Lord Perfect Read online

  A sigh. “No, Mama.”

  “Kindly apologize, Olivia.”

  The girl ground her teeth. Then she took a deep breath and let it out.

  She turned to Peregrine. “Sir, I most humbly beg your pardon,” she said. “It was a ghastly, unspeakable, heinous act I perpetrated. I hope the precipitous fall from the stool did you no permanent or disfiguring injury. I am so deeply ashamed. Not only have I attacked and possibly maimed an innocent person but I have disgraced my mother. It is my ungovernable temper, you see, an affliction I have suffered since birth.” She fell to her knees and snatched his hand. “Can you be so good, so generous, kind sir, as to forgive me?”

  Peregrine, who had listened to this speech with increasing bewilderment, was, for perhaps the first time in his life, struck dumb.

  The mother rolled her outrageously blue eyes. “Get up, Olivia.”

  The girl clung to Peregrine’s hand, her head bowed.

  Peregrine threw a panicked look at Benedict.

  “Perhaps now you comprehend the folly of contradicting ladies,” said Benedict. “Do not look to me for rescue. I hope it will be a lesson to you.”

  Speechlessness being alien to Peregrine’s character, he swiftly recovered. “Oh, do get up,” he told the girl crossly. “It was only a sketchbook.” The girl didn’t move. Voice moderating, he added, “Uncle is right. I ought to apologize, too. I know I’m supposed to agree with whatever females as well as my elders say, for some reason or other. If there is a proper reason. No one has ever explained the rule’s logic, certainly. At any rate, you barely hit me. I only fell because I lost my balance when I ducked. Not that it matters. It’s not as though a girl could do much damage.”

  Olivia’s head came up, and her eyes shot deadly sparks.

  The boy went on, oblivious, as usual. “It wants practice, you know, and girls never get any. If you did practice, you’d strengthen your arm at least. That’s why schoolmasters are so good at it.”

  The girl’s expression softened. She rose, the subject having diverted her, apparently. “Papa told me about English schoolmasters,” she said. “Do they beat you very often?”

  “Oh, all the time,” Peregrine said.

  She sought details. He provided them.

  By this time, Benedict had recovered his composure. So he believed, at any rate. While the children made peace, he allowed his attention to revert to the breathtaking mama.

  “Her apology was not necessary,” he said. “However, it was most—er—stirring.”

  “She is dreadful,” the lady said. “I tried several times to sell her to gypsies, but they wouldn’t take her.”

  The answer startled him. Beauty so rarely came coupled with wit. Another man would have rocked on his heels. Benedict only paused infinitesimally and said, “Then I daresay there’s no chance they’d take him, either. Not that he’s mine to dispose of. My nephew. Atherton’s sole progeny. I am Rathbourne.”

  Something changed. A shadow appeared that had not been in her countenance before.

  He had presumed, perhaps. She might be as beautiful as sin and she might have a sense of humor, but this did not mean she was not a stickler for certain proprieties.

  “Perhaps a mutual acquaintance is idling about who would introduce us properly,” he said, glancing about the gallery. At present, the space held three other persons, none of whom he knew or could possibly wish to know. They looked away when his gaze fell upon them.

  Then a shred of sense returned and he asked himself what difference a proper introduction would make. She was a married woman, and he had rules about married women. If he sought to further the acquaintance, it would only be to violate those rules.

  “I greatly doubt we have a mutual acquaintance,” she said. “You and I travel in different spheres, my lord.”

  “We’re both here,” he said, his tongue getting the better of Rules Regarding Married Women.

  “As is Olivia,” she said. “I can tell by her expression that she is nine and a half minutes away from getting one of her Ideas, which puts us eleven minutes away from mayhem. I am obliged to remove her.”

  She turned away.

  The message was plain enough. As plain as a bucket of ice water thrown in his face. “I am dismissed, I see,” he said. “A fitting return for my impertinence.”

  “This has nothing to do with impertinence,” she said without turning back to him, “and everything to do with self-preservation.”

  She collected her daughter and left.

  HE VERY NEARLY followed her from the room.

  Unthinkable.

  True, nonetheless.

  Benedict had even started that way, heart pounding, when Lady Ordway burst from a doorway and surged toward him in a flutter of ribbons, ruffles, and feathers. These, given her advanced state of pregnancy, created the effect of an agitated brood hen.

  “Tell me I am not seeing whatyoucallems,” she said. “Those things they see in the desert—not oases, Rathbourne, but when one sees an oasis that isn’t there.”

  He directed an expressionless gaze into her cheerfully stupid, pretty face. “I believe the word you seek is mirage.”

  She nodded, and the ruffles, ribbons, and feathers of her bonnet danced giddily about her head.

  He had known her forever, it seemed. She was seven years his junior. Eight years ago, he had very nearly married her instead of Atherton’s sister Ada. Benedict was not sure matters would have turned out more happily if he had. Both women were equally pretty, equally wellborn, equally well-dowered, and equally intelligent. Both were more handsomely endowed in all the other categories than in the last.

  Still, precious few women had the wherewithal to offer true intellectual stimulation. In any case, it was Benedict who had failed his late wife, he was all too well aware.

  “I thought it was a mirage,” said Lady Ordway. “Or a dream. With all these strange creatures about, one might easily think oneself in a dream.” She gestured at the objects about her. “But it was Bathsheba DeLucey truly. Well, Bathsheba DeLucey that was, for she was wed before I was. Not that the Wingates will ever acknowledge it. To them, she doesn’t exist.”

  “How tiresome,” he said while he stored away the not-unfamiliar names. “Families feuding over an ancient triviality, no doubt.”

  He was sure he’d gone to school with a Wingate. That was the Earl of Fosbury’s family name, was it not? As to the DeLuceys, Benedict couldn’t remember having met any. He knew his father was acquainted with the head of the family, the Earl of Mandeville, though. Lord Hargate knew everybody worth knowing, as well as everything worth knowing about them.

  “It is far from trivial,” Lady Ordway said. “And pray do not tell me it is un-Christian to visit the sins of the elders upon the children. In this case, if one accepts the children, the elders will come, too, and they are so very dreadful, as you know.”

  “I never met the lady before in all my life,” Benedict said. “I know nothing about her. The children had a dispute, and we were obliged to intervene.” He glanced at Peregrine, who’d returned to his drawing, altogether unaffected by recent events. Youth was so resilient.

  Benedict, meanwhile, was still short of breath.

  Bathsheba. Her name was Bathsheba.

  Fitting.

  Lady Ordway, too, looked at his nephew. Lowering her voice, she explained, “She comes of the ramshackle branch of the DeLuceys.”

  “We’ve all got one of those,” Benedict said. “The Carsingtons have my brother Rupert, for instance.”

  “Oh, that scamp,” said she, with the same smile and in the same indulgent tone most women adopted when speaking of Rupert. “The Dreadful DeLuceys are another story altogether. Thoroughly disreputable. Imagine Lord Fosbury’s reaction when his second eldest, Jack, declared he was marrying one of them. It would be like your telling Lord Hargate that you intend to marry a gypsy girl. Which, really, is what she was, for all they tried to make a lady of her.”

  Whoever had tried to make a
lady of Bathsheba Wingate had succeeded. Benedict had detected nothing common in her speech or manner, and he had a fine ear for the nuances that betrayed even the best-schooled imposters and posers.

  He had assumed he was speaking to one of his own class. A lady.

  “Beyond a doubt that was how they lured poor Jack into parson’s mousetrap,” Lady Ordway said. “But the marriage did not enrich her family as they had hoped. When Jack wed her, Lord Fosbury cut him off with a shilling. Jack and his bride ended up in Dublin. That was where I last saw them, not long before he died. The child looks like him.”

  At this point, the lady found it necessary to catch her breath and fan herself. These measures proving inadequate, she availed herself of the nearest bench. When she invited him to join her, Benedict complied without hesitation.

  She was silly and wore too many frills, and rarely said anything worth listening to—and one must listen, for she was one of the multitude who believed “conversation” and “monologue” were synonyms. On the other hand, she was an old acquaintance, a member of his social circle, and married to one of his political allies.

  More important, she had prevented his committing an appalling breach of both propriety and sense.

  He had very nearly followed Bathsheba Wingate out of the Egyptian Hall.

  And then . . .

  And then, he was not sure what he would have done, so bedazzled had he been.

  Would he have stooped to teasing her until she told him her name and direction?

  Would he have sunk so low as to follow her secretly?

  An hour earlier, he would have believed himself incapable of such gross behavior. That was the sort of thing infatuated schoolboys did. In his youth he had experienced the usual assortment of infatuations, naturally, and behaved in the usual absurd manner, but he’d long since outgrown such foolishness.

  Or so he’d thought.

  Now he wondered how many crucial rules he might have broken. Her being a widow rather than a married woman made no difference. For a short time he had not been himself but a sort of madman, bewitched.

  Impetuous behavior is the province of poets, artists, and others who cannot regulate their passions.

  And so he sat patiently with Lady Ordway and listened while she went on to the next topic, not at all interesting, and the next, which was less so, and told himself to be grateful, because she had broken the spell and rescued him from a shocking folly.

  Chapter 2

  BATHSHEBA WAITED ONLY UNTIL THEY’D exited the Egyptian Hall before she took her daughter to task. Children, Bathsheba had found, were like dogs. If one did not administer a punishment or lecture immediately after the crime, one might as well forget the matter altogether, for they certainly would.

  “That was outrageous, even for you,” she told Olivia as they made their way across the busy street. “In the first place, you accosted a stranger, which you have been told countless times a lady never does, except when her life is in danger and she requires help.”

  “Ladies never do anything interesting unless they’re about to be killed,” Olivia said. “But we are allowed to aid persons in need, you said. The boy was frowning as though he was having a difficult time. I thought I could help him. If he were unconscious, lying in a ditch, you wouldn’t expect me to wait for an introduction, surely.”

  “He was not lying in a ditch,” said Bathsheba. “Furthermore, striking him with his sketchbook meets no criterion of charity I ever heard of.”

  “I thought he looked afflicted,” Olivia said. “He was scowling and biting his lip and shaking his head. Well, you saw why. He draws like an infant. Or someone very old and palsied. He’s attended Eton and Harrow, can you credit it, Mama? That isn’t all. Rugby, too. And Westminster. And Winchester. They cost heaps of money, as everybody knows, and one must be a nob to get in. Yet not one of those great schools could teach him to draw even adequately. Is it not shocking?”

  “They are not like schools for girls,” Bathsheba said. “They teach Greek and Latin and little else. In any event, the topic is not his education but your improper behavior. I have told you time and again—”

  She broke off because a gleaming black phaeton had rounded the corner at a speed that threatened to overturn it, and was racing straight at them. Pedestrians and street vendors scrambled to get out of the way. Bathsheba hauled Olivia to the curb and watched it fly past, her hands clenched while she longed for something to throw at the driver, a drunken member of the upper orders with a trollop giggling beside him.

  “What about that one, with his fancy piece?” Olivia said. “He’s a nob, isn’t he? It’s so easy to tell. The way they dress. The way they walk. The way they drive. No one minds what they do.”

  “Ladies know nothing about fancy pieces and they never use the word nob,” Bathsheba said between her teeth. She made herself count silently to twenty, because she still wanted to run after the phaeton, tear the driver from his perch, and knock his head against the carriage wheel.

  “It only means he’s got rank or money,” Olivia said. “It isn’t a bad word.”

  “It is slang,” Bathsheba said. “A lady would refer to him as a gentleman. The term serves for men belonging to the gentry and the aristocracy as well as the peerage.”

  “I know,” Olivia said. “Papa said a gentleman was a fellow who didn’t work for his living.”

  Jack Wingate had never worked for a living and simply couldn’t do it, even when it was a choice between working and starvation. For all of his life before he met Bathsheba, someone else had paid the bills, shouldered the responsibilities, and made a path through the difficulties. For the rest of his short life, she was the someone else.

  Still, in every other way, he had been everything she could want in a husband, and he’d proved to be the best of fathers. Olivia had adored him and, more important, listened to him.

  “Your father would make one of his wry faces and say, ‘Really, now, Olivia,’ if you spoke of nobs to him,” Bathsheba said. “One does not use the word in polite conversation.”

  Wishing Jack had taught her the trick of getting through to their daughter, Bathsheba went on to explain how certain words were interpreted. This word would prejudice people against one, by indicating lower-class origins. She explained—for the thousandth time, it seemed—that such judgments were an unfortunate fact of life, with practical and often painful consequences.

  She concluded with, “Kindly discard it from your vocabulary.”

  “But all those gentlemen can do as they please, and no one scolds them,” Olivia said. “Even the women—the ladies. They drink to excess and gamble away their husbands’ money and go to bed with men who aren’t their husbands and—”

  “Olivia, what have I told you about reading the scandal sheets?”

  “I haven’t read one in weeks, ever since you told me to stop,” the girl said virtuously. “It was Riggles the pawnbroker who told me about Lady Dorving. She pawned her diamonds again to cover her gaming debts. And everyone knows that Lord John French is the father of Lady Craith’s last two children.”

  Bathsheba hardly knew where to begin responding to this declaration. Riggles was an undesirable acquaintance, not to mention indiscreet. Regrettably, Olivia had been on easy terms with such persons practically since birth. Jack always dealt with them, because he’d had the most practice with pawnbrokers and moneylenders. And he always took Olivia, because even the stoniest heart could not resist her enormous, innocent blue eyes.

  When he fell ill, and Bathsheba had so many other cares, the then nine-year-old Olivia took over financial negotiations, carrying the remaining bits of jewelry and plate, household bric-a-brac, and clothing to and fro. She was even better at it than Jack had been. She had his charm and her mama’s obstinacy combined, unfortunately, with the Dreadful DeLucey talent for bamboozlement.

  Bathsheba and Jack had left the Continent and moved to Ireland to get Olivia away from the unwholesome influence of Bathsheba’s family.

&nb
sp; The trouble was, Olivia was drawn to shifty characters, rogues and vagabonds, spongers and swindlers—persons like her maternal relatives, in other words. Apart from her teacher and classmates, the pawnbrokers were the most respectable of her London acquaintances.

  Undoing the education her daughter received on the streets was becoming a full-time occupation for Bathsheba. They must move to a better neighborhood very soon.

  All they needed was a few shillings’ increase in monthly income.

  The question was where to find the money.

  Bathsheba must either obtain more commissions or acquire more drawing students.

  Neither students nor commissions were easy for a woman artist to come by. Needlework was, but it would earn a contemptibly small wage, and the working conditions would ruin her eyesight and health. She was ill-qualified for any other occupation—any other respectable occupation, that is.

  If she was not respectable, her daughter could not be. If Olivia was not respectable, she could not marry well.

  Later, Bathsheba counseled herself. She would fret about the future later, after her daughter was in bed. It would give her something productive to think about.

  Instead of him.

  The Earl of Hargate’s heir, of all men.

  Not merely a bored aristocrat, but a famous one.

  Lord Perfect, people called him, because Rathbourne never put a foot wrong.

  If he hadn’t identified himself, Bathsheba might have lingered. It was hard to resist the dark eyes, especially, though she couldn’t say why, exactly.

  All she knew was that those eyes had very nearly made her lose her resolve and turn back.

  But to what end?

  Nothing good could come of knowing him.

  He was not at all like her late husband. Jack Wingate was an earl’s younger son with no sense of responsibility and as little affection for his family as she had for hers, though for different reasons.

  Lord Rathbourne was another species. Though he, too, was a member of one of England’s most prominent families, his was also one of the most tightly knit. Furthermore, all she’d ever heard and read about him led to one conclusion: He was the embodiment of the noble ideal, everything aristocrats ought to be but so seldom were. He had high standards, a powerful sense of duty—oh, what did the details matter? The scandal sheets never mentioned him. When his name appeared in print—as it did regularly—it was on account of some noble or clever or brave thing he’d done or said.