Chapter Three
Oh, good,” Elliot said, as he hopped out of the carriage which had rolled up before the small cottage the Littlefields occupied. “The dresses have arrived.”
“Only this morning,” Kate said, a hint of disgruntlement playing about her mouth and scrawled between the pinch of her dark brows. It had been something of a surprise to have so many new things arrive with such alacrity. “However did you manage it so swiftly?”
Elliot coughed into his fist. “The village seamstress had a few ready-made things that will do well enough for travel. I had to guess at the measurements, but I’d wager I wasn’t too far off.
” A rake of his gloved hand through his windswept gold hair.
“Of course, there isn’t a lot of call for silk or satin out here in the countryside, so your formal attire will have to be obtained in London—but I know of a modiste who happens to be both suitably discreet and well-versed in the latest fashions.
” He gave a gesture of his hand to signal the footman to begin loading Kate and her mother’s trunks.
“We’ll allude to some mishap with your luggage, if necessary,” he said, “until both of you have got serviceable wardrobes made up.”
“Both of us?” Mrs. Littlefield’s brows raised toward her hairline.
“Of course,” Elliot said. “I can hardly let you go about London in anything but the height of fashion. You’re to be chaperoning Katie; you must have a proper wardrobe.
” He hastened to hand Kate into the carriage; a bit of gentlemanly nonsense that served to remind her that he was, in point of fact, a gentleman.
It had been an easy enough thing to forget most days, since she still carried the vivid memories of being children together and of shoving—and being shoved—into convenient mud puddles, or tumbling together down the massive hill that rode up the western part of the land toward Longthorpe Manor.
Or, in more recent years, of plucking him out of fields and setting him to rights once again.
She wondered absently, as she settled onto the plush seat of the carriage, whether London knew an entirely different side of Elliot than she did. Whether he was a different sort of person altogether within its boundaries. Whether she, too, would meet that version of him.
Mama slid in beside her, smoothing at the soft muslin of her new traveling dress as she did, her fingers savoring the texture of it.
They’d had a new dress each only last year—an unusual indulgence—but already the fabric had begun to pill and the threads to pull.
New traveling dresses were a luxury beyond what their meager budget could manage.
Especially given that Kate had never been more than five miles away from her home in the whole of her life.
“I do hope,” Kate said wryly as Elliot planted himself into his seat across from them, “that discretion doesn’t intend to imply that you mean to send us to whichever modiste your mistress prefers.”
Mama’s eyes widened behind the lenses of her spectacles. “Kate!” she chided, horrified at the suggestion. “I’m surprised at you.”
“I’m not,” Elliot said, one corner of his mouth twitching upward in a wry grin. “What sort of man do you take me for, Katie?”
“Just the sort that begs his friend to find him a wife.”
“Touché.” A wheeze of a laugh drifted across his lips as he rapped upon the roof of the carriage. “I have got friends in London, you know. Rebecca—Lady Crewe; the wife of my friend Richard from my university days—is considered quite fashionable. It’s her favored modiste of whom I was speaking.”
Oh. Of course. Elliot was convivial, amiable, genial—of course had friends in London, and a social life there which did not include her.
It had just never seemed to follow him home here, as if that nebulous world he inhabited when away from the countryside had gone hazy and murky, paused in his absence.
He trotted it out only on those occasions when he sought to entertain her with his stories, and packed it away neatly once more when he had finished.
But they wouldn’t be just stories any longer, those people he knew, those members of the Ton which he counted amongst his friends and acquaintances.
Kate’s hands, once laid properly in her lap, linked before her.
Beneath the thin fabric of her gloves—also new, having arrived along with a few dresses this morning—she knew her knuckles has gone white.
“And these friends of yours…” Her voice had come out just a bit strained, as the magnitude of the task she had agreed to weighed more heavily still upon her shoulders.
“Will this scheme not cause you trouble with them?” To drag a stranger into their midst; a woman who would plainly not belong amongst them. To foist her presence upon them?
“Not at all. That is to say, Rebecca and Richard have got two young children and their own social schedules to manage besides. Probably they will be quite grateful to you for saving them the effort themselves.”
Her shoulders slipped down into a more natural slope, tension dissipating minutely.
Even if he was wrong, she reasoned, probably it wouldn’t matter.
Once she’d found him a wife and returned to the countryside, the likelihood that she would ever encounter anyone from her brief time in London again would be practically nonexistent.
Mama peered out through the window, sighing at the sight of their little village disappearing into the distance as the carriage made the main road at last, heading south toward London.
“Lord Elliot,” she said, “if it is not too terribly much trouble, might we find the time to visit the theatre in London?”
“Of course we’ll go to the theatre,” he said easily.
“You haven’t truly been to town if you’ve not experienced the theatre.
And there will be dinner parties and balls and musicales—all manner of entertainments.
You are doing me a monumental favor, after all.
I promise you, you’ll both have the grandest time I can give to you. ”
A favor. Yes; to sort through the veritable cavalcade of eligible women who would cast themselves into his path and to determine which might make a suitable Lady Elliot Holbrook.
Somehow, she had never considered that Elliot would find himself in so much demand, and the thought landed awkwardly in her head, as if it didn’t fit quite comfortably.
An unwieldy thing, it took up far too much space in Kate’s mind, shunting other thoughts aside.
Elliot, an eligible bachelor now in his own right.
Elliot, the playmate of her youth. Elliot, whose nose she had bloodied a time or two on those rare occasions that he had deserved it, who had taught her to lace her own boots, and who had in their teens thrashed the butcher’s son when he’d called her a foul name.
Elliot, who she had seen hale and healthy, drunk and sickly, and once, when he’d somehow contracted cowpox, speckled with unsightly sores.
Elliot, who had let her cry upon his shoulder when her father had passed on, and who had cried upon hers when that same grief had been visited upon him.
It seemed a curious blend of impossible and inevitable.
But a tiny corner of her heart ached at the thought of it, of the inexorable procession of time.
Time which would carry him farther and farther afield, and away from Northampton.
It would have to. Elliot might have grown up here at Longthorpe Manor, but it belonged now to his brother Devon, the duke.
Perhaps Devon’s eventual duchess would not wish to have her scapegrace brother-in-law so frequently underfoot. Perhaps Elliot’s eventual wife would have no particular liking for the countryside. So he would have to have a home of his own somewhere else entirely. And where would that leave Kate?
Alone, most days. With her sheep.
“Though I can’t say I agree with your brother’s methods,” Mama said conversationally, settling herself back in her seat in preparation for what promised to be an incredibly long journey, “I suppose most young men must marry eventually.”
That affable smile firmly affixed to Elliot’s face grew strained, no longer appearing quite so natural as it had only moments ago. “Eventually,” he conceded, with the smallest inclination of his head. “When the right woman presents herself.”
What a peculiar turn of phrase. “Have you not considered,” Kate said, “that the right woman might present herself this Season, and you won’t have needed me at all?”
And there—his lips twitched in the subtle relaxation of the tension that had held his face frozen for the space of several long, agonizing seconds.
“Even if the right woman happened to be in London this Season—which, thus far, she has not—I’d have been hard pressed to catch so much as a glimpse of her through all the wrong ones barreling at me.
Perhaps, when the field has been cleared, I’ll be better able to see who’s left standing. ”
Mama gave a muffled flutter of laughter behind the shield of her fingers. “The way you describe it, Lord Elliot, one would think you were speaking of war.”
“It’s the marriage mart,” Elliot said. “Of course it’s war. A frightfully civilized sort of war, but a war nonetheless.”
Mama’s eyes widened in astonishment. “Is it really?”
“Oh, yes. I am besieged, I tell you—not by generals commanding troops, but by the most fearsome, fierce, and determined of all creatures.” Elliot let a moment pass in silence, and Mama canted her head in confusion.
Kate gently nudged Mama in the ribs and said, “He means the women.”
Mama blinked, stunned, as she adjusted her spectacles once more. “Surely not.”
“You doubt my assessment? I have seen a woman feign a faint in such a manner designed to force the man of her choosing to catch her in his arms.”
Mama gave an appalled gasp, and her fingers fished her handkerchief out of her pocket only so that she could clutch it to her chest like some sort of scandalized damsel. “What a shameless ploy. They’re not truly so bold as all that?”
“Oh, they are, and I can tell you that with some certainty, as the man intended to catch her was me.” There was the familiar hitch of the corner of his mouth in that saucy, devil-may-care grin.
“I would have let her fall and pretended ignorance, but the man beside me proved more gentlemanly than me.”
Was it only this Season in which he had been inundated with ardent admirers, or had they always been there in the periphery of his London life, waiting for the opportunity to present itself before them?
“What’s wrong?” Elliot asked, his brows drawing into a frown. “Have you got an affliction of wind?”
Kate startled, ruffling up like a wet hen. “What? No, I haven’t got wind! What manner of question is that?”
“The manner of question it is prudent to ask when one considers that the last time I glimpsed that particular expression upon someone’s face, it was shortly before Richard and Rebecca’s infant son soiled his nappy right in my arms. Suffice it to say, I learned a valuable lesson from that particular ordeal, and I’d appreciate a bit of a warning before—”
Kate could feel her face heating to a vibrant red. “I don’t have wind!”
“Well, it’s a long ride yet to London, so if you do—”
“I tell you, I won’t!” Her fingers twitched in her lap, unconsciously seeking something to lob at his head.
She hadn’t been moved to such an action in years and years, and Elliot might well be the only man in the world capable of moving her to such heights of indignation.
Where was her reticule? Surely something in it would be substantial enough to serve the purpose of knocking that maddening smirk straight off of his face—oh.
He was jesting. Teasing her, just the same as he’d always done. And as that smirk gave way to a wheeze of a laugh, which he tried—and failed—to smother beneath the tip of his fingers, Kate spluttered, “Oh, you wretched, misbegotten son of a—”
“Children!” Mama shrilled, her voice an odd blend of interest and horror. “That is quite enough out of both of you. I cannot believe such indecorous talk of bodily functions would be welcome anywhere in London!”
Elliot linked his hands in his lap. “Well—”
Mama narrowed her eyes behind the lenses of her spectacles, pinning him with a stern stare. “You are not to escort my daughter anywhere such talk would be welcome. Is that perfectly clear?”
Elliot’s shoulders slouched, and for half a moment, he looked nothing so much like the boy he’d once been, pouting to have been so thoroughly disabused of such a notion in no uncertain terms. “Yes, ma’am,” he grumbled in the selfsame inflection he had since childhood whenever his mischief had earned him a rebuke, though the faintest trace of amusement still rippled at the edges of his voice.
Kate slid her foot across the carriage floor and nudged his boot with the toe of her shoe. “Elliot, be serious,” she chided.
“Aw, Katie,” he said, as he braced his arm against the wall of the carriage and let a heartfelt sigh drift from his lungs, that hangdog expression now firmly fixed upon her. “I must take my levity where I can find it, you know. And so ought you.”
“Me?” Kate blinked, startled.
A flicker of that mischief etched itself into his cheek along with a flash of dimple. “You’ll never find such entertainment as there is to be had in London,” he said. “Sheep, I imagine, aren’t terribly scintillating conversationalists.”
“No,” Kate allowed, with a prim sniff. “Not particularly.” Though she had found it at least a bit amusing when that little lamb had pranced gaily across Elliot’s midsection. “However, neither are they known for their predilection for gossip or rumor-mongering.”
“Damn shame—beg pardon, Mrs. Littlefield. Love a good rumor; the more unlikely the better. And the gossip! We’ll have to find you some good scandal rags when we arrived in London. You don’t know what you’ve been missing.” A cheeky wink followed. “But you’ll find out. I’ll make certain of it.”
Oh, Lord. Kate rolled her eyes to the heavens and cast up a silent and undoubtedly futile prayer for patience. It was too soon yet to regret this scheme—but a part of her was certain she would. Eventually.