Chapter 2
CHAPTER TWO
No better than he was.
Jem paused beside the lemon tree, a vantage point that let him survey the room and its avenues of escape.
It also allowed him to glance about with seeming casualness and identify the young woman who had at last voiced what he suspected everyone in the entire upper classes of Britain had been thinking of him for months.
He found his hand resting over his racing heart and forced his fingers to relax. Mustn’t crush his cravat. His valet would give notice if Jem were careless with his work.
The four young women stood clumped like a stand of exotic flowers in a field of cultivated English blooms. Heads close, sharing whispers, they laughed as if they hadn’t a care in the world.
Particularly her, the slim, quick-witted one who held herself like a queen in that awful green lutestring sack that was two decades out of fashion.
What else did such girls have to do with their time but loiter at fashionable London soirees and dole out jests and insults?
It was the game everyone in this room played, including himself. He was trapped in this world now, like it or not.
Judith was going to get tangled in it, too, despite his best efforts. And girls like those, who mocked and derided—they would destroy his gentle sister. Like carrion crows that pecked a carcass to clean bone.
He ought to leave now, Jem thought, before his mood had a chance to worsen.
He’d accomplished what he intended. He’d acknowledged his debt to Lady Clara by appearing at her conversazione.
He’d admired the cut of the Duchess of Hunsdon’s gown and gave the Duchess of Highcastle some discreet hints about replacing her turban with something more à la mode.
Wise to leave before he could overhear further insults, or worse.
But against his better judgment he headed toward his friends, who stood where they could catch the footmen circulating with trays of drinks and ignore the hopeful stares of young ladies who wished to dance.
His friends were the reason Jem had survived thus far in the gladiatorial field that was British high society when he was nothing but a tradesman, a draper’s son, suddenly vaulting into the position of marquess’s heir.
“It was the balloon flight at St. George’s Field,” Plimpton was saying. “She told me I was shaped like one.”
“We were at Astley’s when she told me the bear danced better than I did,” Ashley said.
“Who did?” Jem asked. If his friends, who were considered prime catches, collected insults from the assorted company, then he had even less reason to feel rankled by the supposedly clever epigram one spiteful girl had composed about him.
Yet for some reason, rankle it did. Handsomer than he should be, she’d said. At least he’d achieved the handsome part. Little else he was good for in the eyes of anyone in this room.
“Who else lacks the ability to appreciate such fine gentlemen?” Ashley glared across the room at the same knot of girls Jem had just overheard discussing him. “Apt that you named them the Gorgons, Rudyard. A greater set of antidotes I’ve never seen.”
“I did?” Jem startled as a passing footman, one gloved hand clasped above the tails of his coat, bowed and offered him a tray of champagne flutes.
Such ceremony belonged at the marquess’s house, a place Jem had never felt comfortable.
He hurried to collect a glass so the footman could straighten and move away.
The man’s suit of livery was a size too large, and his silver stockings had a snag. Jem would have to ask Lady Clara what service she had used to hire extra servants for the night, then stop round the office with his card.
As if summoned, their hostess glided into place beside him. She twirled gracefully to give Jem a look at her open robe of heavy cream over a petticoat of golden silk, fabrics straight from his warehouse.
“You invented the name, Rudyard,” she reminded him, confirming his suspicion that, as was rumored, Lady Clara heard everything that went on in a room. “You said it at the Queen’s levee.”
“The Luneburg snubbed Ashley,” Plimpton said helpfully. “And then me.”
“And when Mallory said they were the set calling themselves the Gregory girls, or what not, you said we might as well call them Gorgons,” Ashley said.
“And it appears the term has caught on.” Lady Clara smiled. “They’re considered quite odd and outré, so of course I had to invite them.”
Jem’s shoulders itched inside his coat, and he knew the blame was not the fine cambric of his shirt. Good Lord, he’d said one thing in passing, a jest to lighten the mood of his friend, and now it would stick for the Season?
The same way he’d been christened Smart Jeremy. He rather suspected Lady Clara was responsible for that sobriquet.
And what would stick to Judith, were he to bow to her pleas to let her circulate in society?
Girls like the Gorgons would be ruthless with her fragility.
And as for his other siblings, the ones he would prefer no one in this room to ever know about—far, far worse would await them in the man-traps of aristocratic circles.
“The one in that bilious green sack, which is an offense to the eye,” Jem said, affecting a casual swallow of champagne. “If they are the Gorgons, does that make her the Medusa?”
Their hostess smiled at seeing Jem perform the role she had assigned him.
Lady Clara Bellwether had appeared in Jem’s shop about a year ago, one of the first wave of Society matrons inspecting the Marquess of Arendale’s latest heir.
The daughter of an earl and emerging from mourning her wealthy baronet, Clara had taken Jem’s advice on fabrics, cut, and style, and the dashing results had made her a leader of fashion.
He had little doubt she made much of him purely for her own amusement and would cut him off at the knees the moment she displeased him, for no one in London’s haut ton would forget he was a lowly linen draper’s son no matter how many estates he inherited.
Still, Clara was better than The New Peerage for knowing the composition of every ranking family and the secrets they hid behind closed doors.
He wondered how long he could keep his own doors closed against her.
“The one in green is Pevensey’s niece,” Lady Clara said. “Not by blood, but by his second wife, the one he has now. His children are by his first wife, and the daughter is the darling little nuthatch dancing with Mallory.”
Jem probed his knowledge of the aristocracy.
Pevensey was a minor baron, a fairly new creation who, like most of his class, was in debt to his tailor.
The cloth for his daughter’s presentation gown had come from Dixon a tradesman cultivating business interests was not.
Clara paused, which meant she didn’t know and was calculating exactly how interesting she wanted Miss Lucasta Lithwick to become. “A great deal.”
Jem straightened. He’d gained the Pevensey custom, but he didn’t know how much those coffers contained. Tradesmen talked, and Lord Pevensey was in debt everywhere.
The Frotheringales, however, were uncharted territory.
If his shops were to style a viscount’s cousin, that might lead to styling the viscountess, and the new viscount, and in time the new viscount’s bride.
And if they had friends in even higher positions of wealth and influence—there were vast opportunities there.