Chapter 3 #2
He had cut her neatly away from her friends and any hope of defense. Minnie looked haughty, Annis amused, Selina full of longing, and Cici was being led out again by Major Mallory. Was that their second dance, or the third?
Rudyard stepped them into a circle with another couple before Lucasta realized. “I ought not dance, milord. I have not been presented.”
“I was given to understand that such rules are relaxed if we are in a private home.” He turned to face her, all feral elegance.
He did not have the powdered, polished complexion of a man who spent his days indoors, sleeping off a night of dissipation. He possessed the physique of a man who engaged in regular physical activity.
And his voice was nothing like honey. Rather a rich, creamy damask silk that she wanted to rub her hands and face in.
She must not add foolishness to her other deficiencies. Lucasta could cut her hair, throw on breeches, and run away to the stage, but this was the world Cici inhabited, that her friends needed to navigate. Lucasta could not stoop so low that they would suffer from association with her.
“I particularly do not know the allemande,” Lucasta warned as the music commenced. It was a dance that would require them not only to touch but to intimately intertwine their arms. No man save her father had touched her person beyond the remotest extremities.
“Yet here we are.” One of his brows rose, the color of chocolate, and she wondered if his hair was that color also. The color of the plowed fields about the vicar’s cottage before the wheat was planted in the spring. The sight brought a pang to her chest, a yearning for that long-gone home.
“Ah, well. It is not as if I shall be admitted to Almack’s anyway.” She didn’t need to glance about the room to know a great number of people were staring at them. At Lord Rudyard, dancing with her.
If only she knew why.
“Do you desire entrée to Almack’s?” he asked.
“No. I mean, yes, as Cici wishes to go.”
“But you do not?”
“The question is moot, as my aunt has not been supplied with vouchers.” She concentrated on her steps, biting her lip. “What else do you wish to know about Cici?”
One corner of his mouth quirked. He did have the most pleasing arrangement of features. She’d been right to call him too handsome for his own good. “Are you interrogating me about your cousin?”
“Are you not here to learn what you can from me? Why else lead me out?”
They twined arms to turn in a figure, and Lucasta focused on her feet rather than the brief press of their bodies. She must not give rein to her sharp tongue. When the passé brought her about to face him, his lips quirked in a smile, unamused.
“If I wished to pursue an acquaintance with Miss Pevensey, one imagines I would address her.”
His guard was up. The cool reserve he’d held with Lady Cranbury had slipped for a moment, but it was back now. He thought she meant to use their dance to throw Cici at his head.
For he was Rudyard now, and in possession of every virtue an ambitious mama could desire.
Heir to grand estates and a title, not known to be profligate or of questionable habits, young, healthy, and not, she could grudgingly concede, a horror to the eye.
Every matron in the room with a marriageable daughter would be taking a crack at him.
And he’d caught Lucasta evaluating him, but that was what one did at these functions. An insult from her could not reach him, high as he was, though through no deserving of his own. She was a flea biting the hock of a draught horse, a fly buzzing the ear of the King.
Besides, she’d merely accused him of caring too much about his appearance. He’d named Miss Gregoire’s girls Gorgons.
Though she had to admit there was a certain pleasure in being thought fearsome, and the girls were like to adopt the label for themselves.
He had called Selina a zebra. Lucasta reminded herself of this as the dance turned her away from his too-keen regard. He held the common narrow bigotry of his class, and all the power with which the upper circles suffocated those of whom they disapproved.
Lucasta was glad her mother had left that shallow world for a life of deep contentment with her father.
She was glad she’d been raised in what anyone in this room would consider abject poverty.
The Season in London was a circus tightrope, everyone performing the same tricks, everyone watching one another, eager for a slip or a fall.
And the scales weighed not one’s character or actions, but one’s appearance, charm, and pounds of income a year.
“I have lost you in thought,” Rudyard remarked as the figure brought them together.
“I was only thinking of something Lady Cranbury said,” Lucasta said, watching the other dancers to follow their steps.
“About how high my cousin might marry. She possesses all the usual accomplishments, in spades. She sings, she plays, she paints, she embroiders, but all that others weigh of her is her dowry and her name.”
“That is the way things are done, I observe. Her father, the Baron, hinted to me at her come-out ball that she would make an excellent little wife.”
Lucasta frowned. “She is a dear, soft-hearted girl, and her one wish in the world is to have lots of babies. But she is seventeen, too young to be considering such a decision as marriage. Though young enough to be taken advantage of by those older and far more jaded than she.”
“Suitors like me, do you mean?” His shoulders went taut, his arm stiffening as he turned about, his expression bland when he faced her once more. “Very well, if you insist, I’m afraid the Baron must be disappointed.”
Lucasta could have cried with relief. He would overlook Cici. He had as much as promised, and gentlemen were absurd about keeping their word.
That did not mean anyone else was safe from him, however.
“But would you desire vouchers to Almack’s nevertheless?” he said in that silky voice. “I could secure them for you.”
“I was not aware you had been made a patroness of Almack’s,” Lucasta said without thinking.
He laughed, and she flushed with mortification as heads turned in their direction. Everyone would think she was flirting with Smart Jeremy. Her friends would think she was flirting with Smart Jeremy.
Selina would think Lucasta was flirting with Smart Jeremy. After what he had said, and done, to Selina.
“I might be able to procure you a Stranger’s Ticket,” Rudyard said. “Or I could speak to Lady Hillsborough about dispensing vouchers of your own. We happen to be friends.”
Of course she should want vouchers to Almack’s, a venue to see and be seen, a visible stamp of approval of one’s breeding and welcome among higher circles.
She hoped Aunt Pevensey, or Cici, never learned that Lucasta had scorned to take a gift from Smart Jeremy’s hands.
But the further he stayed from her cousin, the safer she’d be.
Lucasta gave him a stony look. “I wonder what other items you are able to procure outside of the usual means, milord? Tea? Chocolate? French champagne?”
“You think me one of those wily merchants who avoids paying customs duty and excise tax?” He bared his teeth in a smile. “A shame, I suppose, that I am no better than I should be.”
She was expecting the thrust, and yet his softly whispered blow took her off guard.
Lucasta stumbled, right there in the steps of the allemande, before all of Lady Clara’s guests.
She saw the gulf of shame rising up to meet her as she began to fall—as she’d vowed she would never do—at Smart Jeremy’s feet.
He could have his revenge right here. All he had to do was let go.
Though she had managed to keep in graceful step with him, it was clear she was not practiced at the dance, though only a shade less acquainted than himself.
Her hand on his arm was the lightest brush, as if she disdained to touch him.
He could simply let her fall, and she would never recover from the humiliation of tripping over her feet in Clara Bellwether’s parlor.
He guessed she was too proud to bear any sort of embarrassment. The gossips would feast on her, and the titters would follow her to every social function hereafter.
Just as the name Smart Jeremy followed him.
He caught her hand and stepped close, pulling her against him and into the turn. He looked down—he did not have to look far, she was so tall—to see that her cheeks had gone scarlet, as if splattered with paint.
Her face was wonderfully transparent, betraying every emotion that dashed through her: fear, mortification, annoyance, and surprise.
He waited for remorse. She might mock him for following fashion, but he was still Arendale’s heir.
Even Lady Cranbury, who had been one of the loudest detractors of Gerald Falstead’s choice to knit himself to a tradesman’s daughter, had demanded Jem’s approval of her dress.
Miss Lithwick gained her balance and tried tugging her hand from his. Jem tightened his grip so she might not leave him standing alone on the dance floor. The humiliation would be his, if she did. Everyone would assume he had insulted her.
“You said it, and I heard you,” he said softly. “So stay and face me.”
He could see the calculation taking place: to grovel, beg his forgiveness, attempt to gain his favor, like all the others who scorned him behind his back and smiled to his front.
She raised her steady gaze to him, and her scowl said she wasn’t the least repentant.
“You run a grave risk, milord Rudyard. Medusa turned any man she looked upon to stone.”
She was going to brazen it out, the minx. To own what she said, and take the consequences. How rare, for a woman.
“Is there more you wish to say? I thought your epigram quite clever, by the by.”