Chapter Twelve
“How could you let her do that?” Edmund demanded, his face red and his balled fists on his hips.
“After Uncle Lord Bellamy took our house? You just hand that stupid lady your horse? And you tell me to be quiet all through luncheon? Becks was crying, and you just said, ‘It’s for the best.’ Well, it’s not for the best.”
“Edmund, calm yourself,” Iris said, ushering him into the spare sitting room where all their worldly possessions lay stacked in one corner. “Was there a horse in here yesterday?”
“What?”
She gestured. “These are our things, Pickle. Was there a horse among our things yesterday?”
“You know there wasn’t. That doesn’t mean she can steal—”
“My point is,” she interrupted, keeping her jaw tight so the frustration she felt stayed precisely where it belonged—deep in her gut and invisible, “I don’t own a horse.
Delilah belongs to Lord Hentrose. I rode her this morning and had a grand time doing so.
If Lady Pauline hadn’t appeared, Delilah would still be Lord Hentrose’s horse. Not mine.”
Her son blew out a hard breath. “You were having fun, riding. And now you can’t. She just walked up and said, ‘Oh, thank you for giving me a horse,’ and now it’s hers. That isn’t fair. He bought her for you!” He grimaced. “He brought her here for you, I mean.”
So Beckett had purchased Delilah for her.
Whomever the mare belonged to now, that had been an exceptional thing he’d done for her, just so she could go riding this morning.
For a few hours she’d been able to forget everything but the breeze on her face and laughing and watching Edmund be so happy he could barely contain himself.
“I had a wonderful time. Didn’t you?”
“Yes, but—”
“No. We had a wonderful time. Period. Now, go change out of your riding clothes, find Mr. Fredericks, and do your mathematics lessons as you’ve promised.”
“I don’t see why I have to keep my word when no one else does,” he grumbled, stalking out of the room.
The moment he was out of earshot, Iris shut the door and sat in the chair facing her small pile of things. Beckett would have protested. He would have said Delilah wasn’t meant for Pauline, and then he would have had to explain so many things that didn’t have an explanation.
And then Lady Pauline would tell her friends about it, Mr. Agnew would add his own commentary to the scandal simply because she’d given him the punch in the nose he’d deserved, and by tomorrow morning Mrs. Silbern would be loudly ridiculed for chasing after a marquis and a duke at the same time when she deserved neither, and then she would be out of the contest to become the next Duchess of Trent—and even less suited to be a wife to Beckett and a mother to Rebecca than she already was.
A sob escaped her chest, and she lowered her face into her hands. This was the trouble with daydreams. They changed nothing, and they made the next blow sting more keenly. As she’d told Edmund, nothing outward had changed. Beckett had provided her with a happy morning. She’d enjoyed it. The end.
The feeling, though, of seeing Lady Pauline’s delight and the way she’d so effortlessly taken ownership of something not hers—it shook her.
It had only been a month since she’d lost her home in almost exactly the same way, and to someone who wielded the same …
supreme sense of self-worth and entitlement so effortlessly that the thing just became true the moment the words were spoken.
Taking a deep breath, she straightened. Facts helped.
Facts made things easier. Simpler. Edmund had gone riding this morning, and he was presently doing mathematics with his tutor.
She could gain security and an income from the Duke of Trent.
When Trent died, and by God she did mean to outlive him, his family would want her and Edmund gone, but that would merely return them to their present position, but with money enough to do what she’d been planning for the past four years.
And the lofty title of duchess, or dowager duchess, rather, to make it all fancier—and easier.
There. Everything remained in place. And if Lady Pauline had handily demonstrated that she had every intention of marrying Lord Hentrose, well, that only served as a reminder that Iris had her own priorities, and she needed to see to them.
“Mrs. Silbern?” Polly knocked on the door.
“Yes? Come in. I’m just taking note of how few things a person actually needs versus what they insist on toting about with them.” She stood up, quickly walking to a sack and opening it.
Her maid entered the room. “Some of the toting-about things are quite pretty, though,” she commented, smiling. “Lady Margaret’s after you to push her up and down Bond Street for some hat shopping. I won’t do, as I don’t stand up straight enough while I’m wheeling her about.”
“Oh, my. We mustn’t make it look like a chore, my dear,” Iris whispered, putting a hand on Polly’s shoulder as she left the room. “It’s a privilege.”
“It being a privilege doesn’t make Lady Margaret weigh any less, especially on the uphill.”
“I do adore you, Polly,” Iris commented, laughing. “Would you come help me change out of my very unfashionable riding attire?”
“Certainly. But you make it look quite fashionable.”
“It is pretty, isn’t it?” And she would have Polly put the riding habit in the very back of the wardrobe, and leave it at Grove House when she and Edmund left, and never think of the very pleasant morning she’d spent, ever again.
She would not keep the memory of this Season in a small corner of her heart and pull it out to examine every so often when she wanted to smile.
Aunt Margaret waited in the foyer as she descended the stairs. “I would never have asked you to aid me if I’d known you meant never to be available, Iris,” the older woman commented, as Tollins and Gerald lifted her out of her chair and into the coach.
Iris took hold of the chair and pushed it outside behind them. “I apologize, Aunt Margaret. I did alert you that I would be out this morning, and I only paused at Raines House a moment to greet Lady Pauline Grenedy.”
Snorting, Margaret fixed her skirts. “Ah. The ice queen and her prince. Marquis, rather.”
Taking the seat opposite her aunt, Iris lifted an eyebrow. “The what?”
“Her older sisters married well, but she’s been out for six years now.
It seems she’s aiming for the highest echelons of Society, despite everyone knowing that princes and dukes and marquises don’t grow on trees, and that her own value plummets every year as she ages.
I’d begun to think she would end up married to a baronet or a sir.
But I suppose she does know how to play the game, because she’s caught a marquis. An impossible-to-catch one, at that.”
That was interesting, though she didn’t think anyone would dare say any of those things to Lady Pauline’s face. “She does seem quite confident,” she said, sitting back as the coach rolled into the street.
Margaret pointed a finger at her. “Being a five-time widower might have put off someone as haughty as Lady Pauline Grenedy, but the Duke of Trent outranks even Hentrose. She’ll be curtsying to you, if you can manage this.”
“I don’t care who curtsies to whom, Aunt Margaret. I would like your assurance, though, as the one who’s thrown me at Trent, that he hasn’t had a hand in the demise of any of his previous duchesses.”
Her aunt folded her hands on her lap. “It would be lovely, Iris, if you could be more grateful to the people assisting you, especially when your own plans were such a poor, na?ve idea. Thank goodness you’ve put it aside. A boardinghouse. Goodness.”
Iris looked at her aunt, at her straight mouth pinched at the sides, her chin jutted just a little forward, and her eyes a bit large. “Don’t be so certain I won’t ask for that money again if I lose the contest to wed Trent,” she said. She could discard hopes, but she would always have a plan.
“It won’t do you any good. Family or not, you are a poor investment.
Marry Trent, if he’ll have you. That will cost us nothing, cost you nothing, and put you in a better position socially and monetarily.
” She waved one hand in the air. “We would happily pay for a few new gowns for you. A small sum in exchange for you and Edmund not clinging to us for the remainder of our lives.”
Now Iris felt like the last piece of bread left on the board after everyone had eaten their fill. A thin, left-behind bit of heel, not terribly appetizing, but available to anyone who might want an extra helping. “How fortunate for me that I have family on whom I may rely.”
“Precisely. Now. I’m looking for something I can wear to my dinner with Lady Naton, a bit of decoration for my hair. In silver and blue to complement my blue gown. The one with the silver lace at the sleeves and hem. Do you remember the one?”
It was on the tip of Iris’s tongue to say that she couldn’t remember it because she was too occupied with deciding whether she and Edmund could flee to the Continent and become jugglers, but she kept her mouth shut.
Aunt Margaret might approve of that and send them packing regardless of Trent’s decision.
The moment they returned to Grove House she asked to be excused, and then informed Tollins that she and Edmund would be taking their dinner in the small dining room upstairs.
An evening of listening to what she’d been hearing all afternoon would definitely have her punching things, and one of them was likely to be her uncle’s nose.