Chapter 4
“P
erhaps I ought to go after her?” Cameron asked uncertainly. “Make sure she’s all right?”
He wasn’t entirely sure who he was addressing these words to, if anyone.
In some ways, he felt like a drowning man flailing around for a piece of driftwood to seize upon in order to save himself.
A particularly apt metaphor since he was entirely at sea when it came to the customs of English society.
He disliked himself intensely for feeling the need to even ask such a thing, rather than simply doing what came naturally to him and following her.
She’d seemed horribly distraught, though he couldn’t understand why; it was a momentary loss of footing, nothing more.
From the way her legs had carried her out of the parlor, she didn’t seem to have injured herself in any real way.
Could she have simply fled from embarrassment? That seemed strange indeed to Cameron after such a minor thing. But once again, it reminded him that he knew very little about English customs.
Lady Hepplewhite chose to answer his query.
“No, you must do no such thing! Lady Cora has committed a grave social faux pas, and, although one would generally make some sort of apology or excuse for oneself before choosing to depart, she has chosen to make a hasty exit in order to save face. We shall let her do so and continue to enjoy ourselves. Oh, and Mister Wallace?”
Cameron had learned the girl’s name. “Aye, my lady?”
She seemed vaguely tickled by his oh-so-Scottish answer, which annoyed him somewhat. Couldn’t he even say a word or two without being made to feel like an outsider?
“In the future, you would do well to remember that it is immensely inappropriate for a fellow to put his hands upon a lady in public unless it is during a dance or one is offering one’s arm for a stroll.”
Cameron raised an eyebrow. “Do you mean to tell me that in your estimation, I should have simply allowed her to fall on her face rather than intercede?”
“Well, it’s hardly as if she was plummeting from the Tower of London, now is it?
” Lady Hepplewhite tittered. “She’d have recovered well enough.
But the way you had your hands upon her person, even after you had successfully stopped her fall…
there are those who might say your motives were not those of a Samaritan, but rather, an excuse for lasciviousness! ”
“Such people would be wrong to make such assumptions, not to mention foolish and uncharitable,” Cameron growled. “Where I come from, when a lady is in need, a real man comes to her aid…regardless of decorum.”
He was beginning to like this soiree less and less, and inwardly, he was bitterly cursing his father for sending him to London in the first place.
“Oh, how positively heroic of you!” Her tone was somewhere between teasing and light infatuation. “It’s just as they say, isn’t it? You Scotsmen are a rough, rowdy, roguish sort, and you care not who knows it! So delightfully droll!”
He wasn’t entirely certain he knew what she was talking about, nor did he much care.
The entire situation was annoying and frustrating him immeasurably, and he, too, felt a strong compulsion to simply leave without another word as Lady Cora had.
He had nothing in common with any of these people, and it was becoming increasingly clear to him that he never would.
The whole trip was folly, as anyone could plainly see.
“For someone who is a member of your own social circle,” he grumbled, “you don’t seem all that concerned about her well-being.”
Hepplewhite scoffed, “She’s hardly a member of either!
Her family has only very recently ascended to any kind of worthy social status, and so she is largely a stranger to my parlor, and to events such as this.
Really, don’t you agree that it would be far better for everyone involved if such people would simply know their place and remain there rather than putting on airs and foisting their uncultured ways upon the rest of us? ”
Now Cameron wasn’t entirely certain whether she was still speaking only of Lady Cora or if, in her own not-so-sly way, she was referring to him as well. He was hardly in the mood to guess at such things, given his current level of impatience.
“The same might be said of me, mightn’t it?” he said.
“Good heavens, not at all!” she laughed airily. “Why, your family’s wealth and influence date back over many generations! Your father is a…oh, what do you call it over there? A ‘laird,’ is it?”
“It is,” he affirmed sourly.
“And so was his father, and his father before him, and so on?” she confirmed. “You come from a long and proud legacy, like everyone else in this room! You aren’t some peasant who has suddenly come into a fortune and is determined to buy his way into high society!”
Was he a peasant who was suddenly wealthy? No, certainly not. As she’d said, his family had ruled over the clan for hundreds of years. But still, he knew that his manners were considered coarse and loutish by the people around him.
He was an outsider, no matter how much money his father had paid Lady Hepplewhite to introduce him around.
Even so, he forced himself to smile at her. “Yes. I think I understand your meaning now. Thank you for taking the time to explain it to me.”
“You are most welcome, Mister Wallace!” she chirped cheerily.
“After all, you are here to learn our ways, are you not? What sort of host would I be if I allowed you to flounder about without the first clue of how to behave… And to chase after opportunistic girls like Lady Cora Weatherington? Now there are some far more cultured women I’m simply dying to introduce you to! ”
Cameron allowed her to lead him to group after group of aristocrats, most of them young ladies.
They curtsied and offered their hands for him to kiss, and he did as he had been taught, bending slightly at the waist to show the deference due to the daughters of some of London’s wealthiest men.
Many of them made small talk with him, speaking of nonsense he barely understood and giggling like airheaded imbeciles.
He found himself entirely bored with their company almost immediately and wondered if he could summon any suitable excuse to extricate himself from such a woeful evening.
How can I possibly be expected to select a suitable bride from these half-wits?
he wondered to himself. How was he supposed to spend the rest of his life with someone who could barely string her words together into any sort of coherent (let alone compelling) thought?
Most of them were lovely to look at, certainly, and the gowns they wore were flowing and eye-catching.
However, their clothes seemed to be the most interesting part of them by far.
The thought of bringing any of them home with him was atrocious.
Just the idea of having to spend a week with one of them during the carriage ride home was enough to make him want to cut his own throat.
He was sure his father would be delighted with any of them, as long as the father of the woman he selected had ample riches and influence.
But was his father’s happiness worth dooming himself to a life of utter misery? The more of these women he was introduced to, the more desperately lonely he felt in this room full of people who came from an entirely different world than he did.
As the evening progressed, however, and he had a chance to spend more time listening to these girls (and dancing with them), he came to realize an important, if rather insulting, truth: It didn’t matter whether he enjoyed their company or not because none of them had even the slightest interest in marrying him.
Oh, they seemed eager enough to be courted by him.
The novelty of his accent and his foreign ways was far too amusing for them to fully reject his advances (if he’d bothered to make them in any genuine fashion).
He had little doubt that once the soiree had come to an end, they would trade gossip about him endlessly, laughing and mocking his strange customs and the way his proper English attire didn’t seem to fit him all that well.
They would continue to entertain him throughout the season, he was sure of that. They might drop crumbs of encouragement, hoping to see him scurry about eagerly to collect and interpret them.
In the end, though, all of them would surely choose more traditional suitors to pledge their troth to. And he would be sent back to Scotland a laughingstock, having wasted his own time and his father’s money on this moronic endeavor.
He drifted around the parlor aimlessly until the event concluded, then returned to his rented townhouse by coach, dejected and wondering what he ought to do about it all.
While Carstairs helped Cameron get ready for bed (quite unnecessarily, though the valet insisted on it so adamantly that Cameron began to feel it would be rude to press the point any further), Cameron’s thoughts kept returning to Cora.
It seemed to him that, although he’d only been acquainted with her for a scant few moments, he’d ended up having more in common with her than with anyone else in that room.
These wealthy people had, in effect, invited both of them to the affair so that they could be smiled at broadly, treated with the utmost gentility…and then mercilessly mocked the moment their backs were turned.
The idea of it turned his stomach and made him feel ashamed beyond belief.
He went to bed wishing he would not have to rise and greet the following day and the further vagaries it promised.
More drawing rooms to visit, more calls to make, more affectations to put on, and more witless conversation to make with people he found detestable.
Could he not simply write to his father and report that the entire thing had failed before it had even had a chance to begin?
That these stuck-up English snobs had already decided to dismiss him completely before even meeting him and that now that they had met him, they didn’t seem especially inclined to change their minds?
What more could he do except meander uselessly and cost Laird Cawley even more coin on this fool’s errand?
If only I could banish all pressure and expectations from my head and simply regard this as a sort of vacation, he thought with a grim chuckle.
Stroll the streets and take in the sights, with no regard for courtship or marriage.
That might be a welcome thing, but I could never get away with it.
My father will no doubt write to all of his acquaintances here to confirm that I am accepting all invitations and doing my level best to find a bride.
So I must go through the motions of it all, at least, no matter how exhausting and senseless such a prospect may seem to me.
Besides, London was not his idea of a vacation spot.
He would gladly have traveled to other lands so that he might learn of their histories and inspect their grand old castles and fortresses.
That notion appealed to him, certainly, for he was a bright young fellow with a curious mind and a jaunty sense of humor.
London, however, was the last place in the world he would have journeyed to if he’d had his preference. Such a foul and dreary place, where nothing green seemed to grow, the air was gray and acrid, and the people appeared to be divided into either beaten-down commoners or obnoxiously shallow twits.
All except Lady Cora Weatherington, at any rate. He remained intrigued by her.
And by the time the next morning arrived, he had resolved that she might be the very solution to the problems he’d been pondering.