
Rafe leaned forward to kiss her. She put a hand out to stop him, but he brushed his lips across hers. "Come, Imogen," he said. "You're too passionate to live a celibate existence. You can hardly join a convent. You are a widow, and there's nothing to stop you having a dalliance."