Chapter Seven
Tucked away in a quiet corner of his club, Elliot tapped his fingertips upon the surface of the table, producing a disjointed, restless rhythm that earned him a glare from someone at a neighboring table.
“It’s nearly five o’clock,” he said as he withdrew his hand from the table to tug at his cravat instead.
His companion—Richard, Lord Crewe—heaved a sigh as he reached into his pocket to retrieve his watch and check the time. “So it is,” he said. “Would you stop fidgeting? You’re making me nervous.”
“What if they’re not getting on?”
“Of course they’re getting on. It’s been hours.”
“That’s just the thing,” Elliot said. “It’s been hours. What could they possibly be doing that would take so long?”
Richard released a long, low breath as he pinched the bridge of his nose. “I always forget you’ve only brothers,” he said. “My sisters could spend hours and hours at the modiste without batting an eye.”
But could Kate? Elliot could count on one hand the number of gowns he’d seen her wear in the past five years.
Probably the ones he’d purchased ready-made from the village’s only seamstress had at least doubled her wardrobe.
“Kate’s mostly made her own dresses,” he said.
“Or her mother has.” Though there had been a time, when her father had still been living, that there had been money in their meager budget for finer clothes, their circumstances had been substantially reduced since.
“I think she was perhaps twelve or thirteen the last time I saw her wear anything with even the slightest hint of lace or ribbon.”
“Well, she will have that opportunity now,” Richard said decisively.
“Rebecca has got fine taste and she adores lace and ribbon. And Madame Dubois, I am assured, has got the finest fabrics there are to be found.” He lifted his glass to his lips and drank down the last of his brandy.
“I’ve instructed the staff to send a note to me here when they’ve returned. And as it has not yet arrived…”
Then they had not yet returned. Which could be good, provided they were still engaged in…whatever it was, exactly, that women did when at the modiste. Elliot found himself wondering whether or Kate was enjoying herself.
Probably not, he decided with a sigh. She had always seemed to enjoy herself most out of doors, like there lived an itch beneath the surface of her skin that was only soothed when the sun was upon her face, and the fresh air tugged at loose strands of her hair.
She had never seemed particularly aggrieved by the limitations of her wardrobe, nor the fact that nothing she owned could remotely be said to be in the height of fashion.
What would she look like, when Rebecca had finished with her? Would she wear those silks and ribbons like an uncomfortable disguise? Would she still look like the Kate he had always known?
As he lifted his glass to his lips, he found it snatched away from him before he could drink.
“That’s enough for you, I think,” Richard said as he pushed the glass to the farthest edge of the table, too distant for Elliot to comfortably reach. “Much more, and you’ll be crawling by the time the ladies are done.”
“It wasn’t so much,” Elliot protested.
“No, but there will be wine with dinner, and then port when the ladies go off to the drawing room. You don’t want to escort Kate back home in your cups, now, do you?”
He supposed Richard had something of a point. Obvious drunkenness would hardly aid his cause, and certainly would not impress Kate or her mother. “How many guests are there to be tonight?” he asked.
“Rebecca has got the exact count,” Richard said, with a blasé shrug of his shoulders. “I’d expect twenty. Perhaps thirty.”
“Thirty! I told Kate it would be small. Informal.”
“Your mistake,” Richard said. “Rebecca does nothing by halves. Besides, thirty is small for her. You know she’d throw a ball every week of the Season if she could get away with such a thing. Loves the social whirl.”
Elliot slumped in his seat, raking his fingers through his hair. “Kate is going to kill me,” he said on a defeated groan. “Her very first Ton event, and I’ve thrust her straight into the thick of it.”
Richard gave a little hum of a laugh over his glass.
“She was always going to be thrust into the thick of it,” he said.
“Whether by your own social calendar, or the veritable deluge of people that will come calling upon her out of sheer curiosity.” He slapped Elliot’s hand away as it inched relentlessly toward the glass that had been placed out of his reach.
“Stop that. Rebecca has an incredible talent for making friends even amongst the most curmudgeonly, and I doubt your Kate is so cantankerous as all that. You can be certain Rebecca will do her damnedest to ensure Kate is made comfortable.” He gave a little snort as he leaned back in his chair.
“Probably,” he said, “she’ll stick to Kate’s side like she’s been sown there just to ensure none of our guests suffocate her in their efforts to sink their hooks into you. ”
His Kate. She wasn’t, really. But might she be?
“Stop worrying,” Richard said again, annoyed. “I can practically see those little-used cogs within your brain turning round and round, you absolute ninny. Do you wish to give Kate cause to be worried?”
“No, of course not.” Elliot’s leg jogged in a restless rhythm beneath the table as he strove to collect himself, to quiet his jangling nerves. “What if she hates London?” he blurted out. “What if she doesn’t get on with Rebecca? What if—”
Unimpressed, Richard produced a frown that stilled Elliot’s tripping tongue mid-sentence. “Really,” Richard said, “you ought to have considered all of that before you concocted this harebrained scheme. Or, at the very least, during.”
“It’s not harebrained. It’s—” Well, at the time, he’d thought it a very cunning plan indeed.
But he had also been three ales deep at the village tavern in Northampton after having been unceremoniously ejected from Longthorpe Manor on Devon’s orders, and grappling with the unfortunate realization that practically every unmarried woman of his acquaintance had set their caps for him except the only one he’d ever wanted.
It, like so many other plots and schemes he’d contrived throughout his life, had seemed like a good idea at the time.
“It’s not entirely harebrained,” he concluded weakly, though he was certain the slump of his shoulders implied otherwise.
“And besides, you have been pressing me to do something for years, now.”
“You’ve been a damned miserable moping mess for years,” Richard intoned dryly.
“Oh, you put on a good show in public, I’ll grant you, but one does tire of so much maudlin, lovelorn sighing.
” He gave a dismissive sniff over his glass.
“You’ve sounded like nothing so much as a grieving widow mourning a lost love.
One wonders why you bother with London at all, when you’d clearly rather be at home in the countryside. ”
Yes, he would. Of course he would, because Kate was there, too.
But it was something torturous, to spend so much of his time in Kate’s company knowing all the while that she saw only the companion of her youth while he saw in her the love of his life.
“Absence is meant to make the heart grow fonder,” Elliot muttered sulkily as he sank further in his seat.
“It hasn’t, though. She’s just as fond of me as she’s always been.
” He pinned Richard with a wry glance. “But I did do something.”
Richard gave a little snort of laughter. “I suppose I ought to have expected something like this from you,” he said. “I didn’t. But I ought to have done.”
“I swear to God I will, without complaint, allow you to hold this incident over my head for the remainder of my life entire, if you will only help me,” Elliot said.
“I have got her here with me, and now…now I need to make her see me at last. As something other than only her feckless, foolish friend.” He shifted uncomfortably in his seat, and continued in a rush, “I want her to have a place for herself here. She’s the daughter of a gentleman, but no one could say our respective social standings are comparable.
She’s anxious enough only to be here as it is.
I cannot allow social acceptance—or a lack thereof—to prove an impediment.
” There would probably be talk anyway of a duke’s son marrying a veritable unknown, but as he was only a third son, that talk would likely be short-lived.
“I count myself infinitely lucky,” he said, “that my position in the ducal line of succession ensures I have no particular need to produce a great number of little blue-blooded heirs, because I have known since I was thirteen years old that I wanted to marry Kate, and I was never happier than the day I realized that the order of my birth—neither heir nor spare—made it a possibility for me.”
“If you can convince her.”
“Yes. If.” Elliot’s breath shuddered from his lungs on a massive sigh. “So will you help me?”
“I was always going to help you, you absolute dunderhead,” Richard scoffed. “Rebecca’s been beside herself with anticipation. She’s wanted to meet Kate for a good long while, you know.”
“I know.” But if they didn’t get on—
“I said stop worrying,” Richard chastised once more, and Elliot realized he’d lapsed once more into it, gnawing at his lower lip and needling the edge of the table with his blunt fingernails.
“If you must concern yourself with something, let it be how you intend to woo a woman who hasn’t the faintest idea of your interest in her. ”
“It’s more complicated even than that,” Elliot confessed, with a beleaguered sigh. “Were I to profess such a thing, she’d think me joking. Or worse—she might well think I was making sport of her. So I have got to exercise a skill I have never much cultivated.”
“And what is that?” Richard inquired.
“Subtlety.”