Chapter Nine #2
“It’s…rather tame,” Kate said as her horse maintained a sedate, plodding pace alongside Elliot’s.
A little inclination of her head indicated his own horse; a spirited gelding that appeared to resent the placid stroll when he plainly wished to be given his head to run. “Your horse wants to gallop,” she said.
“He’s Devon’s horse, actually,” Elliot said, giving the horse a gentle pat to the side of the neck. “He’s a good lad, most of the time. But I’m afraid he’ll have to content himself with nothing more strenuous than a trot. The park is far too crowded to manage anything else.”
Kate wasn’t certain what she expected of Hyde Park.
Possibly something resembling the rolling hills of her home, where one could look out from the top and see the village below to one side and miles of open land to the other.
A place where a person could give a horse its head and ride on with the wind at one’s back at an exhilarating pace, as she and Elliot had done on innumerable occasions in the countryside.
Instead she found there was little difference between Hyde Park and the Crewes’ dinner party, except that horses had also been invited here.
People milled about the edges of the Serpentine, stopping to greet those they knew and perhaps offering a nod here and there to those with whom they were not yet personally acquainted.
There was a pageantry to it, she supposed, but it seemed infinitely more constrained than that to which she was accustomed, and not nearly as fun.
“Slowly,” Elliot said in a cautionary tone, as Kate’s horse danced a nose ahead of his. “We ought not outpace your mother.”
Kate gave a muted huff beneath her breath.
Mama had never had much enjoyment of riding.
She had come along with them as a chaperone, but Elliot had seen her comfortably situated in a curricle, where her presence would be noted, but she would not be forced to endure a horseback ride which would have brought her little pleasure.
“We’ve been on dozens of rides without my mother’s presence,” Kate remarked in a grumbly-surly voice that put her in mind of a sullen child.
Elliot chuckled, that damned wretched infuriating dimple appearing in the smooth-shaven surface of his cheek once more. “In the countryside,” he said. “But this is London. The Ton lives on gossip and scandal. Venturing out of your mother’s sight would be good meat for the gossips.”
“How!” Kate asked, her fingers tightening upon the reins. “No, truly, tell me—how could there be gossip? The park is stuffed to the gills with people!”
Elliot’s shoulders shook with silent mirth, plainly amused that Kate did not have the same intrinsic understanding of such things as did he. “It’s the way of things,” he said. “You’re still of an age to require a chaperone.”
As if her entire life had not consisted of traipsing across the countryside with him, irrespective of chaperonage! “Oh, come,” she insisted. “What could possibly happen with so many people present? What scandal could possibly come of it?”
“You’d be surprised,” he said in such a dry, droll tone of voice that Kate wondered—strangely—if he had found himself at the center of such a scandal.
And with whom? But even as her tongue twisted about the ill-advised question that sprang to it, Elliot’s gaze sharpened in the distance.
“We’ll walk from here,” he said, a hint of eagerness in his voice as he swung himself off of his horse and jumped to the ground.
Potential embarrassment momentarily averted, Kate found her lips curling around fresh questions. “What? Why?” she asked as she drew her own horse to a halt.
Elliot’s hands found the span of her waist, holding her securely as he helped her down from her sidesaddle perch to land lightly upon the dry earth. “Sugared almonds,” he said. “Can’t you smell them?”
Cautiously, Kate took a sniff. “Not above the horse manure and coal smoke,” she said, wrinkling her nose as Elliot released her at last. “But somehow I am not surprised that you can.”
“I had hardly anything at all for breakfast,” he said, affecting an abashed expression even as his gaze darted to the left and into the distance, where she supposed he must have spotted the sugared almond vendor. “Had to eat and dash, as it were. And luncheon is such a long way off.”
“You liar,” Kate accused. “I saw you sneak a sausage and a second pastry on your way out. Mrs. Norris is quite put out with you, you know. She says you’re liable to eat her out of house and home at the rate you’re going through your brother’s larder.
” Which was curious indeed, given that Mrs. Norris had implied he was a rare guest for meals even when his brother was in town, and she had proclaimed it rarer still for Elliot—whom she had implied was known to be a late riser—to come for breakfast, of all meals.
“Wife-hunting is hungry work,” he said, with a nonchalant shrug of his shoulders as he gestured past Kate toward where Mama’s curricle was positioned.
A few moments later, a footman came jogging up, offering a brief bow.
Elliot tugged the reins of Kate’s horse from her hands, gathered up his own, and passed them to the footman.
“Hold the horses, would you? We’re going for sugared almonds.
Tell Mrs. Littlefield as much when the curricle passes close enough; we won’t be out of sight. ”
As the footman led the horses away from the road to permit other riders to pass, Elliot turned in the direction of the sugared almond vendor, gesturing for Kate to come along. “I can walk off with you,” she said, in measured tones of disbelief, “but I cannot ride off with you?”
“We’ll remain in sight,” Elliot repeated as he paused briefly to root through his coat pockets.
“That’s half the point of the curricle. It’s an open vehicle, so your mother can enjoy the fresh air and the rare sunshine—and everyone present knows you are not unchaperoned.
Oh,” he said as he paused and withdrew a small object from his pocket and turned to press it into her hands.
“The notebook you requested of me,” he said.
“There’s a pencil, too. Easier to take notes on the go with a pencil, I should think. ”
Oh. Notes on potential wives. Elliot’s potential wives.
Wife, rather, since he would only have the one.
Kate’s fingers closed upon the little leather-bound book, and her stomach performed an odd pitch and flip, not unlike those it had experienced most recently in the closed, tight confines of a carriage.
“Thoughtful of you,” she said blandly, only because she thought she was supposed to have said something of the gift, whether or not she meant it.
“I rather thought so.” There again was the mischievous quirk of his lips, as if they shared some private joke between them.
Kate wondered why she did not find it nearly as amusing as he seemed to do.
Shouldn’t she have done? Yet she could not bring herself to so much as twitch the corners of her lips upward in even the most pallid, pitiful excuse for an answering smile.
She’d left her reticule in Mama’s keeping, and so she was forced to carry the notebook and the pencil together in her hands as they proceeded in the direction of the sugared almond vendor.
She blamed the sweatiness of her palms beneath her gloves upon the growing heat of the day, and wondered how such a small book—smaller even than the span of her hand, and with no more than a hundred pages tucked within its binding—could feel somehow so damned heavy.
∞∞∞
Elliot crunched into a sugared almond, silently enjoying the bewildered expression that had settled upon Kate’s face as they meandered toward the footpath that ran beside the road meant for carriages and horses.
Just ahead, Kate’s mother was perched in the curricle, her face shielded from the sun by a straw bonnet.
Elliot lifted his hand to give a jaunty wave, which prompted Kate to do the same, though her pinched-brow, perplexed expression had not eased.
She had always worn her emotions plainly upon her face, but that was only to be expected.
She’d never had occasion to learn the artifice with which the Ton preferred to comport itself.
Had never had the need to blunt her tongue or to craft a careful mask to don in public, lest too deep a frown or too broad a smile be misconstrued and bandied about as if it might contain a deeper significance.
The notebook had not pleased her. It hadn’t exactly annoyed her, or exasperated her, as one who had been suddenly assigned a hated chore might have been. But it had not pleased her to be given this little token, the purpose of which was ostensibly to make her task easier to manage.
“I had a thought,” Elliot remarked casually as he crunched through another small handful of almonds, watching Kate’s face change from flustered and flummoxed to a brewing stormcloud of irritation.
“The last time you had a thought,” she said, jabbing the point of the pencil he’d given her in his direction, as if she were giving serious consideration toward skewering him with it, “I ended up in London, tasked with finding you a wife!”
Elliot produced a puppy-eyed, pleading glance. “Hasn’t it been fun thus far?”
“I vomited on the carriage ride up,” she reminded him fiercely.
“So you did.”
“Twice!”
“Was it twice? Ah, well, some things cannot be avoided. Sugared almond?” he offered, holding out a handful of the treats in her direction.
“Thank you, no,” she sniffed, turning up her dainty nose at the offering.
“Suit yourself. More for me, then.” Already he was nearing the end of the small, paper-wrapped package of them. Ah, well—at least he had cake to look forward to later in the afternoon. “We ought to make a list.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“A list,” Elliot repeated. “Of important wifely qualities. So that when we find the perfect woman, we’ll know at once.”
“We?” Kate echoed, her mouth dropping into an incredulous gape. “We!”