Chapter 6
“You look entirely too pleased with yourself for a Tuesday.”
Sebastian Hawthorne did not glance up from the racing journal spread across his knee.
He sat in the same leather chair he had claimed every afternoon at White’s for the past six years.
His boots were crossed at the ankle. His expression carried deliberate calm, the look of someone who had long ago decided that urgency was beneath him.
Oliver lowered himself into the opposite chair.
Around them, the quiet murmur of the club carried on in its usual fashion: the rustle of newspapers, the occasional burst of laughter from the billiards room, the discreet clink of crystal as a footman replaced decanters.
The air smelled of tobacco, old wood, brandy that had been poured into the same glasses for decades.
“I am not pleased,” Oliver said. “I am composed.”
Sebastian turned a page. “When you are composed, your left eyebrow does not lift. At present, it is halfway to your hairline.” He looked up.
His dark eyes, sharp beneath an expression of theatrical boredom, scanned Oliver’s face with practiced efficiency.
He had been reading Oliver’s moods since Eton. “What have you done?”
“I have done nothing. I am merely enjoying a productive start to the Season.”
“You loathe the Season. You have loathed every Season since your twenty-first year. Last April you told me, in this exact chair, that you would rather be trampled by your own horses than attend another musicale or garden party.”
“I may have been dramatic.”
“You were drinking your third whisky at two o’clock in the afternoon. You were sincere.” Sebastian closed the journal, folded it neatly, and set it on the table beside his glass. “Out with it.”
Oliver gestured toward the footman. A measure of whisky appeared at his elbow within moments, amber liquid catching the afternoon light that fell through the tall windows.
He took a sip. The warmth spread through him, familiar, steadying.
He had not come to White’s with the intention of discussing his arrangement with Louisa Fairchild.
He had come because Tuesday afternoons at White’s with Sebastian were a fixture of his life, predictable in a way he valued.
But Sebastian was watching him with that look. The one that meant he would sit in perfect silence for as long as it took, patient beyond all reasonable expectation, until Oliver either spoke or went mad from the quiet.
“I have entered into an arrangement,” Oliver said.
Sebastian’s glass paused halfway to his mouth. “An arrangement.”
“A mutually beneficial agreement with a young lady. She assists me with a persistent problem. I assist her with a separate but related concern. Both parties benefit. No one is harmed.”
“Good heavens.” Sebastian set his glass down hard. “You have taken a mistress.”
“I have not taken a mistress.”
“You have proposed.”
“I have absolutely not proposed.”
“Then what in the name of all that is holy constitutes a mutually beneficial arrangement with a young lady that requires you to sit in my club looking like the cat that found the cream?”
Oliver leaned back. He could hear Lord Barrington’s voice carrying from the card room, bragging about his new hunter.
“Miss Louisa Fairchild,” he said. “She has agreed to play the part of my courtship interest for the remainder of the Season. In return, I am helping her attract the attention of a gentleman she has admired for some time.”
Sebastian stared at him.
“It is practical,” Oliver continued. “The matchmaking mothers have grown more aggressive this year. Lady Blackwood cornered me at the Bancroft ball for twenty minutes. Mrs. Worthington sent a footman to my house with an invitation to dine with her daughter. Alone. If society believes I am courting Miss Fairchild, the pursuits will diminish. She, meanwhile, benefits from the visibility my attention provides. The gentleman in question has already begun noticing her.”
Sebastian was still staring.
“It is a sound plan,” Oliver said. “Logical. Efficient. Everyone profits.”
Sebastian picked up his whisky. Took a long, slow drink. Set it down. Folded his hands in his lap. Drew a breath through his nose.
Then he laughed.
“Oh, Oliver.” Sebastian pressed his knuckles against his mouth, failing entirely to suppress the grin that had consumed his face. “Oliver, Oliver, Oliver.”
“I fail to see what is amusing.”
“You fail to see.” Sebastian wiped the corner of his eye.
“England’s most eligible duke has entered into a pretend courtship with a young lady, for the purpose of convincing society that he is interested in her, while secretly helping her attract the attention of another man, whom she actually wants.
Did I miss anything? Because I want to ensure I have the full measure of this catastrophe before I respond. ”
“It is not a catastrophe. It is a strategy.”
“It is a penny novel. You are living inside a penny novel, and you walked into this club to tell me about it with a straight face.”
Oliver’s fingers tightened around his glass.
He could feel the cut crystal pressing into the pads of his thumbs, the bite of it grounding him against the irritation crawling up the back of his neck.
Sebastian had a gift for finding the thread that unraveled people.
He had been doing it since they were boys, since the summer Oliver’s father had sent him to stay with the Hawthorne family in Sussex, the first time Oliver had slept through an entire night without waking to listen for raised voices through walls.
“The young lady in question is perfectly sensible,” Oliver said. “She is not dazzled by my title, which is precisely the point. She treats me with a refreshing absence of flattery. The arrangement works because neither of us harbors romantic illusions about the other.”
“Miss Louisa Fairchild.” Sebastian rolled the name across his tongue. “The Fairchild family on Curzon Street? Modest fortune, respectable father, declining circumstances?”
“You know them?”
“I know of them. Her mother is apparently a formidable woman who manages their household with military precision despite reduced means. I believe her father invested unwisely in a canal scheme several years ago.” Sebastian tilted his head.
“And this young lady is, by your account, completely unimpressed by you.”
“That is correct.”
“The Duke of Ashford. Twenty-nine years old. Master of one of the finest estates in Hampshire. Charming enough to talk his way out of a debtor’s prison, though you would never need to. Handsome enough that Lady Fitzwilliam once walked into a column while watching you cross a ballroom.”
“That was never confirmed.”
“I was standing beside the column, Oliver. I caught her fan.” Sebastian leaned forward, his elbows on his knees, his dark eyes bright with amusement that had not yet burned itself out. “And this young lady is not impressed by any of this.”
“She is not.”
“You adore it.”
Oliver’s stomach did a queer, involuntary thing. A drop, or a lurch, the kind of physical response he associated with missing a step on a staircase. He covered it by drinking his whisky. The liquid was smooth, peaty, exactly the sort that usually anchored him.
“I do not adore it. I appreciate it.”
“Semantics.” Sebastian sat back, crossing one leg over the other, his expression settling into that knowing satisfaction Oliver had spent two decades attempting to outmaneuver. “Tell me more about her.”
“There is nothing more to tell. The arrangement is straightforward. We attend events together, I call upon her, we dance. Society draws its conclusions. The mothers retreat. She gains access to the gentleman she wants. Everyone is satisfied.”
“And this gentleman. Who is he?”
“Frederick Langley.”
Sebastian’s eyebrows climbed. “Langley. Respectable fellow. Good family, decent prospects, steady temperament. Utterly without imagination.”
“She admires him.”
“Women admire many things. It does not mean those things will make them happy.”
Oliver turned his glass between his fingers.
The whisky caught the light, amber turning to gold, gold to bronze.
Through the tall windows, he could see the rooftops of St James’s, the grey London sky pressing low over chimneys that trailed smoke into the afternoon air.
A carriage rattled past on the street below.
“What does her happiness have to do with our arrangement?”
Sebastian’s expression shifted. The amusement dimmed, replaced by a watchfulness Oliver recognized.
Sebastian wore it rarely, reserved for moments when the teasing gave way to the older, deeper thing beneath their friendship.
The thing that had been built during those summers in Sussex, when Sebastian had found Oliver sitting alone in the Hawthorne garden at three in the morning, unable to sleep, unwilling to explain why.
“Nothing,” Sebastian said. “Presumably.”
They sat in silence. The clock marked the seconds. A waiter passed with a silver tray bearing the afternoon post. The ordinary rhythms of the club carried on around them, undisturbed.
“In the park, when we discussed the terms, she argued with every rule. She accused me of treating courtship as a military campaign. She insisted on conditions of her own. She told me my deflections were not the same as answers.”
Sebastian reached for his whisky. Drank slowly. Set it down.
“And when we shook hands,” Oliver continued, aware that he was speaking more than he had intended, aware that his voice had taken on a quality he could not name, “her grip was firmer than I expected. She wore gloves that had been mended at the seam. Very small stitches. The kind of repair that comes from a household where nothing is wasted.”
“Oliver.”
“What?”
Sebastian’s mouth curved. Not a grin, not the theatrical amusement from before. A smaller, quieter expression, edged with fondness. “You have spent more time discussing Miss Fairchild in the last ten minutes than you have discussed any woman in the entire time I have known you.”