Chapter Ten #4
“Heavens, no,” Lady Clipstone replied. “I shouldn’t take you from instruction, having so rudely arrived without announcement. Or have you canceled lessons for the day? I shouldn’t blame you what with all the recent…excitement.”
Emma’s nostrils narrowed. Ah. There it was. The first cut. A rapier tip dipped in arsenic.
The scented, high-buttoned gloves had come off.
It appeared that for Alice, at least, all pretense of gentility would be abandoned for this private moment.
Emma felt the calmer for sensing her adversary’s lapse into antagonism.
Alice had never been able to graciously accept that Emma’s academy drew more applicants than she could accommodate and that she, the usurper, had to make do with those her rival rejected.
“There are always classes,” she said with a negligent shrug.
“One studies the social graces from dawn until dinner. Charlotte, as you know, is well qualified to instruct, and I have employed the re-doubtable Miss Peppertree. Right now she and the girls are in the library enjoying a sketching lesson with Lady Dalrymple.”
Alice’s eyes lit up. “Hermia? You’d trust those tender minds to a—”
“A what?” Emma said in an ice-edged voice.
“Well, to a woman who paints unclad aristocrats for public consumption,” Alice said with a sly pause. “I wouldn’t be surprised if she wasn’t avidly sketching a certain duke’s heir as we speak.”
A guilty flush stole into Emma’s face. There was the rub her rival had been waiting for.
Adrian and the incident at the wedding party.
It might conceivably have sunk to the bottom of the scandal broth in a month or two, had Emma immediately placed as much distance possible between herself and her outrageous defender.
Still, Alice knew nothing of that indiscretion—Emma would be forced into exile alongside an even more infamous dictator before she would allow the truth to be known. “If Lord Wolverton wishes his portrait painted, then I…I am—”
She broke off.
A sense of foreboding stole over her at Alice’s sudden, enrapt silence. In trepidation she turned to see what had so captured the woman’s attention.
Some furtive movement at the window. Her brother Heath—and Adrian, his handsome, broad-shouldered figure a silhouette against the dying sunlight.
For a surprising moment Emma’s throat constricted in regret.
He was fully dressed in a heavy charcoal-gray coat and black silk hat.
As if, well, from what one could deduce from his dashing shadow as he walked past her sight, he were leaving.
Wasn’t that what he’d been telling her? Both of them knew it was for the best. A man of his talents could take care of himself, but—
She forced her gaze back to Alice, only to find the woman studying her in brittle curiosity. “What were you about to say, Lady Lyons?” she inquired in an innocent tone.
Emma would not allow herself to be unsettled by her opponent. “Actually, my dear, I was about to ask what brought you here this late in the day.”
Uninvited. Unaccompanied, too, unless that surly old footman Emma had spotted lingering in the entry hall meant to pass as a companion.
“Surely we did not have an appointment planned that I had forgotten?” she went on artlessly.
“If not, I really must excuse myself. You see, we’re expecting a new arrival, a special student—the Earl of Heydon’s niece.
I expect you’ve heard of her.” Emma paused.
“I believe her bags have already arrived.”
“Hasn’t everyone heard of Lord Heydon?” Alice asked. “He once considered offering the academy his sponsorship, didn’t he?”
Emma wavered, reminding herself a lady would end a conversation before it drifted into more dangerous ground. Nor would she keep stealing peeps out the window at a certain beautiful rogue. “He has been gracious enough to consider us, yes. As for—”
“Goodness,” Alice said, clapping one hand to her cheek. “What a featherbrain I am. That’s the reason I’ve come.”
Emma swallowed over the knot of apprehension that tightened inside her. “The earl sent you?”
“In a manner of speaking.” Alice gathered her gloves and reticule from the table. “His secretary advised me to collect Lady Coralie’s baggage. It seems there’s been a misunderstanding and it was delivered here by error.”
Emma watched Adrian vanish around the corner into the garden. “What sort of misunderstanding?” she asked in a stiff voice, forcing her attention back to Alice.
“Lady Coralie won’t be attending your academy after all, my dear. It appears her uncle has changed his mind about her education. I thought I should see you in person to explain on her behalf, and to pick up her belongings.”
Emma struggled against an ungentle impulse to pluck Alice’s adorable hat from her head by its feather. “She’s changed her mind?” she asked lightly.
Alice sighed with unconvincing regret. “I am sorry if this inconveniences you—I do hope you weren’t counting on her funds?”
Emma managed a shrug of insouciance, rising to her feet. “Of course not. Shall I instruct Hamm to help you out with Lady Coralie’s luggage? I assume you still have not been able to afford a footman yet…”
Alice virtually breathed fire from her nostrils. “I employ two of them, and intend to take on another two soon.”
“Shall I hire a dogcart for the two of you or will you be walking back across town?”
“I have a new vehicle, in fact,” Alice said, standing to stare directly at Emma. “I bought it with—”
A trill of delighted giggles from the garden interrupted Alice’s coup de grace. Emma could not decide whether she appreciated the timely outburst or not. One more word from her nemesis, and she would indeed have been provoked to do something nasty enough to make the morning papers.
As luck would have it, however, the disturbance in the garden, a scandal in the making of its own, absorbed her full attention.
Adrian stood poised on the steps of the small summerhouse, his coat slung over one well-built shoulder, his hat at his feet.
His grin, although not directed in Emma’s direction, for she doubted he could see her at all, nonetheless, took her off balance.
He was a deity with a dozen female admirers at his feet.
Was he posing for Lady Dalrymple’s infamous sketches? Oh, how…how—
“Is that Lord Wolverton?” Alice asked breathlessly from behind her.
Emma drew the drapes tightly together and spun on her heel. “Do you think you should leave your school unattended, Lady Clipstone?” she said crisply. “I for one must return to my duties.”
Alice’s gaze drifted back toward the darkened window. “Indeed,” she murmured. “You have your hands quite full, by the look of him.”
Adrian was not sure himself how he had ended up posing for one of Lady Dalrymple’s sketches.
He had merely been waiting outside with Heath, discussing his plans.
He did know, however, that he felt quite absurd, especially with Heath watching in amusement from the garden bench.
How many times had his friend Dominic made jokes about the outrageous sketch of Heath Boscastle’s manhood that had ended up on the streets and in the salons of London?
Well, Adrian wasn’t removing his pantaloons for any of the females sketching him in the garden.
He’d had a deuced hard time refusing Lady Dalrymple at all.
No matter what abhorrent violence had defined his professional years, he harbored a strange weakness for sweet old ladies and uncouth little children.
His grandmother had spoiled him and his siblings until two weeks before her death.
He wondered now whether Lady Dalrymple had reminded him of his beloved nana.
Had his grandmama’s eyes twinkled at him with such irresistible wickedness? He suspected they had.
“Do you mind turning at the trunk a little and arching your back?” Lady Dalrymple asked in her quavery, angelic voice, then struck a classical pose to demonstrate.
He frowned down into her pleasant face. “Excuse me?”
“As if you were engaged in some labor that required every ounce of your strength,” she explained with an evasive flutter of her wrist. “Oh, dear. Pretend you’re lifting a heavy load.”
“Of what?”
“I don’t know. Coal. Bricks. Whatever makes those marvelous muscles work.”