Chapter 14
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
“He’s besotted with you,” Judith declared. She sat before the spinet, Lucasta at her elbow.
Bertie looked up from the deep chair where she sat with her feet tucked beneath her, a novel on her lap and a dish of sweetmeats on the table beside her. “Indeed he is,” she murmured in agreement.
Lucasta blushed. “I am sure I don’t know who you’re referring to. Now, this passage—”
“You know perfectly well.” Judith smiled. “I’ve never seen Jem so taken with anyone.”
“The only interest your brother has in me is as a music tutor,” Lucasta said briskly. “And refurbishing my wardrobe, it should seem.”
In the last few weeks, Mlle. Beaudoin had just so happened to come across several extraordinary fabrics which she made into gowns for Lucasta.
As much as it embarrassed Lucasta to fear she might have become one of Jeremiah Falstead’s charity cases—or whether it were right to accept the gift—the relief of having properly modish gowns to wear when she conducted charity concert business outweighed her reservations about becoming too much in his pocket, or in his debt.
“Shall I run through this exercise once more?” she asked, determined to distract.
“I have most of it.” Judith played through the small piece, only pausing once or twice to ask Lucasta to clarify a passage or correct her fingering.
Lucasta sorted through the pages of musical scores she had brought, listening with pleasure.
She had received a delightful response to her inquiry to Mélanie de Salignac, who promptly shared her system of using raised print in musical scores.
While this meant Judith could use her fingers to read the musical notes, she really didn’t need notation.
The girl’s ear was remarkable, better than Lucasta’s, and she needed only play a piece through twice to have it committed to memory.
Judith added a final flourish at the end. “Has he declared himself yet?”
Lucasta fanned herself with the sheet music. The small fire, built in the fireplace against the cool day, made the room absurdly hot. “There is nothing to declare.”
In all the time they had spent together the past several weeks, him whisking her from beneath Aunt Pevensey’s pinched stare to bring her to Rose Hollow, or the dances or conversation they shared when their paths crossed at yet another card party or rout, they spoke of nothing more than his family’s health, Mlle.
Beaudoin’s shop, her preparations for the concert, or what Lucasta thought of the evening’s musical offerings.
There were no murmured compliments, no heavy-lidded glances, no pressing of fingers to suggest she meant more to him. She was not being wooed, therefore no reason existed for her insides to flutter like a flock of starlings taking flight each time she saw him. Absolutely no cause whatsoever.
“I suspect he has made a project of me,” Lucasta said.
“Pygmalion fell in love with his project,” Judith said.
“Galatea,” Bertie agreed, popping a bonbon into her mouth.
Bertie was much more relaxed in her cousin’s parlor than in her own.
When Lucasta visited Arendale House for Bertie’s musical lessons, she was received stiffly in a cavernous formal parlor by Lady Payne, who always managed to imply she was standing guard so that Lucasta didn’t lift some priceless object off an occasional table.
In contrast, in the cozy parlor at Rose Hollow both Bertie and Lucasta were greeted with the warmest enthusiasm by the three younger Falstead siblings and the resident cat, a tray of pastries and tea whisked in by Mrs. Cadogan, and a lively go-over of absolutely everything that had happened in the intervening hours since they had seen one another.
Judith hungered for tales of Lucasta’s glittering social round, demanding details of dress, furnishings, music, and conversation, as well as a full transcript of conversations, especially with the men who vied for her attention.
Jem often lingered in the parlor on one pretext or another, eavesdropping on this gossip as if he wasn’t also attending every function Lucasta did, watching with no doubt great amusement, and a great deal of self-congratulation, her absurd transformation into the Season’s toast.
According to Clara Bellwether, no less a person than His Royal Highness Prince George, whom Lucasta had unexpectedly run across when she called at Carleton House with an errand having to do with the charity concert, remarked her a veritable diamond.
Nothing more was needed to make Lucasta Lithwick an unqualified success.
This afternoon, Jem had taken his siblings off with the promise of fishing instruction.
But how, Lucasta wondered, had a draper’s son learned to fish?
And how did a man with a business to run, a man whose taste ruled the current caprices of London fashion, find the time two or three afternoons a week to ferry about his sister’s musical tutor?
She enjoyed their lessons and the easy rapport she had developed with the Falstead girls.
Judith was steady and true, completely artless, though she had a buried sense of mischief.
Bertie had been raised more conscious of her status as a marquess’s granddaughter, and even out from under her mother’s stern eyes, she moved as if wary of her apparent freedom.
And then there was Jem. He was a completely different man among his family than the dandy who strolled society drawing rooms with studied elegance, whose approval was sought, his reprimands crushing.
The man she met and occasionally danced with at evening soirees was not the man she sat beside on their drives to Little Chelsea, snugged under a blanket to keep the dirt of the road from her skirts.
She could not, in good conscience, charge for musical instructions when she was being welcomed as one of the family. Not even she was that grasping.
Which meant she was not building her savings for the musical conservatory she would open when she returned to Bath.
She was spending all her spare time planning the benefit concert.
Time, that was, not spent parading around town on the arm of Trevor Pevensey taking Cici to her entertainments, while the Baron watched with sharp eyes, overseeing this courtship that was not a courtship.
Trevor was amusing, courteously attentive, and completely uninterested in Lucasta, who meant nothing to him beyond a foregone conclusion. She doubted he would make a stir to recover her once she made her feelings clear.
But if the Baron began pressing for a wedding date while Lucasta was still in London—while she still needed his goodwill, and her aunt’s, to take part in the concert she was single-handedly planning—she would find her back to a wall.
And there was no accommodation in any of her plans for a brown-eyed, whiskey-voiced draper’s son who kept a hidden family and ran a clothing empire. No room at all.
“Yes, Galatea.” Lucasta located a simple Mozart concerto that Judith could try.
“I’ve read the story. So disgusted was the sculptor Pygmalion by the changeable and unreliable nature of women that he made himself a companion out of ivory, kissed and caressed her, and draped her with silks and jewels because she pleased him as no mortal woman could.
And when the goddess of love took pity on him and made his ideal woman take flesh, he adored her all the more because she was so innocent in mind and body that she depended entirely on him.
Ovid doesn’t tell us what happened if Galatea ever developed a will or desires of her own, or whether poor deluded Pygmalion could handle sharing his life with an actual living creature. ”
“Peace!” Bertie cried, laughing. “You are no man’s creation, Miss Lithwick. God forgive us if we ever make such a suggestion again.”
“I only mean to say that book ten of the Metamorphosis is devoted to doomed and painful love,” Lucasta said. “Orpheus and Eurydice. Atalanta and her prince. Pygmalion and Galatea.”
“But also about transformation,” Judith said. She ran her fingers over the raised musical notes of the concerto, reading the music. “Have you secured the performers for your concert?”
“I have a roster beyond my wildest dreams,” Lucasta said with a happy sigh.
“Miss Harriet and Miss Theodosia Abrams have agreed to sing a duet. Margaret Kennedy will sing as long as she might wear a gown. She says she is weary of playing breeches roles—it’s what most contraltos are consigned to.
And Mrs. Cecilia Young has promised to make an appearance, though she does not sing in public anymore. ”
“And?” Bertie prompted.
Lucasta laid a hand over the neckerchief filling in the neckline of her day gown.
“Signor Marchesi has consented to perform.” Her heart pounded at the thought.
“He had very kind words about my English version of his Italian song, which I arranged for the harpsichord. I sent him a copy, with my compliments.”
“You should sing a duet,” Bertie suggested.
Lucasta laughed. “I, sing with the great Signor Marchesi! You have taken leave of your senses.”
“I hope you will sing, Lucasta,” Judith said.
“I have no intention of doing so. I will conduct the choir of my foundling girls and accompany some of them in their smaller pieces, but otherwise, I shall be silent.”
“Not to be borne!” Bertie cried. “You ought to shine as well. It is your night.”
“On the contrary, it should look as if I were pushing in.” Aunt Cornelia might have approved Lucasta’s part in organizing the concert—a properly genteel pursuit, after all—but the grand chapel of the Foundling Hospital could hardly pass as an acceptable private venue in which Lucasta might perform.