The Secret Mistress

Chapter 3

WHEN THINKING AHEAD to her removal to London, Angeline had somehow imagined that she would make her curtsy to the queen the moment she arrived in town—well, perhaps not the very moment, but certainly within a day or two—and that she would then sweep off into all the dizzying round of entertainments with which the ton filled its days and nights during the Season.

She was quite wrong, of course. For one thing, she had come to town rather early in the year, when there was a mere trickle of entertainments and half the ton were still in the country packing their trunks and bandboxes in preparation for the move to their town houses.

For another thing, a young lady needed time—and lots of it—to make endless preparations for her presentation and all the balls and parties and concerts and whatnot that would follow it.

Tresham had explained it to her in the carriage on the way to London, sounding rather bored, as if it were just too, too tedious to have a sister to bring out. And he had been sprawled across a corner of the carriage seat, one booted foot propped against the seat opposite, for all the world as though looking alert and elegant for a sister were too great a bore to be contemplated. Of course, he had looked gorgeous anyway with all his tall, dark, harsh beauty, and Angeline had gazed back at him with fond exasperation.

Brothers had positively no idea how to treat a sister.

“Cousin Rosalie will bring you up to snuff,” he had said. “She will tell you what to wear, what to do, where to go, whose acquaintance to cultivate, how deeply you must curtsy to the queen.” He had paused to yawn. “While I have to exert myself to host a come-out ball at Dudley House, which is something I have never done before and never expect to do again, and so I hope you are properly grateful. And then I must interview all your suitors, who are bound to be queued up outside my door as soon as they know you are on the market for a husband.”

He had glanced at her then, a hint of lazy affection in his eyes. But really, if one was not watching closely, one could easily miss such moments.

Cousin Rosalie was Lady Palmer, actually their second cousin on their father’s side. She had kindly agreed to sponsor Angeline’s come-out and chaperon her throughout the Season. She would be glad to do so, she had assured Tresham, since Palmer was on a lengthy diplomatic mission in Vienna and was making rumblings about her joining him there. She had no patience with either Vienna or any other foreign city and would be glad of the excuse to put him off.

Rosalie called promptly at Dudley House the morning after Angeline’s arrival there.

“Goodness, you have grown tall” was her first observation.

“Yes,” Angeline agreed meekly, waiting for a listing of all her other shortcomings.

But Rosalie only nodded briskly.

“Your modiste is going to thoroughly enjoy dressing you,” she said. “I suppose you have nothing, Angeline? You have spent all your life in the country, have you not? Your mother never brought you to town. Having nothing is fine. It is better than having stacks of garments of inferior workmanship and unfashionable design. Tresham has given us carte blanche on the amount we may spend on you, which is no less than I would expect of him.”

“I wish to choose my own designs and fabrics,” Angeline said.

“But of course,” Rosalie agreed.

“I like bright colors,” Angeline warned her.

“I can see that.” Rosalie looked at her sunshine yellow dress with the blue and green stripes about the hem. There was perhaps a suggestion of pain in her expression. “The design and even the color of your court gown will of course be dictated largely by what the queen demands of young ladies being presented to her. It will be archaic and very uncomfortable, but we will have little say in the matter. It would not do to offend Her Majesty. Your ball gowns—all of them—will have to be white, I am afraid. It is de rigueur for unmarried young ladies.”

“White?” Angeline cried in dismay. White was her least favorite color—or lack of color—especially when it was upon her person.

Rosalie held up one hand.

“All your other dresses and accessories may be as brightly colored as you wish,” she said. “You may dress in all the colors of the rainbow at once if you choose. I may advise against it, and I shall certainly express my opinion, but if you are a true Dudley, as I daresay you are, then you will pay no heed anyway.”

“I always listen to advice,” Angeline said, brightening. She was going to like her cousin, she believed. She had not set eyes upon her since she attended Rosalie’s wedding at the age of eight or thereabouts.

“This is going to be a great delight to me, Angeline,” Rosalie said. “I was ecstatic when I gave birth to Vincent. I was pleased when I had Emmett—it is always a relief to have a spare as well as an heir, and I knew Palmer had hoped for a second boy. I was somewhat disappointed when I had Colin and really rather depressed when I had Geoffrey. They are all perfect loves, of course, my boys, but I would have so liked to have a girl. But now I am to bring you out. I was really very gratified when Tresham asked me if I would.”

“I hope,” Angeline said, “I will not be a disappointment to you, Cousin Rosalie.”

“You will not,” her cousin said decisively. “And I am so glad you are not a small, soft, lisping, blond, blue-eyed creature like your m—”

She was assailed by a sudden fit of coughing.

Like your mother? Was that what she had been about to say? Surely not. Mama had not lisped. And she had been beauty itself. Perfection itself. Everything that Angeline was not, in fact.

“Oh, dear,” Rosalie said, patting her chest to stop the coughing. “It is time we had some rain. The air is dry. What was I saying? Ah, yes, that we will go out shopping tomorrow bright and early. And the day after. And the day after that. We are going to have a wonderful time, Angeline.”

And surprisingly they did. Angeline had never been shopping. She soon discovered that it was the most blissful activity in the world. At least, it was for the time being until there were even more exciting things to occupy her time.

The day for her presentation to the queen was set. And her come-out ball was to be the same evening at Dudley House. Tresham had made all the arrangements, and Ferdinand—who had been waiting at the house the day she arrived and had swept her off her feet and swung her about in two complete circles on the pavement outside the front door while she shrieked her protest and delight—had promised to see to it that she did not lack for partners all evening.

“Not that you will even without my vigilance, Angie,” he had said. “In fact, I daresay prospective partners will be queued up beyond the ballroom doors and all the way down the stairs and out the door. Tresh will have to extend the duration of the ball for three whole days to accommodate them all and you will have blisters on all ten toes and on both heels and be unable to dance again all Season. Tell me about your journey. Tedious, was it?”

The days rushed by, and Angeline acquired so many new clothes and shoes and slippers and fans and reticules and a hundred and one other items that she wondered where Betty found room to put them all.

And finally, almost before Angeline was ready for it, the great day dawned. The day of The Curtsy—she thought of it in capital letters—and the come-out ball. Ferdinand might yet prove right, or wrong, about the number of prospective partners she would have, but she was to have at least one. The widowed Countess of Heyward had spoken to Rosalie, and Rosalie had spoken to Tresham, and the Earl of Heyward, the countess’s brother-in-law, had spoken to Tresham, and it was all settled—the earl was to lead Angeline into the first set.

The very first set of her very first ton ball.

She hoped the earl was tall, dark, and handsome, or at least some acceptable mixture of the three. Tresham, annoying man, had only said when she asked that Heyward was a dry old stick, but Rosalie had said nonsense, the earl was a young man, though she did not believe she had ever actually seen him. Which meant, of course, that he might still be a dry stick, whatever that was.

Anyway, it was just a dance, albeit the most important, most anticipated one of her life.

She was up ridiculously early in the morning. At just after seven o’clock she was at the open window of her bedchamber, barefoot and still in her nightgown, her forearms resting along the sill, her bosom propped on her forearms, her back arched inward. She gazed out upon gray early morning drizzle, but rather than allow the inclement weather to dampen her spirits, she sighed with contentment.

Today—within the next few hours—her real life would begin.

She was to be presented to the queen. There was a little flutter of excitement, perhaps even of nervousness, deep in her stomach at the prospect. And then she would be free. Free to enjoy all the myriad activities of the Season while searching for the man of her dreams.

Angeline sighed again, more wistfully this time.

She had already found him once, of course. Except that she had not set eyes upon him since that day at the Rose and Crown Inn and would probably never do so again. It would be very romantic to pine for him for the rest of her life but not at all practical. She would grow old and be a spinster and an unpaid nanny to all the children Tresham would produce once he had finished sowing his wild oats and taken a wife. And eventually she would shrivel up like a dried prune and be nothing but a burden to all her nephews and nieces and great-nephews and great-nieces and on down the generations while she relived the ever-dimming memory of the one meeting she had had with the love of her life when she was nineteen.

It all sounded ridiculously pathetic. And ridiculously … well, ridiculous.

She was going to put him right out of her mind from this moment on. There, it was already done. Tonight she would meet other gentlemen—hordes of them, if Ferdinand was to be believed. Tonight she would begin to fall in love again.

But her thoughts were distracted at that moment by the sounds of a small commotion in Grosvenor Square below her window. She leaned forward on her forearms and peered downward.

Marsh, Tresham’s head groom, was standing down there holding onto the bridle of a horse that was literally champing at the bit in its eagerness to be off on its morning gallop. And Tresham, all black and long-legged in form-fitting riding clothes, was hurrying down the steps, pulling on his riding gloves as he went. He swung himself up into the saddle, and even as Angeline watched, he assumed instant command of his restless mount and rode off without further ado.

Angeline was assailed by a wave of envy bordering on jealousy.

He must be going for an early morning ride in Hyde Park. She would give anything in the world to be going with him. It was chilly and windy and ever so slightly drizzly, all weather conditions that would make almost any delicately nurtured female shudder with distaste and cling tenaciously to the indoors until the sun deigned to make an appearance.

But she was not a delicate female.

Cousin Rosalie had not said exactly when she would arrive to supervise while Betty got Angeline all decked out in her court finery, but it would probably be ten o’clock at the very earliest. That gave her almost three hours to kick her heels. Or to …

Her hair would get damp.

Not if she wore her oldest—and still her favorite—riding hat. Besides, damp hair dried quickly.

Her complexion would turn rosy.

She would look vibrantly healthy among all the wilting lilies who would also be making their come-out. It never hurt to stand out from the crowd. And the worst of the shine would have faded from her nose and cheeks before she needed to leave the house again.

Marsh would refuse to saddle a horse for her without Tresham’s consent. No, he would not. Not if she behaved as if it had all been planned yesterday, and—what? Had his grace not informed Marsh about it and instructed him to have a mount ready for her? How very odd!

No harm would be done. What could she be expected to do alone for three whole hours, after all—at least three? She would only get more nervous thinking about her curtsy and the tricky maneuver of backing out of the queen’s presence without tripping over the train of her gown. Not that the possibility had struck her until this very moment. But now that it had, it would consume her mind and her nerves for every idle moment until she was safely out of the royal presence.

What better way to distract her mind and her nerves than to go for a morning ride? She would take a groom with her. She was not so lost to all conduct that she would go tearing in pursuit of Tresham without proper chaperonage. Besides, Marsh would never allow her to set one horse’s hoof beyond the stable doors unless there was someone trustworthy with her.

Tresham would not mind if she joined him on his ride.

Well, he probably would, but he was not her father. He was only her guardian, and he had not exerted himself greatly so far to be a vigilant one—except that he had surrounded her with governesses and servants from the moment he became duke at the age of seventeen. And except that he had given vent to a minor volcanic eruption when he had discovered at that inn that the Reverend Coombes had abandoned her and that none of the four grooms or footmen from Acton had been in sight when she rushed downstairs to greet him and that Betty had still been half asleep up in her room. Now he had imposed Rosalie on her. Not that Rosalie was a great imposition.

He would not scold her today, would he? Not in public, anyway. Or in private. Not today. This was her very special day, perhaps the most special of her whole life, and he would not wish to upset her.

And if she stood here any longer holding this rather garrulous mental debate with herself, she thought, straightening up and closing the window, it would be too late to go, and now that she had conceived the idea of taking a morning ride in order to relax her nerves, she could not possibly do without it.

Well, perhaps she could. But she would not.

She strode off in the direction of her dressing room.

THIS WAS THE day, Edward thought as he woke up—and wished he could simply fall back to sleep.

There was his maiden speech to deliver in the Upper House. It had been written and rewritten and then written again. It had been practiced and repracticed and practiced again. And just last night—and every night for the last two weeks—he had been assailed by terror at the conviction that it was utter rubbish and he would be laughed out of the House and expelled from the ranks of the nobility.

He was not usually given to vivid, ridiculous imaginings.

And then tonight there was the Tresham ball and the set he was to dance with Lady Angeline Dudley. It was only a dance, he had tried to convince himself. But it was the opening set of her come-out ball, and every eye in the ballroom—virtually every eye in the ton, in other words—would be fixed upon them. His only hope, a faint one, was that most of those eyes would be directed exclusively at her. She was, after all, the most eligible young lady on the market this year and most people would be getting their first look at her.

However, he would think of the ball and that particular dance later.

He went out for an early morning ride in the park despite the inclemency of the weather—it was cloudy and chilly, and a light but persistent drizzle kept everything and everyone uncomfortably damp. If one waited for clement weather in England, though, one might find oneself riding for brief spells once or twice a fortnight if one were fortunate. Besides, he had made arrangements to meet two of his oldest and closest friends and he would not let them down, supposing that they braved the drizzle and the chill, that was.

They both did.

Edward’s stomach was feeling rather queasy, and he was tired after a night of what he might have thought had been sleepless if there were not the memory of bizarre dreams, all of which had proceeded along the same general lines. In one he had begun his speech in the House of Lords with a flourish until he had faltered at the realization that he had forgotten to put on any clothes before leaving home. In another, he had got up to speak, opened his mouth, noted the respectful attention with which all his fellow peers were regarding him, and realized that he had forgotten to bring either his notes or his memory with him.

“Damnation,” Sir George Headley said as they rode through the park together. “I counted upon the Row being deserted this morning. I need a good gallop to blow away the fumes of too much imbibing last night. It is a good thing my brother can turn twenty-one only once in his life.”

Rotten Row was indeed surprisingly crowded with riders, some of them ambling along on their mounts, others moving at a brisker canter, some few flying along at a more reckless gallop—reckless because the grass was slippery with moisture and any bare patches of earth were slick with mud.

“We might as well take a turn up and down anyway,” Ambrose Paulson said from Edward’s other side. He grinned as they rode onto the Row. “Ed is looking rather green about the gills and in dire need of air and exercise, even though you were the one doing the drinking, George. But he has a maiden speech to deliver. I wish we might hear it.”

“No, you do not,” Edward assured them both. “Doubtless everyone in the House will be snoring before I reach the second paragraph.”

“They will all thank you afterward for providing them with a good chance to rest,” George said, and all three of them chuckled.

Edward breathed in lungfuls of fresh air and ignored the discomfort of water droplets clinging to his face. He began to relax a little, and they rode in companionable silence for several minutes while he mentally rehearsed his speech yet again.

It was George who broke the silence.

“Good Lord,” he said suddenly, bringing his horse to a near halt and forcing his two friends to prance about on either side of him while they slowed their own mounts, “what the devil is that?”

That, Edward saw when he followed the direction of his friend’s gaze down the Row, was a woman. At first, though only for the merest moment, he thought she was surely a courtesan. She was cantering toward a group of young men, all sunny smiles, while a groom shadowed her a little distance behind. What other sort of lady would be out alone at this hour and in weather like this, after all?

The answer to his unspoken question came to him during that merest moment.

The same sort of lady as one who would stand alone in a public taproom, posed provocatively in a clinging bright pink muslin dress as she gazed through a window, oblivious to the effect she was having upon two males standing behind her.

Not just the same sort of lady, of course.

The very same one, in fact.

Edward watched, appalled, as she rode into the midst of the group of young men, none of whom he knew, talking volubly as she went. He did not hear the first few words, but then her voice became more audible.

“… must have decided to go somewhere else, the provoking man. I was about to turn about and go back home when I spotted you. I was never so glad of anything in my life. But you must absolutely promise not to say a word, Ferdie. He would doubtless cut up nasty though it would be grossly unfair. How was I to know he was not coming here? This is where everyone comes to ride. I will ride with you and your friends instead. You will not mind, will you?”

She bestowed the dazzle of her smile upon the group at large. As Edward and his friends rode on by, Edward with his face averted lest she see and recognize him, there was a chorus of enthusiastic assent from the young men.

It would seem, then, that her indiscreet behavior at the Rose and Crown was nothing unusual. How well did she know any of those men? She certainly had not arrived with any of them. And someone, it seemed, would be annoyed if he knew she was here alone. As well he might be, whoever he was, poor devil.

Well, this time, Edward decided firmly, he was not going to get involved. If she did not know how to behave, and clearly she did not, it was not his concern—even if she did look slender and lithe and very much as though she might have been born in a saddle. And even if when she smiled she made one forget that it was not a bright, sunny morning.

He felt rather hot and ruffled, he realized. What if she had seen him? She might have recognized him and hailed him. It would have been a ghastly breach of etiquette.

“That,” Ambrose said, having refrained from answering George’s question until they had moved past and out of earshot, “is a riding hat. At least, I assume it is since it is on the lady’s head. And if it were a bird’s nest, it would be infinitely more tidy, would it not?”

He and George snorted with mirth.

“A hat,” George said. “I do believe you are right, Ambie. Perhaps it would not be such a monstrosity if it were dry.”

Edward had hardly noticed the hat the lady wore. But he was about to be given a second chance to observe it. There was the sudden thunder of hooves from behind them, and before they could move to one side or take any other defensive action, five horses and riders went galloping past at full tilt, spraying water and mud indiscriminately in all directions, except over themselves. And then a sixth a decent interval behind the others—the groom.

Second in line was the only lady who had braved the weather this morning, whooping with joyful abandon and laughing with wild glee, just as if she had never in her life heard of feminine decorum—as perhaps she had not.

Her hat, glorious in its profusion of multicolored feathers culled from birds long deceased, bounced on her head in time with her movements and somehow stayed on.

It was perhaps the hat, Edward thought belatedly, that had caused him to mistake her at first for a courtesan.

He glanced down at his mud-spattered buff riding breeches and black boots—both new just last week and immaculately clean this morning. He flicked one gloved finger over his cheek to dislodge something wet that clung there.

“Who is she?” he asked, though he was not sure he wanted to know.

But neither of his friends had seen her before.

Edward really did not want to risk coming face-to-face with her, whoever she was.

“It is time I returned home to get ready for the House,” he said.

His stomach answered with a return of the slight queasiness. He turned his mount to leave Rotten Row.

A whooping laugh blew past behind him together with a flying horse and rider. She was galloping back up the Row, Edward presumed without looking around to confirm his guess. It sounded as if she was leading the pack this time.

He felt more spatters of mud pelting against the back of his coat.

And then he sensed something and was unwise enough to turn his head.

She had stopped her horse. She had done it so abruptly, it seemed, that it was rearing up. But she brought it under control with an ease that could only have been born of long practice. Her companions were thundering off into the distance, apart from the groom, who was altogether more vigilant.

Her eyes were fixed upon Edward, wide with recognition. Her lips were parting in a smile.

Oh, Lord!

At any moment now she was going to hail him, and there was enough of a distance between them that at least a dozen other riders, including his friends, were bound to hear.

Edward inclined his head curtly to her, touched his whip to the brim of his hat, and rode away.

She did not call after him.

Devil take it, she was in London. He was bound to run into her again, he supposed. Perhaps even this evening. Perhaps she would be at that infernal Tresham ball.

He frowned. This was not a day destined to bring him any pleasure. It had already started badly.