Chapter Ten #3
“Your thoughts.” Elliot inclined his head to indicate the notebook resting by her elbow. “You’ve been scribbling away for nearly half an hour. You must have a great deal to impart.”
Kate hesitated, her gaze sliding to the notebook almost guiltily. “Well,” she hedged, shifting in her seat, “it would hardly be fair to make a judgment so early on, would it?”
“I’m not asking you to render a judgment entire,” Elliot said as he popped another bit of bread into his mouth.
“Just a first impression, as it were. You’ll have the opportunity to revise it, most likely.
” More likely than not, he thought. Probably one—or all—of the ladies they’d encountered today would call upon Kate at some point or another, if only out of curiosity.
“I thought Miss Watson was lovely,” Mrs. Littlefield said. “Such a pleasant voice, and so kind and welcoming.”
“Yes; she’s always been most pleasant on the occasions we have met,” Elliot said. “Very agreeable.” He lifted his glass of wine, took a reflective sip. “Possibly even too agreeable.”
Kate drew back in her seat, a quizzical frown pleating her brow. “Too agreeable?” she repeated, baffled. “What the devil does that mean?”
“Kate!” Mrs. Littlefield chided.
“Well, it does grow wearying, does it not?” Elliot cast an innocent glance across the table.
Kate’s dark eyes sharpened, her hand fisting around her fork. “How,” she inquired, in a voice infused with menace, “does agreeability grow wearying?”
“Oh, you know.” Elliot gave a vague wave of his glass as he searched for an answer.
“The occasional difference of opinions can be most stimulating.” And entertaining.
Like he was now entertained, as Kate stared at him as if he had suddenly grown an extra head.
“One doesn’t wish one’s spouse to always be agreeable, elsewise what is the purpose of conversation? ”
“One would think the purpose would be to speak with one another,” Kate said, her voice inflected with scathing sarcasm.
“To what effect? That is to say, what is the purpose in soliciting my wife’s opinion of anything, when I know it will only echo my own? Furthermore, it does make one wonder if said agreeability is genuine, or if it is merely affected for the purpose of—of—”
“Being agreeable,” Kate supplied as she stabbed a fresh bite of cod, chewing off the word as if it had become stuck between her teeth.
“Exactly.” Elliot beamed, enjoying the surly downward dip of her brows as she silently stewed in growing agitation.
With jerky little movements, Kate set her fork down upon her plate, drew open the cover of the notebook, and lifted her pencil. “Must not be too agreeable,” she muttered as she wrote with painstaking precision.
Mrs. Littlefield cleared her throat, the lenses of her spectacles shining in the candlelight. “Is Miss Watson stricken from consideration, then?” she inquired lightly as she prepared another bite for herself.
The question had held some small trace of amusement lingering within it, though Elliot doubted that Kate had noticed, as intent upon her notebook as she was once more.
“Not necessarily,” he said. “We’ll put it to Kate to judge Miss Watson’s agreeability, and determine whether or not she proves herself less so upon further acquaintance. ”
“I see.” The corners of Mrs. Littlefield’s eyes crinkled as Kate’s mouth pitched toward a scowl. “I thought Lady Eloise was perfectly congenial. It was very kind of her to offer us an invitation to her family’s ball.”
“Oh, yes,” Elliot agreed readily. “She’s quite popular, really.
Her mother is renowned as an excellent hostess; no doubt Lady Eloise comes by her kindness through her.
” He used the tines of his fork to push his food about his plate in a manner that would have earned him a scolding from Mrs. Norris, had she been present for it. “However…”
Kate—who had flipped through her pages to jot notes as they had conversed—lifted her gaze to his. “However?” she echoed, a hint of that scowl leeching out into the question.
“Don’t you think she’s a bit”—Elliot paused as he searched for a patently ridiculous response—“too blond?”
“Too blond.” Kate repeated the words with a placid blink, as if she had not fully understood them. “Too blond! How, pray tell, can one be too blond?”
Elliot offered a bland shrug. “You’d have to ask Lady Eloise, though given her mother’s coloring, I’m fairly certain it’s entirely natural.”
In a tone that verged upon a growl, Kate said, “What is wrong with being blond!”
“Not a thing in the world,” he said, “except that I don’t prefer it.”
The sound Kate made in the deepest part of her throat reminded him rather of a feral dog guarding a meal. Her fingers pinched the pencil as she flipped pages once again and she gritted out the words between the clench of her teeth as she wrote out, “Must not be blond.”
“Oh, it’s not a requirement,” Elliot informed her cheerfully. “It’s just that I do have a preference for dark hair, so if it should come down to a deciding factor—”
Kate slammed the notebook closed. “You are ridiculous!” she exclaimed.
Elliot widened his eyes and lifted his brows in an expression of contrived innocence.
One which, given the little snort Mrs. Littlefield swiftly muffled behind the press of her napkin, he assumed had been none too successful.
“What?” he asked. “Is a man not entitled to the occasional preference? In my opinion, a liking for dark hair is somewhat more palatable than a taste for a substantial dowry.”
Mrs. Littlefield ventured, “To that end, did I hear correctly that Miss Applegate had a dowry of ten thousand pounds?”
“Likely,” Elliot said. “I’ll admit I wasn’t paying much attention.”
Kate’s jaw dropped. “You weren’t paying attention! To a woman who could be your future wife!”
“Well, she and her mother were speaking with you,” Elliot explained, “and I didn’t want to eavesdrop. I reasoned you’d make the pertinent notes where necessary and discuss them with me later.”
At last, Kate caught the sly wink he tossed at Mrs. Littlefield.
With a groan, Kate let her head drop into her hands, thoroughly turning the little curl that had been left free to fall over her brow—and which she had been puffing out of her eyes all evening—to a frizzy mess.
“Elliot,” she grumbled, though her shoulders shook with reluctant laughter.
“You must take this seriously. This is your future wife we are discussing!”
“Ah,” Elliot mused as he rubbed his chin speculatively. “It seems we’ve stumbled upon another requirement.”
“We have?” Kate asked, straightening from the slouch that had bent her over the table.
“Yes. I think I’d like to have a serious sort of wife.”
She twitched a solitary brow up, wrenching it into an arch of patent disbelief. “You,” she said, almost accusingly. “You want a serious sort of wife?”
“Why should I not? Balance in all things, Katie, isn’t that where happiness lies? I’m often accused of all levity and no substance. Surely a wife with a propensity toward gravity would suit. Can you imagine the sort of havoc I might wreak if I had a wife with a temperament too much like my own?”
Was it his imagination, or had she gone just the tiniest bit pale?
“Besides,” he added, with a cheeky grin, “serious women are so much more fun to tease.”
A flush of pique burned away the faint pallor in Kate’s cheeks, and quick as the strike of a snake, she fished her napkin off of her lap and cast it straight across the table into his face. “Oh, you absolute—”
“Children,” Mrs. Littlefield chided, though she was not quite able to smooth away the traces of the smile that clung still to the corners of her lips.
“At the dinner table? Really, now.” A cluck of her tongue and shake of her head.
“Kate, you certainly know better than to let Lord Elliot goad you into such behavior.”
“She does,” Elliot said, as he clawed the napkin away from his face and dropped it to the table, “but she simply cannot help herself. It’s one of the things I love best about her.
” And then, as that perplexed expression scored itself once more into the furrow that appeared between Kate’s dark brows, Elliot pitched his attention instead to Mrs. Norris, who had appeared in the doorway alongside the footmen to clear away the dishes.
“Good evening, Mrs. Norris,” he said, with a polite nod of acknowledgment. “I do hope there’s dessert.”