Chapter Six
Dinner at the Grand Palace on the Thames was a merry, chaotic sport in which everyone won, most particularly Mr. Delacorte.
Tureens sloshing and brimming with hearty things were swiftly passed in every direction, and Ginny learned quickly that one
needed to be nimble and alert to avoid mid-air collisions. Tonight she’d nearly taken a butter dish to the temple because
her eyes were on her plate. She’d been applying herself diligently to the fish stew and herbed potatoes in an attempt to avoid
looking directly at Mr. Marchand, who had somehow contrived to sit almost directly across from her.
Today she’d endured a stingingly awkward visit to Weston’s on Old Bond Street to inquire about satyr buttons. All the gentlemen
behind the counter had eyed her reprovingly, clearly keenly disturbed by the invasion of a young, well-bred, unchaperoned
woman into their masculine sanctum.
“Good heavens, miss. No. That travesty of a button sounds like something George Stultz would do to waistcoats,” the gentleman
at the counter sniffed, when she’d inquired about the satyr buttons. “You might try at his shop.”
She’d departed with a scorching blush and returned at once to the Grand Palace on the Thames, her quotient of bravado spent for the day, though she was painfully aware that shame was pure indulgence given the urgency of her mission.
She did not look forward to her visit to George Stultz’s shop tomorrow.
Ironically she had Mr. Marchand to thank for the miracle that happened next.
Because her traitorous head inevitably lifted and turned as if of its own accord, and her gaze collided with Mr. Marchand’s.
Whereupon she swiveled it sharply away again, toward Lord Bolt.
Who had just rotated his torso to pass the bread to his wife.
When he did, candlelight glanced off the silver buttons on his waistcoat.
Ginny saw that they were etched with little galleons.
She went so abruptly still she was nearly bashed in the head by a tureen of peas Mrs. Pariseau was trying to hand off to her.
“If you’ll excuse me, Lord Bolt . . . ” she ventured. She took the peas and passed them on.
He looked over at her and smiled.
“My brother mentioned admiring buttons similar to the ones on your waistcoat. He said they were etched with satyrs or some
such. He’s a lover of mythology, like Mrs. Pariseau. I thought they would make a charming gift for his birthday, but I don’t
have the first notion of where to find them.”
All of these things were fundamentally true.
Something glinted in her peripheral vision. She instinctively knew it was Mr. Marchand’s gunmetal gaze. He’d gone still.
“Ah! It sounds as though your brother may have seen the Earl of Sydenham’s buttons,” Lord Bolt told her.
“He was wearing a waistcoat of that description a few weeks ago in White’s.
My tailor knows someone who knows someone who does the silver etching on buttons.
I’d be happy to find his name for you, Miss Woodville. ”
Hope went to Ginny’s head so violently she nearly swayed from it.
If you knew who it was, you’d understand, Hogarth had told her.
Her father’s friend and rival. The one who claimed her father had stolen her mother from him, and who had gifted that handsome
rifle to him.
Of course. The Earl of Sydenham.
“Thank you, Lord Bolt. I would be much obliged.”
“Miss Guinevere Woodville. It is you. My God. I thought my ears had deceived me when Farnham told me you were waiting in the foyer.”
Ginny had in fact been cooling her heels in the Earl of Sydenham’s foyer for nearly ten minutes. She’d slipped out of the
Grand Palace on the Thames after dinner in the wake of Mrs. Pariseau, who was off to meet friends at the theater, because
widows were allowed to gallivant without men. She’d shared a hack with her as far as Covent Garden.
In parting, Ginny had assured the slightly skeptical Mrs. Pariseau that the friends she was visiting would see her safely
home. Then she’d taken the hack the rest of the way to St. James’s Square.
Perhaps the earl would see her safely home, for old time’s sake. One never knew. Just in case, she’d tucked a knitting needle in her sleeve again
for protection, in anticipation of needing to hunt alone for a hack later.
Sydenham was the same floridly handsome fellow she remembered from the last time he’d visited her parents more than a decade
ago, though he’d gone significantly grayer and ever-so-slightly balder. She knew a fleeting surge of desperate resentment
that her father was not alive to go grayer, too. She liked to think her father would have kept all of his hair, just to spite
Sydenham.
“I am so very abashed to intrude upon your evening, Lord Sydenham, and in such an unusual manner, but—”
“Who is there, dear?” A woman called from the top of the stairs. “I thought I heard a young lady’s voice.”
The Countess of Sydenham swanned into view. A plume swayed languidly from her purple turban with every step of her graceful
descent, and light bounced from the toes of her satin slippers.
“It’s . . . ah, Miss Guinevere Woodville, dear.” The Earl of Sydenham still sounded a bit dazed. “She seems to have come for
an . . . after-dinner visit.”
He said this last a bit ironically. There really was no such thing as an after-dinner visit among the types of social calls
Londoners paid one another. Which was one of the many reasons Farnham the footman had been reluctant to admit Ginny to the
town house at all.
The other reasons were the fact that she was a young woman and alone, of course, because heaven forfend.
Ginny didn’t blame him, because she’d had about plenty of time to entertain second thoughts about being there while he’d gone to fetch the earl.
She’d ultimately decided she was glad she hadn’t waited until morning.
If fortune favored her, she might even be able to return home as soon as tomorrow with good news for Hogarth.
“Guinevere Woodville? As in Viscount Woodville?” The countess was amazed, too.
“. . . and now the Earl of Highgrove,” Ginny prompted. “Perhaps you already know this, but my brother, Hogarth, inherited
the title.”
“Yes, I believe we did hear! Oh, Miss Woodville.” The countess was in the foyer now. She took Ginny’s hands in hers and studied her fondly. Her wide blue eyes reminded Ginny
a bit of Dot’s. “Look at you, a woman grown now! And so very pretty! I remember you so well as a little girl. The freckles
were so charming! Not that they still aren’t, of course, but there’s always powder, isn’t there? Your parents were such good
fun. So madcap. We do miss them very much. You have your father’s eyes.”
“Ah—thank you, you’re very kind. And we miss them, too. Very much.”
The Earl and Countess of Sydenham had not once visited the Woodville children after their parents’ deaths.
There ensued a lull.
“Are you in some kind of trouble, dear?” the countess prompted.
Which was a polite way of asking her what the devil she was doing in their foyer.
Ginny pulled in a long, courage-bolstering breath.
“I have urgent need of counsel on a particular matter. I could not think of another friend in London to whom I could turn. Otherwise I would never intrude upon you without sending a letter first. Nor would I ever come alone. I feel rather at odds right now.”
She wanted them to know that she at least knew how to behave like a lady, even if she wasn’t doing it now. She owed that much to her parents, particularly her mother.
The earl and countess exchanged a glance.
“Well, do come through into the drawing room, my dear.” The countess at least sounded kind. “We’ll have a chat.”
In the drawing room a few steps away, a leaping fire picked out the glints of gold leaf and ormolu. Velvet was everywhere.
Ginny settled onto a crimson settee opposite the Sydenhams.
She considered where to begin. She decided it was best to get straight to the point. “I wondered if you had seen my brother
lately, Lord Sydenham.”
“Why, is he missing?” the earl smoothly replied, just as his wife exclaimed, “You just saw him at Lucifer’s Fall, didn’t you,
dear?”
The earl pressed his lips tightly together.
Against a curse word, if Ginny had to guess. She knew the look.
The countess placed a gloved hand delicately over her lips at her faux pas.
A tense silence followed.
Apparently, the earl didn’t believe Lucifer’s Fall’s little rule about protecting the privacy of members extended to wives.
“I believe Hogarth lost a very good deal of money to you at Lucifer’s Fall, Lord Sydenham,” Ginny pressed on.
The earl sighed. “Well, he did, indeed,” the earl decided to confirm with matter-of-fact cheer, since they all knew about it. “It was a very lucky night for me.”
Ginny’s heart was pounding sickeningly now. She prayed to every god she could think of for the strength to say what she needed
to say next.
“In honor of your friendship with my parents, I wondered if you would consider tearing up his vowels and canceling his debt.”
She was both horrified and thrilled to have gotten the words out. It felt utterly brazen.
They echoed in her ears like a gong clash.
The silence that followed was surely the longest and most awkward in English history so far.
A bead of sweat slid from her neck into her cleavage as the earl and countess regarded her in wary amazement.
“You’d . . . like me to just . . . forget . . . the debt?” The earl issued all of these words gingerly. As if giving Ginny
an opportunity to apologize or explain away this latest hideous social transgression.
She was nauseous with shame and nerves. “Yes.”
His eyebrows dove into a frown for a full five seconds. Suddenly, all at once, his expression cleared. “But that’s not how
it works, my dear.” His relieved tone suggested he’d thought about it and concluded she was just misguided or naive, not soft