Chapter 7 #2
If anything, Louisa had expected a charm offensive—and a charm offensive this was not. He acted as if he’d never encountered such a ridiculous thing as Frederica considering her looks ruined.
It was ridiculous, except Frederica refused to believe her family when they tried to convince her otherwise, certain that her mother and sisters were lying out of love—or pity.
But Lord Wrenworth’s simple, almost brusque repudiation of the truth she’d long held to be self-evident had a far more dramatic effect on her.
By the time he was saying his good-byes, Louisa caught Frederica looking surreptitiously at herself in the mirror hanging over the fireplace—when she’d studiously avoided any reflective surfaces for years upon years.
She was not the only one who noticed.
“Did you see that?” asked Cecilia, as soon as Frederica and Lord Wrenworth were both out of earshot.
“I saw that!” Mrs. Cantwell exclaimed. “Think of the wonderful match she can still make for herself, if only she would go out and let herself be seen. There is bound to be a rich widower somewhere who would be thrilled to marry her.”
“Now, why didn’t we talk to Frederica like that earlier?” said Cecilia.
“We did,” Matilda pointed out. “We talked ourselves blue in the face. We said everything Lord Wrenworth said—we just didn’t say it the way he did.”
Lady Balfour nodded authoritatively. “And the way he said it made all the difference.”
Mrs. Cantwell turned toward Louisa. “I hear they call you the luckiest lady in London, my dear. I think you must be the luckiest lady in all of Britain.”
That same general sentiment prevailed. Matilda, with whom Louisa shared a room at home, was the only one to say, before they went to sleep that night, “I know everyone else is saying how lucky you are, Louisa, but I think he is the lucky one. Just think how much Mr. Charles will envy him in having you for a wife.”
Louisa reached over and hugged this most beloved sister. “Thank you, my dear.”
“I hope you aren’t only marrying him because we need the money,” said Matilda. “You do like him, don’t you?”
Louisa had never asked herself that question before.
Fortunately—or unfortunately, depending how one looked at it—the answer was all too obvious.
She did like him, his villainous ways included.
In fact, his villainous ways might be the very reason she liked him so much, this darkly gleeful secret that he shared only with her.
“Not only do I like him,” she answered, “I would have volunteered to be his mistress if I couldn’t be his wife.”
That sent Matilda into a fit of giggling. She hugged Louisa back. “I’m so glad to hear that. I am sure you will make him very happy, and I hope he will do the same for you.”
Louisa had her doubts. She had no idea what made her fiancé happy or otherwise. Nor did she know how she would handle herself should the day come when he was no longer excited by the prospect of sleeping with her—when he would go on to bed the next woman who titillated him.
His heart in the palm of her hand might—might—act as insurance against this infelicitous eventuality. But where was the path to his heart? Did he have great trolls guarding it? Perhaps a fire-spewing dragon, chained before the castle gate?
Assuming, that was, The Ideal Gentleman had a heart at all.
* * *
“I’m in your debt, sir,” Louisa told Lord Wrenworth the next time she saw him.
A week had flown by since the day he was presented to her family.
During that time, Frederica made a quick appearance at the afternoon tea party Lady Balfour had hosted to welcome the Cantwell ladies to London—and she’d gone to the dressmaker’s in an open carriage, wearing only a veiled hat that didn’t do much to hide her face at all.
“That is terrible. You will only ever be able to pay me with my own money,” he said as he handed her up into his carriage.
It was pouring again. Since they were now affianced, however, he was allowed to fetch her from the bookshop on his own.
“But joking aside, do you mean to tell me that my words had some effect on your sister?”
“Yes. She now has a mirror permanently attached to her right hand and studies herself constantly.”
“Sounds like symptoms of a mental disorder.”
With his walking stick, he knocked on the ceiling of the carriage to signal the coachman that they were ready to go.
Louisa had not seen him with that particular accessory since they were last in the town coach together, before his proposal.
She couldn’t stop herself from staring a moment at its ebony handle.
And he certainly didn’t help matters by moving his thumb in a slow circle around that stylized jaguar head.
“Take your hand off it,” she said.
He looked at her with a half smile that made everything inside her shift and drop, and set the walking stick aside. “Better?”
“No, not really. But what were you saying?”
He smiled again. “That your sister’s new tendency to study herself constantly in a mirror sounds like an affliction.”
“It does, but it is a much better affliction than the one she’d suffered for so long. We are all delighted. My mother especially—she is beginning to speak again of Frederica as the future spouse of a very wealthy man.”
She looked at him sideways. “In fact, she thinks rather wistfully of you as that very wealthy man. I believe she is ever so slightly embarrassed that you will have me instead, when she has so much prettier daughters.”
“Your mother actually thinks that any of her other daughters could possibly hold the slightest temptation for me?”
She ought not to, but she adored the dismissiveness of his tone.
“That is a very smug smile on your face, my dear, dear Louisa.”
“That is a very smug sensation inside my heart, my dear, dear Lord Wrenworth.”
The carriage turned a corner and his walking stick went sliding. They both reached out, but she caught it first.
“Maybe I ought to keep a better grip on it,” he said.
She laid the walking stick across her lap. “There, I’ll make sure it isn’t up to mischief.”
He glanced at the walking stick for a fraction of a second longer than completely appropriate, before he looked up into her eyes.
“By the way, our marriage settlement is being drawn up as we speak. When you meet your solicitor again, he will tell you that you will have five thousand pounds a year in pin money.”
She nearly dropped the walking stick. “Five thousand!”
“Don’t be so loud, don’t look so astonished, and don’t, for goodness’ sake, appear grateful. I would not be able to show my face in Society if it became known that my wife managed to squeeze only eight hundred pounds a year out of me.”
“You offered me only five hundred,” she said indignantly.
“And you were the worst negotiator ever, asking for only a thousand from a man who has two hundred thousand a year. Shame on you.”
Her face heated. “Well, you have always known that I am a country bumpkin.”
“I thought you were ambitious. You were certainly more ambitious where telescopes were concerned.”
“Your proposal caught me off guard.”
“Excuses, excuses, Louisa. Were I less mindful of my reputation, you would have been robbed.”
Hardly, when she would have given him the eleven pounds, eight shillings she’d studiously scraped together for emergencies, just so he didn’t withdraw his offer.
Still, five thousand pounds a year, just for her. She wanted to laugh: She was now her own rich man.
Suddenly she remembered her deception. “Goodness gracious. There was something I was going to let you find out for yourself after the wedding. But at five thousand pounds a year, my conscience won’t let me keep quiet anymore.”
He cast her a sidelong look. “So your conscience was fine at eight hundred a year?”
“Did you really think my conscience was the sort that couldn’t be told to keep quiet when only eight hundred a year was a stake?”
“True, morally upstanding you are not. So what dastardly secret am I going to find out now?”
Was that fondness in his voice? Why did she feel as if she were slowly melting? “I employ an array of bust improvers.”
He shrugged, unperturbed. “So do at least half of the ladies in London. God does not make that many perfectly waspish figures.”
“Well, my bust improver doesn’t so much improve my bust as create one where none exists.”
He glanced at her bosom. “So how much of that is actually yours?”
“Twenty-five percent. Thirty-five at most.”
His eyes widened.
“I apologize!”
“Only sorry to be caught, I see.”
“Well, I always did plan to make up for it.”
“How?” Was that a barely suppressed smile in his voice? “Isn’t it a bit late for you to develop a bigger pair?”
“I once heard Lady Balfour talk about her brother-in-law’s mistress. She said the woman was completely flat-chested, but was willing to take part in all kinds of unnatural acts.”
He made the sound of choked laughter. “Sorry, go on.”
“So I thought…” She pulled at her collar. “I thought if I would consent to unnatural acts, then perhaps it would not be so difficult to achieve my husband’s forgiveness in this matter. And, well, you are most certainly the sort to incline toward unnatural acts.”
“Am I?”
“Are you not?” She couldn’t tell whether she was asking out of hope or apprehension.
He didn’t answer her. “Suppose you had become engaged to Mr. Pitt instead. Would you have just remained silent on the matter?”
“I would have started putting on progressively less exaggerated bust improvers and hoped that he didn’t notice. But if he did, there were always the unnatural acts.”
“He might never again believe anything you say the rest of your life.”
She was hardly worried about Mr. Pitt. “What about you?”
“I have never trusted a word you said, since the very beginning.”
“I do tell the truth sometimes,” she pointed out, half pouting. “Besides, now that I have ensnared myself a rich lord and confessed my sins regarding my undergirding, I have no more lies to tell.”
“Is that what you think marriage is, a hotbed of honesty and transparency?”
“Well, no…”