A Summer to Remember

Chapter 4

Sutton?” Lord Farrington said. “Yes, I know him well enough, Ravensberg. We were up at Oxford at the same time. Cut up a few larks together. That was before he inherited the title and became head of the family and pillar of the community and intolerably stuffy.”

“You are going to invite him to join a party of friends in your box at the theater next week,” Kit told him. “With his betrothed, of course.”

“Am I?” Lord Farrington replied. They were on horseback, cantering along Rotten Row rather earlier in the morning than usual. It was still almost deserted. “Am I permitted to ask why?”

“Because Lady Wilma Fawcitt is Miss Edgeworth’s cousin,” Kit reminded him. “Or stepcousin, to be precise. You are also going to invite her.”

“Miss Edgeworth? Ah.” His friend’s voice was full of sudden comprehension. “And I suppose I am going to invite you too, Ravensberg. Or have you already invited yourself? And why, pray, should I help you win your wager when I stand to lose a hundred guineas?”

“Because you will be unable to resist your curiosity to watch the progress of my courtship,” Kit said with a laugh. “And my chances are looking woefully slim, you will be delighted to know. I heaped gallantries upon her the day after the Mannering ball, when I drove her in the park, and instead of blushing and simpering, she did that icicle thing I was warned about and accused me of mocking her. I felt distinctly as if I were perched on top of the North Pole with no way down and no way home.”

“You failed to charm her?” Lord Farrington threw back his head and laughed. “Are you losing your touch, Ravensberg?”

“In the week and a half since then,” Kit continued, “I have looked in at a whole dreary array of balls and soirees and even a concert or two and have caught nary a glimpse of her. It is time to take a more active hand in my own fate. We have to entice her to the theater.”

“We?” Lord Farrington turned his horse at the Queen’s Gate end of the Row and headed back up it.

“And I think you should invite another couple or two as well,” Kit said. “We must not appear too obvious, after all. Eminently respectable couples, I need scarcely add.”

“Of course. And I am to forget to mention in the invitations that the infamous Lord Ravensberg is to be one of the party, I suppose?” his friend asked.

“No, no,” Kit protested. “I would not win by foul means. She will be determined not to come when she knows I am to be there. Sutton and his betrothed, when they know it, will exert all their considerable influence to dissuade her from accepting. So will Anburey and his lady. And Attingsborough. Probably Portfrey and the duchess too, though I am not at all sure that I don’t have an ally in that particular lady—she has a twinkling eye. Anyway, I count upon the discouraging chorus about Miss Edgeworth being loud enough to persuade her to come just to spite them all.”

“Tut, tut. You may as well pay your debts now and resign yourself to your father’s choice of a bride.” Lord Farrington shook his head before prodding his horse to a gallop and leaving his unwary friend in his dust for a moment.

But winning his wager had become an appealing as well as a necessary challenge, Kit realized before going in pursuit. She was prim and proper and apparently without even a glimmering of a sense of humor. At the same time she was hauntingly beautiful, and she was not immune to a challenge. Certainly she did not allow her relatives to rule her. And she had shown some intelligence as well as spirit in spurning his deliberately blatant flatteries in the park. What would such a lady be like in bed? he wondered suddenly. It was an intriguing thought.

He needed to see her again. For the sake of his wager. For his chance to go to Alvesley on his own terms. And for the personal challenge of somehow penetrating that cool, ladylike faзade—if there was anything beyond the faзade to penetrate to, that was. There might well not be.

The roses had wilted after a few days. But one bud was still pressed between several heavy volumes a footman had carried up to Lauren’s sitting room from the library below. It was too perfect to be allowed to die and be forgotten, she had told herself.

She had refused all further invitations to ton events after the Mannering ball and the drive in the park. She had gone shopping and walking for exercise. She had read several books from both the duke’s collection and Hookham’s subscription library. She had worked diligently at her embroidery and at her tatting. She had written almost daily letters to Gwendoline and Aunt Clara, Gwen’s mother. She had even written one to Lily and had the duke enclose it with his daily missive—Lily was his daughter. If there was a certain boredom in her days, a certain restlessness—well, that was a lady’s lot in life.

But on this particular evening she was riding in the Earl of Sutton’s town carriage with the earl and Wilma. They were on their way to the theater at the invitation of Lord Farrington to watch a performance of Shakespeare’s King Lear. Viscount Ravensberg was to be a member of the party.

“You must sit between Sutton and me when we arrive, Lauren,” Wilma instructed, not for the first time, as the carriage drew up behind a couple of others close to the theater doors.

Wilma had been vociferous in her determination not to accept her invitation, and she had had a firm ally in her betrothed. But a couple of weeks ago Lauren had discovered a hitherto unsuspected side to herself—a stubborn disinclination to have her activities ordered for her by others, however well meaning. All her life she had behaved the way she believed a lady ought to behave. And look where it had got her. She had informed Wilma that she was accepting her own invitation even though she had never met Lord Farrington. She was still not sure what she would have done if Wilma had not considered it her duty to accompany her with Lord Sutton.

The carriage inched forward and a doorman opened the door and let down the steps. A gentleman stepped forward from the throng about the theater doors and reached up a helping hand.

“Miss Edgeworth?” Viscount Ravensberg said. “Allow me.”

He looked incredibly dashing and handsome in his swinging black opera cloak and silk hat. Lauren set a hand in his even as Wilma and Lord Sutton murmured ineffectual protests.

“Thank you, my lord.” She stepped down to the pavement.

“A violet cloak,” he said, “with a matching gown beneath. But the shade is paler than your eyes this time—and less lustrous. I have missed you. I have looked for you everywhere and not seen you. I had to descend to this stratagem.” He led her through the crowded foyer of the theater toward the staircase up to the boxes.

“Why?” she asked.

He countered with another question. “Why did you accept?”

“Perhaps,” she said, “because I admire the work of Mr. Shakespeare.”

He chuckled.

“Lauren,” Wilma called from behind them, “do remember to sit between Sutton and me. I need you to tell me what is happening on stage. I am such a dunce. I never did understand all that archaic language.”

“There,” Lord Ravensberg murmured. “Your excuse to escape my lascivious clutches has just been presented to you, Miss Edgeworth. If you sit beside me, as you are invited to do, you may find me whispering naughty nothings into your ear all evening and touching you in places I ought not to touch you under cover of the darkness.”

His words were shockingly outrageous. They were meant to be, she realized, just as his lavish praise of her beauty had been meant to provoke rather than deceive her that day in the park. She would not show her indignation. She would merely be playing into his hands and affording him amusement, she suspected. Though why it should amuse a man like him to goad someone like her she did not at all understand.

“If I had wished to escape your clutches, my lord,” she told him, “I would have remained at home.”

“Provocative words indeed,” he murmured before stopping outside one of the boxes and opening the door.

A couple of minutes later, having been introduced to Lord Farrington, Miss Janet Merklinger, and Mr. and Mrs. Merklinger, the young lady’s parents, Lauren seated herself on a velvet-covered chair at the front of the box even though Wilma, still in conversation with Mrs. Merklinger, tried to snatch at her arm to detain her.

Viscount Ravensberg took the seat beside her.

Despite all her good intentions Lauren felt a prickle of awareness along the arm closest to him and a stirring of anticipation that felt very like excitement. If he should be forward or impertinent or otherwise outrageous, she would deal him a sharp setdown. She almost looked forward to pitting her wits against his.

Life was usually so very dull and predictable.

She sat, as he expected, without touching the back of her chair with any part of her spine. But it would be inaccurate to describe her posture as ramrod straight. There was an elegant arch to her back. Indeed, there was grace in every line of her body. A disciplined grace, that was. And perhaps an unconscious one. Certainly she watched the play with all her attention, her hands motionless in her lap, her closed fan clasped in one of them.

Kit watched her.

Did she realize that he did so? Had she noticed the considerable stir of interest their entry into Farrington’s box had aroused in the pit and the other boxes? Numerous quizzing glasses and lorgnettes had swung their way, and heads had moved together in that way people have when exchanging gossip. There had been a flurry of talk, of course, when he had driven her in Hyde Park the day after dancing with her at the Mannering ball—particularly, according to Rush, over the fact that he had borne her off along one of the shadier paths instead of completing the social circuit with her. But two weeks had passed since that occasion with nothing to fan the flames of speculation.

She seemed oblivious to the interest she had aroused. She turned her attention away from the stage only when the first act ended.

“I had forgotten,” she said, “what it is like to watch a live performance of a play. One forgets one’s very existence, does one not?”

“I have not been watching the play,” he confessed, deliberately lowering his voice.

Her lips compressed in an almost imperceptible expression of annoyance, and she opened the fan in her lap. Clearly she understood his meaning. Equally clearly she still did not approve of his form of light flirtation. He did not approve of it himself. He was capable of far more effective subtleties. But he found it amusing to discover how far he could push her before she lost her cool control over her temper—and to discover too what would happen if ever he could push her so far. Was there anything interesting behind the cool faзade?

Everyone else in the box had risen. Farrington was bearing Miss Merklinger off in pursuit of a glass of lemonade. Her parents, very correctly, were following closely behind.

“Lauren.” Lady Wilma Fawcitt touched her cousin on the shoulder. “Sutton has offered to escort us across to Lord Bridges’s box to pay our respects to dear Angela. Do come along.” She smiled graciously at Kit. “Goodness, you will feel quite abandoned, Lord Ravensberg. But we will be back for the second act.”

Lady Bridges was Sutton’s sister, Kit recalled. He got to his feet. Miss Edgeworth did not. She fanned her face slowly and set one slim arm along the velvet rest at the edge of the box.

“I believe I will remain here, Wilma,” she said. “Do please convey my respects to Lady Bridges.”

Interesting!

Sutton and his betrothed had little choice then but to proceed with their visit to the Bridges’s box, which was at quite the opposite side of the theater. Miss Edgeworth looked down into the pit and continued to fan her cheeks as Kit resumed his seat.

“You were a reconnaissance officer in the Peninsula, Lord Ravensberg,” she said without turning her head to look at him. “A spy.”

She had been learning things about him, then? “I prefer the first appellation,” he said. “The word spy conjures up images of cloaks and daggers and hair-raising exploits of reckless derring-do.”

She turned to look at him then. “I would have expected such a life to appeal to you,” she said. “Was it not like that?”

He thought of the long, solitary journeys, sometimes on horseback, more often than not on foot, over hostile terrain no matter what the season. He thought of the endless wild-goose chases, of dodging French scouting parties; of making painstaking contact with partisan groups in both Portugal and Spain; of having to deal patiently and tactfully with petty dictators and wild hotheads and cruel, fanatical nationalists; of the unspeakable atrocities that happened far from the battle lines—the torture, the rapine, the executions. Of the weariness of body and spirit and the constant drain on the emotions. Of his brother . . .

“It was far more mundane and dreary, I’m afraid,” he told her with a laugh.

“And yet,” she said, “you were singled out for commendation in several dispatches. You saved your country on numerous occasions. You are a military hero.”

“My country?” He considered. “I doubt it. Sometimes as a military man one wonders exactly what it is one fights for.”

“Surely,” she said, “one fights for what is right. One fights on the side of goodness against the forces of evil.”

If that were so, why was insomnia such a problem for him? And the frequent nightmares when he did sleep?

“Do you believe, then,” he asked her, “that every Frenchman—and every Frenchwoman—is evil, that every Briton and Russian and Prussian and Spaniard is good?”

“Of course not,” she said. “But Napolйon Bonaparte is evil. Anyone who fights for him is evil by association.”

“I suppose,” he said, “France is full of mothers with sons slain in battle who believe the British soldier to be evil incarnate.”

She opened her mouth to speak but closed it again.

“It is war that is evil,” she said at last. “But then wars are provoked and fought by men. Did you acquire the scar beneath your jaw in battle?”

It ran from the hinge of his jaw on the left side to the point of his chin. “At Talavera,” he said. “I did not complain too loudly about it even at the time. Two inches lower and I would have been playing a harp for the rest of eternity.” He grinned at her and ran one knuckle lightly down the arm that held her fan, from the edge of her short, puffed sleeve to the top of her glove. Her skin was silky and warm.

All around them was a loud hum of conversation as members of the audience visited one another and shared impressions of the play and other gossip. And yet suddenly the two of them seemed very alone. He felt a totally unexpected stirring of sexual desire for this woman who did nothing whatsoever to arouse it. She possessed beauty in abundance but no overt femininity. He had not even seen a genuine smile on her face. Yet his body wanted hers.

She drew her arm away from him. “I have given you no permission to touch me, my lord,” she said. “In fact, I have given you no encouragement at all. Why did you arrange this . . . stratagem tonight?”

“I was tired of attending every interminable social event of the Season,” he said. “I have been becoming alarmingly respectable. How dull for the ton to have had no outrageous exploit of mine with which to titillate its conversations during the past week or so. I have been compelled to take action.”

“If I had smiled and fawned over you at Lady Mannering’s ball,” she said, “and if I had simpered and giggled during the drive in Hyde Park, you would have lost interest in me in a moment, Lord Ravensberg.”

“Good Lord, yes,” he agreed. Perceptive of her.

“I would thank you not to take the Lord’s name in vain,” she said so primly that he was momentarily enchanted. “I see that I have behaved in quite the wrong manner with you. I should have encouraged you.”

“There is always time,” he suggested, moving his chair half an inch closer to hers, “to mend your ways, Miss Edgeworth.”

“You mock me,” she said. “You laugh at me—constantly. Your eyes never stop laughing.”

“Smiling,” he said. “You do me an injustice. My eyes smile with delight because every time they behold you they see a woman so beautiful that no one after her is worth looking at—or thinking of or dreaming about.”

He was enjoying himself enormously, he realized—and wooing her in quite a different way than he had planned, with a quite blatant lack of subtlety. But there was no conventional way of wooing this woman, he suspected.

“I rest my case,” she replied, a faint blush coloring her cheeks. “There is no common ground between us, my lord, upon which any sort of meaningful relationship might be built—if that is your intent. We are as different as night and day.”

“And yet night and day meet fleetingly at twilight and dawn,” he said, lowering his voice again and narrowing his eyes and moving his head a quarter of an inch closer to hers. “And their merging sometimes affords the beholder the most enchanted moments of all the twenty-four hours. A sunrise or a sunset can be ablaze with brilliance and arouse all the passion, all the yearning, in the soul of the beholder.” He grinned wickedly at her and touched his fingertips to the back of her gloved hand.

She moved her hand sharply away and then, seeming to recollect that they were on public view, raised it gracefully in order to fan her flushed cheeks. “I know nothing of passion,” she said. “You are wasting your time with me, my lord. I am not the sort of woman on whom words like these will have any effect whatsoever.”

“The theater is certainly overwarm,” he said softly, his eyes on her fan.

She ceased her movements abruptly and turned her head to look directly into his eyes. He expected her to move back when she saw how close they were, but she stood her ground, so to speak. He could sense anger hovering behind her control, and willed it to burst forth, even in this very public setting. Especially here, perhaps. They would instantly become a spectacular ondit. But he could almost see her reining in her temper before she spoke.

“You would be well advised not to continue pursuing me after tonight,” she said. “I will not accept any future invitation that includes you, my lord. I am accustomed to moving in circles where gentlemen are unfailingly gentlemanly.”

“How intolerably dull for you,” he said.

“Perhaps,” she said, plying her fan again, “I like a dull life. Dullness is much underrated. Perhaps I am a dull person.”

“Then perhaps,” he suggested, “you should marry someone like Bartlett-Howe or Stennson. Every time they move they are lost to view within a cloud of dust.”

He thought for an intrigued moment that she was going to laugh. Then he was convinced that she was drawing breath in order to deliver the blistering setdown he had been trying his damnedest—Lord knew why!—to provoke. But dash it, the door of the box opened before she could either laugh or explode, and she turned her head away sharply to gaze down into the pit again.

Kit rose and bowed to Mrs. and Miss Merklinger, helped them resume their seats, and asked them how they had enjoyed the first act. He grinned and winked at a poker-faced Farrington, and resumed his seat beside Lauren Edgeworth only moments before Sutton and Lady Wilma returned and regaled everyone with a rйsumй of every topic of conversation they had pursued with Lady Bridges and her party.

The second act of the play rescued them all from death by boredom.