Chapter 6 #2
For all he knew, a gently bred girl should have fled the room immediately upon the entrance of a gentleman not familiar to her.
The high born seemed to have any number of rules about attendance on unmarried females, as if they were delicate flowers that needed a prop at all times.
Whatever the rules were, this girl didn’t heed them.
She’d hidden herself on the chaise, of all things, and then popped up to argue with him once the foreman left.
He pulled on his tailcoat, the superfine a deep indigo-blue color known as corbeau.
She’d caught his reference to the play he’d quoted.
The line had come from somewhere and seemed apt at the time, but she knew it.
Beatrice and Benedict—it was an absurd play.
He’d attended a showing with his sisters, here in Cheltenham, at the Theatre Royal.
Princes behaving badly, friends tricking their friends with manufactured love affairs, and a heroine who for some reason pretended to die rather than give the cad who’d jilted her a sound slap across the face.
He could imagine the little termagant cuffing her lover if she’d been jilted. She certainly wouldn’t faint, go into hysterics, or waste away.
Dante hadn’t either, when it was his heart that shattered. He’d taken the blow manfully, refusing to show by a flicker of emotion how deep the humiliation had cut. He’d go to his grave still hiding that wound, if he had to.
Just as he’d hide that the little theater harpy had the least effect on him, beyond an annoyance. She was young. She was spoiled. She was full of herself in the way only the young could be, when they still thought themselves the center of everyone else’s lives, not just their own.
But, by God, Dante thought as he entered the drawing room where the group had gathered before dinner, she was beautiful.
It was as if he’d designed the room merely to showcase her.
The grand salon occupied one of the newer wings, and the soaring windows on either side of the room reflected the light of the many candles and strategically placed Argand lamps.
The draperies falling from the windows were like fabric columns, mimicking her slender figure, and the patterns of shells and vines woven along the cornices and soaring over the panels above the fireplaces were an echo of her elegant simplicity.
The room was full of people, yet all that stood out in it was her.
She wore a simple, high-waisted white gown of silk tricot with layers of lilac fringe at the hem.
A swath of cord or some such trimming draped around the small, high bodice, bringing attention to that area.
Cord trim along the small puffed sleeves bared most of her upper arm, a smooth sweep of dark golden-brown skin meeting the elbow of her white gloves.
Her dark brown curls were tucked into a smooth coronet laced with a string of glittering diamante and an ostrich feather, dyed lilac, that curled forward over her head.
She looked like she might be an installation of any great house, daughter of a baron, an earl, even a duchess.
An effect of her theater training, of course. She was practiced at pretending to high birth and manners. It was a role she had memorized as well as the scornful ripostes of Beatrice.
And she had found her way to the side of the highest woman in the room—Andover’s cousin Diana, daughter of the previous Earl of Suffolk, who was staying in Cheltenham for the cure and had been installed at Suffolk House for the duration.
Cousin Diana was too wise to bow to the dictates of fashion that bared skin in a drafty room.
She sat with straight back in a gown of cascading silk with sleeves that went all the way to her wrists, a lace ruff that covered her bosom up to the chin, and a long mink tippet draped around her shoulders.
Her gown was a pale pink trimmed with green scallops—no widow’s weeds for Cousin Diana.
The scallops were an interesting motif, and Dante thought how they might look in the dressing room for the mistress’s chamber at his house.
Lady Diana took the younger girl’s hand and patted it in a motherly caress.
“But of course you must stay here. There’s not a single decent set of lodgings to be had in this town, other than the Great House, and I find the company there has been sadly degraded ever since those Irish sisters sold it. But when Phillis ran off to be married, what was poor Francis Mary to do?”
“Now, Cousin Diana, I hope you don’t think I am degrading the Great House.” Dutton joined the small group. Of course he would; Dutton never failed to place himself at the side of the most attractive female in the room. “I’ve given an excellent dinner there once or twice.”
“And no doubt contributed to a great influx of traffic that would wear on the nerves of one so delicate as Miss Evans.”