Chapter 5
Rob had warned Grey about the Halversons.
Braxton had warned him. Even the assistant at Weston’s, where Grey had gone to recover his brand-new formal togs, had warned him.
Paralyzing, they’d said. A crashing bore.
Old title, new money from the big-toothed wife with pretensions of taste.
Grey should probably be grateful they had just married off their last daughter.
He could have been caught in Halverson’s maw instead.
He thought all of this in the time it took to climb the stairs to the receiving line in his new evening attire, the shirt points as stiff and unpleasant as his uniform collar, the coat cut so close Braxton had had to coax him into it like a corset.
Grey wasn’t quite certain that he could lift his arms high enough to defend himself if needed.
Just another uniform, he kept thinking to himself, even if he felt completely out of place in it, especially every time he looked down to see the severe black jacket he knew to be de riguer. But then, he’d been wearing the scarlet one since his seventeenth birthday.
“Stop scowling,” Rob hissed alongside him. “Two debs are crying, and a footman just ran the other way.”
Grey snapped to attention. It was already hot in this mausoleum of a house, his stomach was growling, and his feet hurt.
At least his head was in better shape. He and Rob had only breached one bottle last night before admitting they were too old to play rambunctious youths anymore.
He still wasn’t certain how he felt about Rob’s offer to help rid him of a fiancée.
He was even more uncertain since Rob told him he knew the Packham girls quite well. Would that help or hurt?
He still couldn’t believe he’d put his problem in their hands.
He had been so relieved when Deevers had followed the news of his inheritance with the offer of help from the Mayhews.
He’d been home no more than a week and had just finished verifying the extent of his cousins’ mismanagement, which left him saddled with two frightened little girls, several entailed estates encompassing an enormous amount of land, any number of buildings, and no cash to support any of it.
Marriage to Priscilla Mayhew had seemed a godsend.
And yet here he was trying to get out of it.
“Lord Adam Noah Ezekiel Robert Glenn, Earl Hexham!” the butler bellowed.
Grey was impressed. Rob didn’t even flinch at hearing his name being shouted out like a fishmonger’s catch as he stepped up to take the hand of a florid man with a taste in bright colors and eyebrows that bristled like white gorse.
“Lord Peter Prentice Philpot Marsden Greyville, Marquess of Coleford!”
Grey did flinch. It was the first time he had been announced at all, much less like a cavalry charge. The first of many, he was afraid. Funny how strongly a man could yearn to be back on a battlefield.
“My lord,” the florid man with the gorse eyebrows and chartreuse waistcoat gushed in a voice that sounded like a creaky door and a smile that revealed missing teeth. “Such a pleasure to welcome you.”
Grey forced a smile and took the snuff-stained hand. “My pleasure, Halverson.”
Don’t thank him for the invitation, Grey reminded himself. It’s his privilege to have you here.
Maybe he should have the Packham chit give him a refresher in precedent.
No one had ever thought to in the slapdash horse farm where he’d grown up, too far from the title to worry about inhabiting it.
The only precedent the military had taught him was that a colonel could court-martial a lieutenant, but if he knew what was good for him, he’d leave the regimental sergeants alone.
He seemed to have passed some test, if the beaming smiles were any indication. Halverson turned to the lady next to him, a breathless powderpuff of a woman in puce and feathers that swayed well over the top of Grey’s head.
“This is my lady, Coleford.” Halverson beamed. “The new Marquess of Coleford, my dear.”
Grey saluted the air above the woman’s hand. Thank heavens for Rob, who’d at least brushed him up on those niceties, although they’d both been three sheets to the wind when he had. Thank God Grey remembered not to actually kiss her plump knuckles. He would have sliced his face open on those rings.
“My lady, a pleasure. Thank you for inviting an old soldier to your home.”
She giggled, which didn’t fit the partridge-shaped fifty-year-old frame very well. “Looking pretty spry in those breeches for an old soldier, Coleford,” she trilled with a hard smack on his arm with her fan.
Which almost left Grey speechless. Glenn hadn’t covered this.
“Well,” he drawled, still holding onto his smile. “We old soldiers keep fit on horseback, ma’am.”
He got another slap on the arm with her fan for that and quickly moved along before she went for his nose.
“You didn’t warn me,” he muttered to Glenn as they strolled away.
“Yes, I did,” his friend answered a bit too smugly. “You didn’t listen.”
“Adam Noah Ezekiel?” he volleyed back. “Why did we never know that?”
Now Glenn was flinching. “Because you would have immediately started thinking of droll jests having to do with my parents’ Biblical leanings.”
“Are all of you similarly afflicted?”
“You mean like my sister Miriam Rachel Eve?”
Grey couldn’t help it. He let loose a bark of laughter that turned heads. “At least they didn’t decide on Bathsheba. Or Jezebel.”
Glenn was still scowling. “I wouldn’t go throwing stones, Peter Prentiss Philpot.”
Grey sighed. “My parents were more enamored with alliteration.”
They had breached the crowd, aimlessly wandering along the sidelines as a quadrille formed up in the center of the room.
The room’s decorations were a nightmare that reminded him that his own house could have been worse.
Swaths of garish pink, purple, and green silk had been draped from the chandeliers, and tall grasses were stuffed in the over-sized vases that sat in between too few windows.
He was just about to go looking for anything resembling a Packham when Glenn stopped on his heel and turned to him.
“What do you mean you can’t make it to Price’s place?” Glenn protested just loudly enough to be heard over the musicians on the balcony.
Grey was so busy scanning the crowd for a familiar face that he almost missed his cue. Glenn wasn’t shy about kicking him to remind him.
“Price’s?” he blurted out with a shake of his head and a throbbing ankle. “Wish I could. Re-fight old battles, share a few bottles, murder some birds. Sounds like heaven. Can’t.”
“Why not?”
Grey let go a despondent sigh. “I have to go to Wales.”
He hoped he sounded disgusted and despairing enough.
“Wales?” Glenn echoed, his expression almost comically horrified. “Good God, man. What did you do to deserve that?”
“I didn’t deserve it at all. But that seems to be where the primary estate is.
Evidently, I cannot begin to salvage the whole mess from the ravages of my cousins unless I am there.
Supervising. The Welsh.” With a silent apology to the Welsh and to the actual primary seat of the marquessate on the English side of the border, he scrunched his face up in disgust. “Do you know anything about the Welsh? M’ solicitor couldn’t even tell me for certain that they spoke English. ”
Rob shook his head, obviously having far too much fun. “Surely there’s a Welshman somewhere who must speak English.”
“The question is, do they at Llanthony Hall. It seems my cousins have let the place go rather feral.”
Glenn waved a hand. “Well then, let it stay that way. What’s it to you?”
Grey picked a glass of something off a footman’s tray. A footman dressed as a jester, even to the bells dangling from his cap. If the lad hadn’t looked so bloody uncomfortable, Grey would have burst out laughing all over again.
The urge died a painful death when he took a sip of whatever was in that glass. He damn near spit it in Rob’s face.
“That I should have warned you about,” Glenn said with a sly grin.
Grey was looking at his glass as if it had grown maggots. “What is that?”
Glenn chuckled. “No one is quite sure. It’s Lady H’s special punch.”
“Well, I’d have to say that seven-eighths of it is gin.”
“Probably. As for the estate, check it out and then meet us at Price’s in Cambridge.”
Grey scowled. “Are you mad? It takes at least five days to get to the Hall from London. Probably more to get back to Cambridge. Over Welsh roads. In spring, when I understand it rains. Constantly. Once I get there, I’m not coming back until the entire place is put to rights.”
Which was when he recognized the tall, rather stooped man nearby making a show of speaking to another gentleman half his size, although his eyes weren’t focused on his companion. They were flicking in Grey’s direction. Mr. Mayhew himself, eavesdropping and looking a bit appalled.
Well. It seemed the Termagant knew what she was about after all.
Grey set his glass on another passing tray and returned his attention to his friend. “It’s pointless to plan anything this year,” he complained. “At least.”
“A big project?”
“Evidently the original title-owners were marcher lords. With castles. The kind with arrow slits and moats and curtain walls that all have a habit of sliding into said moats.”
Glenn was grinning like an idiot. “Sounds full of...er, atmosphere.”
“Full of bats and mold, more likely. Oh, and reportedly one of the early marcher lords who still hangs about the place terrifying the servants. Can’t keep even the cook overnight. I plan on filling one of the wagons in our little cavalcade with barrels of whiskey. I suspect I’ll need it.”
“A ghost to boot?” Glenn demanded with a delighted gleam in his eye. “Maybe we’ll all come there. I haven’t had spectral chains rattled at me in ages.”
“This one pushes people down the stairs.”
Out of the corner of his eye he could see Mayhew’s eyes getting even bigger. Good.