Chapter Five
Elliot was halfway through his first plate of breakfast when Kate descended the stairs at last and appeared in the dining room looking as if she’d spent a night entirely sleepless.
He swallowed down the mouthful of bacon he’d been chewing on as she speared him with a glare and dropped a stack of correspondence somewhere near his elbow as if throwing down a gauntlet.
“Good morning,” he said pleasantly as she dropped into the chair across from him and scraped the flyaway strands that had escaped her plait away from her face.
“Is it? Is it a good morning?” she grumbled, slanting a grateful look toward the footman who quickly snatched up the tea cup near her place setting, seeming to have determined that if ever a woman existed who urgently required a bracing cup of tea, it was Kate.
“I thought so,” he said as he scooped up a second coddled egg and collected a few toast points.
“The sun is shining. There’s not a cloud in the sky.
” Something of a rarity for London. “It’s a lovely day and I’m in a fine humor.
” The icy glare that she settled upon him over the rim of her tea cup suggested she did not share his assessment of the day. “But plainly you are not. Have you—”
“I have not got wind!” Kate flashed, baring her sharp little teeth at him.
From the doorway, Mrs. Norris cleared her throat.
Kate startled, nearly upsetting her tea, her cheeks instantly flushing a vibrant crimson. “Oh, Lord,” she muttered, her shoulders slumping as she sunk deeper into her seat in humiliation. “Mrs. Norris, I—”
“Not to worry, dear,” Mrs. Norris said as she set a plate of pastries in the center of the table. “I blame Lord Elliot entirely, as I find whatever has gone amiss is usually his doing.”
“That’s hardly fair. I didn’t even say anything,” Elliot said as he reached for a pastry, only for Mrs. Norris to slap his hand away. “Rude!” he accused. “You wouldn’t have slapped Devon’s hand.”
“The duke pays my wages,” Mrs. Norris sniffed, tilting her nose in the air. “You simply eat at my table whenever it pleases you. Guests first.”
“I’m a guest!” Elliot protested.
“You’re family,” Mrs. Norris said, settling her hands upon her hips. “Miss Littlefield and her mother are guests of the duke. You’re welcome to whatever you please once they have served themselves.”
Elliot watched in mute shock as a devious little smirk curled the corner of Kate’s lips.
She stretched her hand across the table and selected the finest pastry upon the plate, the one that was drizzled with honey and dotted with perhaps a dozen more walnuts than the rest. Her hand hovered over it for a second, two—the very pastry that he had been reaching for until Mrs. Norris had smacked his hand away—and then she snatched it up, dangling it in the air like a prize she had won.
“I wanted that one!” Elliot objected, jaw slack.
“I’m a guest,” Kate snipped as she bit into the pastry, savoring it to a degree that might have constituted comical, had Elliot the wherewithal to feel amusement over his chosen pastry being stolen before his very eyes.
Kate’s shrewd eyes scoured the plate, ferreting out the second-best-looking pastry, which she nipped onto a plate and set protectively near her elbow.
“For Mama,” she said by way of explanation. “When she comes down.”
Mrs. Norris made a sound rather like a muffled laugh, which she nearly—but not quite—smothered beneath the staid demeanor she most often employed. At long last, she gave a brisk nod, which Elliot assumed meant he was now free to take whichever of the pastries left he preferred.
“I don’t suppose,” he ventured to her as he cautiously reached for one, “I could trouble you for a handful of walnuts? My pastry is nearly bare.” He favored Mrs. Norris with his most charming smile.
“If my pastries are not to your liking,” Mrs. Norris suggested sweetly, “I’m certain you’ve got more than a passing acquaintanceship with a good number of street vendors. You may purchase as many sugared walnuts as you please from them.”
Elliot pulled a face. “But—”
“Be grateful I thought to make enough for you at all,” Mrs. Norris said, with a haughty lift of her chin. “Since you know full well the household is running on a skeleton staff, given that the duke is not in London, and you gave no indication you’d be attending breakfast, besides.”
This caught Kate’s attention, her dark eyes lifting from the pastry she’d been enjoying. “He didn’t?”
“No, he did not,” Mrs. Norris said. “To my best understanding, Lord Elliot—like many young men during the Season—rarely rises before noon. So it was somewhat of a surprise to find him at my table shortly after dawn.”
Elliot shifted uncomfortably in his chair. “You could hardly expect me to inflict Kate upon London without supervision.”
Kate’s shoulders stiffened as her mouth popped open in offense. “Inflict!” she parroted, her fingers scrunching the soft pastry in her hand. “Inflict me!”
“Perhaps my choice of words was poor,” Elliot allowed.
“Supervision!”
“Now, Kate, you know you could get lost on the hill that runs up to Longthorpe Manor if you hadn’t walked it a hundred times,” Elliot said.
“London’s riddled with winding streets and sharp turns.
You’d get lost the moment you stepped out the door.
It was for your sake I rose with the dawn.
Really, it was exceedingly chivalrous of me.
A noble sacrifice of valuable sleep.” He pitched his voice to a surly grumble.
“Which ought to have earned me the best pastry, if you must know.”
Kate shoved the remainder of the pastry in her mouth, thrusting her chin out in stubborn disagreement. “And was it a noble sacrifice to make me into your social secretary?” she asked, when she had managed to swallow down the last of the pastry.
“I beg your pardon?”
She gave a flippant gesture of her hand, fingers shiny with lingering traces of honey upon them, toward the stack of letters she’d dropped at his side. “Those,” she said, “all require answers.”
“Ah. Well, I thought you’d prefer to choose—”
“How am I to know which to choose! I haven’t the faintest idea of who any of those people are!” She threw up her hands in exasperation. “And I haven’t the faintest idea of what one is meant to wear to a garden party, or a musicale, or—or any of these events, besides.”
“Well,” Elliot said, as he bit into the substandard pastry he’d been allowed, “one typically wears a ball gown to a ball.” He chewed slowly, with consideration. “Provided one is a woman, I mean to say,” he added. Had he imagined it, or had the tiny muscles beneath her left eye twitched?
Kate muttered something beneath her breath as she speared a bit of egg with the tines of her fork, her shoulders set mulishly.
Elliot sipped his tea, allowing himself a small smile, which he carefully hid behind the rim. “What was that?”
Kate flicked a glance toward Mrs. Norris—who had busied herself with clearing away the serving plates which they had emptied—and must have decided that she could speak plainly before the woman, for she hissed, “I said that if you don’t cease needling me, you will be the one in the ball gown.”
The plates clattered in Mrs. Norris’ hands as her shoulders shook with mirth.
“Oh, no, I don’t think so,” Elliot said blithely as he crunched through another piece of toast. “Haven’t got the shoulders for a ball gown.”
That had done it. Mrs. Norris wheezed with laughter, and Kate’s shoulders drooped from their tight set with a reluctant chuckle of her own.
And there, that hint of a dimple in her right cheek—the one he had spent the whole of his life playing the fool just to catch the briefest of glimpses of from time to time, whenever he could manage to coax it out of her.
Perhaps the whole world thought him a rogue, a rapscallion, a ne’er-do-well.
And it was true that he’d few enough accomplishments to his name which might turn the tide of public opinion.
But he had long considered his greatest achievement to be the ability to make Kate laugh.
Even in the midst of a burgeoning pique, he had developed a particular talent for turning a sour mood toward humor.
“I’m sorry,” he said, genuinely contrite, as he collected the letters she’d cast down near his elbow.
“I promised you your pick of events. I’m afraid I didn’t consider that you might not know where to begin.
” And he hadn’t realized that there would be quite so many invitations to consider.
Probably it had been a daunting task in the extreme, especially for a woman so unaccustomed to the busy social schedules that made up the London Season.
Kate gave a little shake of her head and puffed the fringe of her bangs away from her eyes.
The rigid stiffness of her spine melted to a more relaxed posture, and Elliot felt a twinge of sympathy as he noted the faint dark circles beneath her eyes that bore witness to what had likely been a mostly-sleepless night.
“You’re invited to so many places,” she said, her voice tinged with exhaustion, and what he thought must be a little worry, a little more apprehension.
“I’m good company,” he said, as he began to thumb through the long-neglected invitations. “Not this one, I think,” he said as he discarded one.
Kate craned her neck to peer at it. “Whyever not?”
“It’s a musicale.”
A pinch of her dark brows as confusion bloomed across her face. “I thought I was meant to attend musicales with you?
“Certainly. But not Lady Beresford’s. She thinks she has got a family full of musical talent.”
“Has she not?”