Chapter Fourteen #2
Richard, who had just arrived himself, clapped Elliot on the shoulder with a force that made him pitch forward just a little.
“Oh, come,” he said, in a chiding tone. “You love to show off, and a gentleman never disappoints a lady. You play; I’ll pour the last of the port.
” He lifted the bottle, still half-full.
“No sense in letting a perfectly good bottle go to waste.”
“Later, perhaps,” Elliot said. “Mrs. Littlefield—”
“Was just about to ask,” Mama interjected, as she smoothed at her skirts and rose from the bench set before the pianoforte, ostensibly to free it for Elliot’s use, “if I might make use of the library. If there is one, that is.”
“Oh, there is,” Richard said. “And Rebecca keeps it stocked to the gills with the romantic novels she favors.”
“Oh, stop.” Rebecca groused as she reached for the glass of port that her husband offered to her. “He reads them, too,” she confided to Kate with a wink.
Richard coughed into his fist, his cheeks flushing with mortification. “And Elliot,” he added in a rough, desperate sort of voice—which Kate took to mean that if he were going to be dragged down into humiliation by his wife, he did not intend to suffer it alone. “He lives for the drama of them.”
Utterly unaffected and absent even the slightest hint of embarrassment, Elliot lifted his brows.
“What is so wrong with that? I enjoy reading. And I’d rather something pleasant and hopeful than some plodding, overly moralistic tome.
” His gaze flitted to Kate. “One always knows how a romance is going end, and there is something comforting in that, don’t you think? ”
Her hands linking in her lap, Kate spluttered, “Why ask me?”
Elliot’s lips twitched with the advent of mirth. “It would have been impossible not to make note of the sort of books you’ve borrowed over the years,” he said. “Twice a week at least Devon’s housekeeper complained of the task of returning them to their shelves.”
Blushing furiously, Kate stammered, “That—that is—”
“Oooh, caught out,” Rebecca teased, softening the accusation with a kind smile as she leaned forward to clasp Kate’s hand in hers. “Don’t worry; I have got all the latest, and I shall be happy to lend them to you.”
“I’ll make note of the ones Devon hasn’t got at his townhouse,” Elliot said obligingly. “Mrs. Littlefield, I would be happy to convey you to the library, if you wish.”
“Thank you,” Mama said. “That would be lovely.” She offered a little smile to Kate as she took the arm Elliot offered to her.
Kate protested, “Oh, Mama, you don’t have to go—”
“Of course I don’t have to,” Mama said with a light laugh. “But I have got no taste for port, and you don’t need your mother hanging on your every word every moment of the day. I’m certain you’ll have just as much fun without me. Lord Elliot?”
“Yes, ma’am. The library is just upstairs,” he said as he led her from the room.
Rebecca tucked her head against her husband’s shoulder as Richard took the seat beside her upon the couch. “Of course, now that Elliot has absented himself, we must gossip about him.” With the point of one finger, she jabbed Richard in the side. “What were you discussing that kept you so long?”
Richard offered a one-shouldered shrug. “Women, mostly,” he said. “Though what kept us was not conversation so much as Elliot’s dogged determination to finish off the last of the raspberry trifle. I think he coaxed our cook out of another three servings.”
As Rebecca chortled over Elliot’s legendary sweet tooth, Kate found her shoulders slumping with an odd dispiritedness. Women. Of course, they had been discussing women. Had it been women in general—or Miss Applegate in particular?
The prospect made her want to throttle someone.
Her fingers curled instinctively into claws, and to camouflage the hateful motion she snatched up her wine glass once more and took a deep drink.
“I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised,” she said, cringing her to hear the faintly surly inflection woven through her voice, “I had always imagined that Elliot must a bit of a rake.”
For a moment there was only a stunned silence. And then, at last, a burble of laughter split the air, and Rebecca slapped her fingers over her mouth to quell it. “A rake?” she echoed, her voice warbling across the syllables, rife with amusement. “Elliot?”
Richard chuckled, a crooked grin sliding over his face. “That’s a first,” he said as he shook his head, as if it were the most amusing thing he’d heard in years. “A rake,” he uttered in patent disbelief. “Whatever would lead you to believe such a thing?”
“Well—well—” Kate floundered for an answer, feeling heat creeping into her cheeks once more.
“He’s often told me tales of the endless amusements to be found in London.
Gaming hells, horse racing, drinking, gambling.
” All of which she knew well enough that he had availed himself of in the past, and from his own mouth, no less.
Richard coughed to disguise a laugh, earning himself a reproachful jab in the side from his wife. “And you assumed, naturally, that women were among those amusements.”
Why should she not have done? “Well—it’s not the sort of thing one speaks of with one’s friends, is it?”
“With one’s male friends? Oh, absolutely it is,” Richard said.
“I’m sorry to say that it is precisely the sort of ribald talk that is more often than not the subject of conversation in places frequented by gentlemen.
Too many men are overeager to impress their peers with shocking tales of their mistresses or lovers—”
Rebecca nudged him again with her elbow, thrusting her lower lip out in a pout. “You might have been one of them,” she accused. “You aspired to be!”
“That much is true,” Richard admitted sheepishly.
“In fact, it was Elliot who informed me—in so many words, I might add—that the vast majority of gentlemen who keep mistresses do so because they have chosen cold, loveless marriages of convenience for the purposes of some material advantage, and so find themselves unsatisfied. That the coarse talk which frequently reached our ears was little more than empty, bloviating nonsense meant to convince themselves of their virility and masculinity, and that I would be better served all around to find a woman I loved and eschew altogether the pallid imitation of it.” He slipped his arm about Rebecca’s shoulders. “And do you know? He was right.”
“He usually is,” Rebecca said, in a faintly sullen tone, as if it galled her to admit to it. “It’s quite irritating, really.”
Kate blinked. “Is it?”
“Oh, yes. He’s alarmingly astute, much more so than a man of his whimsical nature has got any right to be.
” She gave a soft sigh as she imparted, “There was an occasion in the early days of our marriage when Richard and I had had quite a nasty row over something rather petty. We were both quite hurt by it, and it had been a few days since we had said more than a few words to one another out of pique and perhaps a little spite. Elliot, I am afraid, grew rather irritated with both of us on account of it, as it made his visits rather unpleasant.”
Fascinated, Kate could only inquire, “Oh?”
“Yes, indeed. And so when he could bear it no longer, he swooped in and made off with Richard. They spent all evening at their club, getting proper soused. It was well past midnight when he delivered Richard home at last, and though they both reeked of spirits, Richard was abjectly apologetic, blubbering like a baby—”
“Blubbering!” Richard interjected, a hot flush of mortification painting his cheeks. “I did no such thing!”
Rebecca laid one hand lightly upon his chest. “Darling. You blubbered,” she assured him in a sweet, cajoling croon. “And you were so pickled with liquor that it required three footmen to heft you up the stairs and into our bed, which you did not leave for two days. Now, hush.”
Richard subsided with a sulky murmur, ducking his head.
“Elliot was hardly holding his feet,” Rebecca continued.
“And as I was still supremely irritated—more so even than I had been, since Richard had been returned to me in such a state—I was prepared to snap his head clean off of his shoulders. But before I could say anything at all, he just looked me straight in the eye and said, in such a clear, stern voice, ‘I am going to ask you the same question I asked of him. When you wake in the morning, are you still happy to be his wife?’” Rebecca gave a helpless little sigh, rolling her eyes heavenward.
“And I realized—I was. Of course I was, even when I was at my angriest, even when I was at my most hurt. Of course I was happy, because despite our disagreement, Richard was still the love of my life.”
Kate smothered a snicker beneath her palm as Richard cast such a besotted look down at his wife that she decided instantly that he had blubbered, despite his protestations to the contrary. “Did you take Elliot to task anyway?” she asked.
“I hadn’t the heart,” Rebecca confessed sheepishly. “I deflated like a collapsed soufflé, I’ll tell you. And when I admitted that of course I was still happy to be Richard’s wife, Elliot only told me that I had best not let petty disagreements snatch that happiness away from me, then.”
“And then?” Kate asked, pursing her lips against the smile that threatened.
Rebecca heaved a sigh and offered an exasperated shrug. “And then he walked past me out into the garden and cast up his accounts into my begonias.”
Yes; that sounded rather more like the Elliot that Kate had known.
And yet, somehow it did not surprise that he had put himself in the unlikely position of counselor to his friends.
He’d been the product of such a happy marriage himself.
It stood to reason he would not wish to witness a perfectly good one collapse beneath the weight of sheer stubbornness.