Chapter Three
“Mother, please,” Natasha pronounced, her teeth gritted, “This dress is more than sufficient.”
“I just wonder, darling, if something a bit more…demure—”
“It’s white, mother, what could be more—”
“But perhaps the light pink—”
“I am not changing again,” the young lady bit off. “If these gentlemen can’t fall in love with me in white, then I don’t stand a chance in pink.”
Eloisa sighed. “I suppose you’re right.”
“I hardly think that we have to worry, Eloisa, about young men not falling in love with Natasha,” Olivia teased, trying to ease the tension between her friend and her daughter. “She is a vision in white.”
Natasha gave the beatific smile of a fashion-plate lady. “And she knows it.”
Olivia had to laugh at Natasha’s stark confidence. Many young ladies in her situation would feel ill at ease making their debut but Natasha seemed to feel no trepidation. Olivia couldn’t imagine a young lady better equipped to take on the London season than Natasha. And she included the girls who had been reared their entire lives for it in that number.
Olivia knew that Eloisa worried about whether London society would accept her daughter. After all, Natasha and her brother, Nathanial, were claimed by some to be illegitimate, even though, in the eyes of their parents, they were anything but. Twenty years ago, their father, Mr. Mapperton, had married Eloisa, but his parents had objected to the match. Because he had been below the age of one-and-twenty, the union had been invalid in the eyes of the law, even though everything else about it had been done correctly. Mr. Mapperton’s parents were now dead, but they had not recognized the marriage when they were alive. All of this made the marriage, in the eyes of society, suspect.
Soon after their wedding, Eloisa and Mr. Mapperton had moved to France with the enormous fortune that he had inherited from his grandfather as a boy. After two children and ten years together, Mr. Mapperton had died, leaving all he owned to his wife, Natasha, and Nathanial. While the lesser society milieu that Eloisa had targeted for her daughter’s season was willing to include Natasha because she was an heiress, the question about her legitimacy did not enhance her appeal as a marriage prospect.
Furthermore, Eloisa and her children would be regarded, by many of the people they met in society, as foreigners. Eloisa had been born in the West Indies, but her mother had been a Hyderabadi woman. Employed by a British army office in India, she had retained her place when he switched posts, traveling with him to the Caribbean. By the time the man had died, he had gotten Eloisa’s mother with child. Whether by force or with her consent, Eloisa said that she didn’t know. I doubt my mother had much choice either way, no matter what she thought, Eloisa had reflected to Olivia more than once. Eloisa’s mother had died when she was still a girl and soon after Eloisa found employ as a servant to a wealthy British family departing back to London. There, one day, attending her mistress in Hyde Park, she met Mr. Mapperton. He had fished her mistress’s parasol out of the Serpentine—and fallen in love with Eloisa in the process. They had run off together not long after.
In the working neighborhoods of London, Olivia knew that biographies such as Eloisa’s were not rare. The higher orders were, however, much less accepting on this score. Most wealthy English families would not like that Eloisa’s light brown skin marked her as foreign to England, nor would they like what it suggested about the fortune her children carried—that their money was of colonial extraction. That their fortune from Mr. Mapperton was, perhaps, the most English thing about Natasha and Nathanial, who had spent nearly their entire lives in France, would not change these feelings. As Eloisa had explained to Olivia long ago, the British loved the fortunes they stole from India and the Caribbean, but they didn’t like the people who lived in those places to come along back to England with said money.
This history made Natasha’s marriage into English society uncertain. Even though Natasha’s olive complexion was hardly darker than that of the many debutantes whose families had been in Britain for generations, it would not matter to some. Potentially, it would matter a great deal to anyone of fortune or consequence. Thus far, however, their introduction had gone better than Eloisa had hoped—but it was still in its early stages.
“I thought Englishmen preferred docile women,” Nathanial retorted, sauntering into the room. He was eating one of the oranges that his mother had piled artfully in a bowl in the entryway.
“Nathanial, those are for display,” Eloisa protested.
“I don’t think the Englishmen will need oranges to convince them that we are rich—report of Natasha’s fifteen-thousand-pound dowry should have achieved that feat before they step foot in the house.”
As it happened, Nathanial was the third thing that made Natasha’s integration into English society a difficult proposition. At the tender age of seven, soon after the death of his father and when Napoleon still ruled France, Nathanial had been named a count in the French nobility. The large fortune that his father had left him and the estate that Eloisa had purchased with her own portion of that inheritance made him an ally that Napoleon wanted to collect. Given that the Battle of Waterloo was still quite fresh in the hearts and minds of most Englishmen, and that not an insignificant number of eligible bachelors had actually served in the campaign, it was not an asset for Natasha to have a French count—Count Mapperton, as he insisted upon being called—as a brother.
“What a man says he wants and what he actually wants are two different things,” Natasha replied, “although I suppose you aren’t learned enough in the ways of the world to have grasped that fact.”
Nathanial blanched and Olivia watched his mother stifle a laugh at his expense. Despite affecting the persona of worldly French count, Nathanial was only eighteen and hardly a sophisticate when it came to courtship, as his sister well knew.
Natasha, however, seemed to have, with only minimal experience in such matters herself, a preternatural instinct for their navigation.
Two nights ago, at a ball given by the absurdly rich Mrs. Templeton and attended even by some of the minor members of the nobility, Natasha had made, at least for the evening, the hurdles of her biography seem like minor considerations. Olivia had never before been to a ball in Britain, but she had been to many in France, and she had never before seen a young woman generate such interest. Before the night was over, Olivia overheard three matrons exclaim that Natasha Mapperton would make the match of the season. Of course, for the milieu they were currently circling in, a great match wasn’t a duke or an earl—that was, of course, out of Natasha’s reach. But a baronet, perhaps, or a wealthy tradesman’s son now seemed within her grasp.
But, as Eloisa had reminded Natasha since, ballroom admiration could be illusory. The real question was whether the young men would come to call.
Olivia hoped that they would. They had come to England because it had been the dying wish of Mr. Mapperton that his daughter marry in his own country. Olivia knew that Eloisa gave credence to her deceased love’s preferences—but she also knew that Eloisa would have swiftly ignored his wishes if she judged them not to be in her children’s best interests. Not only did Eloisa think that Natasha may have better marriage prospects in Britain, where new fortunes abounded, but she thought it more politically stable than France. After watching the country roiled by war and Napoleon, Eloisa was not about to consign the fate of herself and her children completely to that country—a foothold in Britain would give them a refuge if they should so need it.
Olivia wanted Natasha to find wealth and happiness and for Eloisa to feel that her children were safe from the vagaries of an uncertain world. And, in Olivia’s mind, the sooner Natasha married, the better. She herself did not want to linger in England. She looked forward to returning to France with Eloisa and Nathanial as soon as Natasha found her match.
Then, Olivia would marry Mr. Laurent, a respectable lawyer in the country village where Nathanial and Eloisa had their estate. Once she did, she would be free of England and its memories forever.
“As if you know,” Nathanial said to his sister, taking a seat beside her on the sofa and devouring the last of his orange. “I’ve been to Covent Garden Theater and mother won’t even let you attend.”
“She would,” Natasha began, “but it wouldn’t look proper if—”
Her response was lost, however, when Chassey entered the room.
“Mr. Maurice Templeton, ma’am, and his brother, Mr. Paul Templeton.”
Eloisa’s eyes flashed. The Templetons were the leaders of their social set. If the heirs of the wealthy banker were here, then many others would follow.
“Yes, Chassey,” Eloisa breathed, “Show them in.”
*
Olivia had neverseen a drawing room so packed with bodies. It seemed that every young man who had sighed over Natasha at the ball had indeed come to call. The men were now perched on every available sofa and divan, angling to get into a tete-a-tete with their young quarry.
Olivia and Nathanial had been relegated to a love seat in the corner, watching Natasha and Eloisa hold court. Mother and daughter circulated seamlessly among the guests.
“Shouldn’t you mix as well, Nathanial?” Olivia teased.
“Bollocks mixing,” Nathanial responded, crossing his leg over his knee, and digging into one of the cream cakes that the other young people had declined to touch.
“But surely these young gentlemen have sisters,” she pressed.
Nathanial leveled her with a gaze. “I don’t want an English wife.”
Olivia was touching on a source of disagreement between Eloisa and her son. Eloisa thought that Nathanial should take the prospect of meeting a wife in England seriously, given the big dowries on display in any given London season, but Nathanial was dead set against marrying here. His mother thought that he was being needlessly short-sighted.
“And why is that?” Olivia did not quite understand Nathanial’s reluctance. Although he was full young, she supposed, to be thinking seriously of matrimony.
“They’re not to my tastes.” Olivia watched Nathanial blush when he realized his audience. “No offense intended, of course, to present company.”
Olivia laughed. She had watched Nathanial grow up and they had long ago begun talking with the frankness of family members. She regarded the young man as a kind of nephew.
Her saucy retort died on her tongue, however, when she realized that an eerie silence had filled the room. She turned her head away from Nathanial and saw that every person in the room had their head craned towards the door.
Augustus.
There, framed by Eloisa’s elegant salon doorway, he stood. An earl in Bloomsbury, a genuine nobleman in the midst of manufacturing heirs, brewers’ offspring, and the sons of one or two penniless baronets.
To say that he looked out of place in the setting would not be fair to Eloisa, Natasha, and their guests. The young men that surrounded them were, perhaps, even more fashionably dressed than Augustus. But from the cut of his coat to the snug fit of his buckskin breeches, Augustus carried the air of his rarefied world, as invisible as a light spring breeze and just as tangible to those who felt it.
Olivia hated herself for her visceral reaction to his presence. How her fingertips ached to trace the strong bend of his jaw, how she could imagine (or, really, somewhere between imagine and remember) riding over his muscular thighs—she shook her head. She had had other lovers in the years since their summer together. She had always been discreet, but she was hardly a nun. And, so, unfortunately, she was not estranged from what her own reactions to this man meant. It wasn’t usual, she knew, to feel such a tightness in her pelvic muscles, to have to press her knees together at the mere sight of a man.
She watched Augustus stride towards Eloisa, who looked somewhere between affronted and shocked. When he reached her, he gave a deep bow. Gradually, the other guests realized that they must not stare and returned to their conversations.
How could Augustus be here? It broke every form of society for him to enter this space without introduction. She did not understand. He could not regard the scene yesterday, after all, as welcome to return.
After last night, Olivia and Eloisa had mulled over Augustus’s conduct and been unable to find his angle. Eloisa had gently suggested that, perhaps, the man still held a tendre for her, but Olivia had insisted such a thing was impossible. She reminded her about the note and the ten guineas. Eloisa had thrown up her hands. Perhaps, she said, he has seen you again and you’ve merely caught his fancy once more. Olivia had insisted that was impossible. Now that he was here, though, Olivia felt a pang. She suspected that his ulterior motive was very close to being discovered and that it had nothing to do with regard for her.
Olivia watched Eloisa smile at Augustus. She knew her friend could do little else. Yes, Lord Montaigne was notorious, but he was still an earl, and he was friends with some of the most high-ranking, powerful men in London. His mere presence here gilded Natasha further in the eyes of the company. It was a boon, even if Eloisa had not wished for it and personally found the man repugnant.
Olivia had been so caught up in watching Augustus that, at first, she had not noticed the shorter, sandy-haired young man at his shoulder. With a shock, she realized it was Percy, Augustus’s younger brother, who she hadn’t seen since he was a boy of ten. A prickle of anticipation ran down her spine as she watched the young man cast a furtive glance across the room at Natasha. She saw Augustus, more discreetly, do the same.
Natasha came away from the cache of gentlemen with whom she had been conversing and began to make her way over to Augustus and Percy.
Olivia stood and waylaid the girl.
“How do you know the earl and his brother?” she asked, her voice low enough that only Nathanial and Natasha could hear her.
“That man is an earl?” Nathanial had stood to join their tete-a-tete. “He looks it—but I hadn’t thought—Natasha, how on earth did you meet an earl?”
“I don’t know the earl,” Natasha snapped, blushing furiously. “I met his brother three nights ago. At the Royal Theater.”
“I don’t remember Percy Carrington making your acquaintance,” Olivia said, her confusion mounting. She would have recognized him—she was sure of it.
“You have met him?” Natasha asked.
For a moment, Olivia paused. Of course, Nathanial and Natasha did not know about her prior relationship with the Earl of Montaigne—and she would like to keep it that way. There was no reason, however, that they couldn’t know that she had once worked for his family.
“I was a maid in their household years ago. But that does not explain how you became acquainted with the young man.”
Natasha colored again. “When I was in the retiring room, a young lady was very vexed over a broken ribbon on her gown. I mended it for her. She introduced herself as Lady Petunia Carrington. When we exited the retiring room, her brother—Lord Percy—was waiting to escort her back to their seats. Thus, we made the acquaintance.”
Olivia had never seen Natasha look quite so flustered at the mention of a gentleman. Oh no, Olivia thought, this was bad. For a thousand different reasons.
To make matters worse, Augustus and Percy were walking towards them.
“Miss Mapperton,” Percy bowed, his countenance indicating that he was alive to every charm that Natasha possessed, “I hope I have not presumed upon our acquaintance to call upon you here. My friend, Maurice Templeton, told me that he would be at home this afternoon. I hope that my presence is not unwelcome.”
Olivia was impressed. Percy had carried off the potential forwardness of their presence quite smoothly. Of course, he knew the Templetons, who were too rich to be denied anywhere. They were the hinge between the mercantile world and the beau monde.
“I am very glad to see you, my lord,” Natasha said, a little breathless, but still maintaining her usual self-possession.
“And please let me present to you my brother, Lord Montaigne.”
“It is my pleasure, Miss Mapperton,” Augustus said. When Olivia saw the look on his face, her heart dropped into her stomach. The man regarded Natasha with unmistakable interest.
How na?ve she had been. Augustus was not here because his brother had acquired a sweetness for a pretty girl. No, of course, he was here to see the pretty girl for himself.
“When my brother told me that he had met such a charming young lady new to England,” Augustus continued, “I had to make her acquaintance.”
Olivia felt her shock turn to indignation.
Natasha, however, seemed unaffected by such gallantry.
“It is an honor to have you visit our home, Lord Montaigne,” she smiled, her eyes darting back to the Percy, who seemed unable to remove his gaze from her face. “Can I offer you refreshment?”
“It would be our pleasure,” Augustus intoned, his deep voice welcoming and genial.
And that was how Olivia found herself seated at a tea table with Natasha and the two Carrington men. The quartet they formed was, immediately, a strange one. Not only was she drinking tea as relative equals with the family that used to employ her and not only was she drinking tea with her ex-lover, but the conversation was equal parts odd and infuriating.
“And tell us, Miss Mapperton,” Augustus began, his eyes hardly alighting on Olivia or Percy. “What amusements do you favor? Outside of setting the social world aflame with your charm and beauty, of course.”
Had he always been this nauseating? If Olivia didn’t suspect him of the worst intentions, she would have laughed aloud at his manner. The old madams at Golden Square could take notes from him on how to abandon subtlety.
“Yes, Miss Mapperton,” Percy echoed, seemingly oblivious to his brother’s flirtation with the object of his interest. “What are your passions? I suspect you of many accomplishments.”
“Hardly,” Natasha demurred, “Although I do love drawing.”
She directed her answer, it seemed obvious to Olivia, towards Percy, although Augustus smiled as if it were meant for him. The girl appeared as oblivious as Percy to the flirtation of the earl—but that did not mean she was safe. Olivia knew, after all, how powerful the attention of Augustus Carrington could be. She wouldn’t let Natasha be taken in, too.
“And what do you draw?” Percy asked. Olivia swore she saw his pupils dilate as he gazed on Natasha.
“Landscapes, mostly. And I confess that I am quite wild about poetry. I wish to create drawings that have the grace of poems. As of yet, I am afraid I have not been successful.”
“I am sure that is not true, Miss Mapperton. But I must ask—you’re an admirer of Wordsworth, perhaps?”
“Yes,” Natasha beamed, “I know many would see such a preference as all too common but nevertheless he is my favorite.”
“What think you of Byron, Miss Mapperton?” Augustus interjected. “Do you think we will soon get a new canto of Don Juan? I must say that I am anticipating it quite keenly.”
Really, Olivia could throttle him. Byron. He might as well ask Natasha to be his mistress right here and now.
“I’m sure such reading feels quite exciting to you, Lord Montaigne,” Olivia burst in, unable to help herself, “But Miss Mapperton is the sort of young lady who could hardly find an interest in such an author.”
“A young lady who loves poetry can surely appreciate Don Juan.”
“Not—not,” Olivia stuttered, her rage at a boiling point, “Miss Mapperton.”
“I understand,” Augustus said, looking a little chided. For a second, his gaze lingered on her. But, then, just as quickly, his eye returned to Natasha.
Olivia could kill Augustus Carrington and she shot him a look that she hoped showed it. Yes, she had grown up working in servants’ quarters, hearing comments that far outpaced Don Juan in ribaldry. But she had spent the past thirteen years in respectable French society and she knew, from her years working for the Carrington family, that the English upper classes were even more circumspect when it came to the education of young ladies. She would not let him jeopardize Natasha’s prospects with such loose talk. In any way.
“I confess I attempted to read Don Juan once,” Natasha supplied, oblivious to Olivia’s turmoil, “But I must confess it bored me. Keats, however, captivates me.”
“Hopefully, you are not like his belle dame sans merci, Miss Mapperton, or the gentlemen of London may not recover,” Augustus nearly purred.
“I love ‘Endymion,’” Percy said, almost at the same moment. Given that Natasha’s eyes were already trained on Percy’s face, his brother’s comment was, thankfully, lost to Natasha’s exclamation of agreement. Olivia gave Percy credit for not saying aloud the first line of that poem—“a thing of beauty is a joy for ever”—although it was clear, from how he looked at Natasha, that he was thinking of it.
“Perhaps, if you love to draw, Miss Mapperton, I could take you out in my curricle—” Augustus broke in, heedless to the two young people’s absorption in each other.
Even years later, Olivia was not sure what possessed her at that moment. All she knew was that everything was hurtling out of control. She was determined not to let Augustus Carrington reach the end of his sentence.
She looked down at her cup of tea. Wisps of steam still drifted lazily up from its surface.
Olivia lifted her hand in an abrupt gesture, toppling the saucer, cup, and tea into Augustus Carrington’s lap.
For the second time that afternoon, Augustus Carrington brought the drawing room to silence—this time with a howl of pain.
Even Natasha and Percy had to take their eyes off one another at such a sound.
Now, Augustus did look at Olivia.
Yes, his eyes were quite riveted to her face.