Chapter Eighteen
As the curtain closed across the stage to mark the first interlude, Kate drew away from the railing of the private box.
Probably she had looked like the provincial nobody she was, hanging half over it throughout the first act.
It hadn’t been a conscious choice; she had simply wanted to be as close as possible, to hang upon every word the actors spoke.
Those in attendance at the theatre this evening had not made it a simple task.
She had always imagined that a trip to the theatre would be a refined affair; one in which the attendees would necessarily fall silent in respect to the talented performers.
Instead it had proved to be a rowdy gathering indeed.
Even the aristocrats, piled into the balconies and within their private boxes, had shown so little interest in the play that Kate had wondered why they had even bothered to attend.
Not even the performance unfurling upon the stage could have rivaled the drama produced by those attending, and the dull roar of conversation pervading the theatre had occasionally made it a struggle even to hear the actors reciting their lines.
“Not quite what you thought it would be?” Elliot asked as Kate scooted her chair back from the edge of the balcony, where it had been precariously balanced upon its two front legs as she had leaned over.
“I’ll admit I had imagined something slightly more…decorous,” Kate said with a grimace. “I suppose our box must have been the quietest of them all.”
Elliot gave a low chuckle. “That’s largely because Richard nearly always sleeps through the performances, and Rebecca—well, she’s been champing at the bit to chat and visit, but she has graciously restrained herself so that you might enjoy your first visit to the theatre.
” He leaned just a little closer, nudging his shoulder against hers.
“Take a glance back,” he said. “She’s already twitching; I guarantee it. ”
No sooner had Kate turned to glance over her shoulder than Rebecca leapt from her seat like a marionette pulled by strings, startling Richard—whose head had lolled against her shoulder in the midst of his nap—awake with a groggy exclamation of surprise.
“Champagne, Kate? How have you enjoyed the first act? Would you care to go visiting?” The questions burst free in rapid succession, as if they had been snared between her teeth for the entirety of the act and now fought one another for dominance as they emerged at last.
“Visiting?” Kate asked, uncertain of exactly which question she was meant to answer first.
“People tend to wander at the interlude,” Elliot said. “Most especially if one has got an acquaintance with a box, where one might converse more privately. For that reason,” he added, lifting his voice for Rebecca’s benefit, “Kate and I will stay. Let them come to us, if they so please.”
“You’ll be overrun,” Rebecca warned, plunking her hands upon her hips. “And did you see? Miss Applegate is in the crowd this evening.”
She was? Kate had missed her entirely—but then, she had been doing her damnedest to focus her attention strictly upon the play rather than the chaos of the attendees.
Quite of its own accord, her gaze drew across the people crowding the balconies, scanning face after face until—yes, that was Miss Applegate there, on the other side of the theatre.
She was dressed in a beautiful pastel blue evening gown, her chestnut brown hair perfectly coiffed and adorned with pins that glinted in the light.
Diamonds, maybe, or pearls of a particularly good quality.
Impossible to tell at such a distance, but they gave her an almost ethereal, otherworldly glow.
As if she had just stepped out of a lovely pastoral oil painting.
She had an air about her of unconscious beauty.
Kate had suffered through enough applications of curling tongs by this point to know that such style was never without sacrifice, and still Miss Applegate wore the fruits of it with a casual sense of ease.
Not with the haughty affect of some of the pushier girls who had been vying for Elliot’s hand, but with a simple, genial joie de vivre that made her a pleasant companion and an amiable woman to all in her circle.
Weeks left, still, to come to a decision, but Kate was already more than half-certain. It would be Miss Applegate. It would have to be. She was Elliot’s match in every conceivable regard. And he would love her, because she was everything he had asked for in a wife and more.
Worse still, Miss Applegate seemed not to be aware that there was any competition at all. If she arrived at their box this evening, Kate had no doubt but that it would be by the direction of her brother, Lord Shaw, and not by any particular insistence on Miss Applegate’s part.
A sigh caught in Kate’s throat, producing an awkward, painful lump.
“We’re off, then,” Rebecca said brightly, as she gave a great tug upon Richard’s arm, yanking him out of his chair. “We’ll be back after the interlude with a fresh bottle of champagne.”
A little frisson of alarm zipped up Kate’s spine.
“Oh, wait—” Too late. Rebecca had nipped out the door already, and Richard had stumbled along behind her, still half-asleep.
“I thought—I thought they weren’t meant to leave us alone,” she said inanely.
And since Mama had proclaimed herself far too tired to attend a production so late in the evening, that had left Richard and Rebecca as Kate’s chaperones.
Elliot ducked his head, muffling a snicker in his gloved hand. “Kate. It’s the theatre. Half of London has got a perfect view of us at the moment.”
Oh. She supposed they did. Unchaperoned they might be, but unobserved they certainly were not.
A furtive glance across the crowd suggested that more than a few opera glasses were trained in their direction.
“I don’t think I will ever understand London,” she said on a grumble.
“There are too many rules, and they never seem to be consistent.”
“Oh, I quite agree,” he said. “Most of the time, they’re about appearances.
” He issued a low sigh and a rueful shake of his head.
“In the countryside,” he said, “one never has to worry whether the sheep might have an opinion about one’s sense of fashion.
Whether wandering out of doors without a properly-tied cravat might scandalize a flock of starlings.
Or if some neighborhood busybody might take offense and write up a scathing piece in some scandal rag simply because one had the audacity to wish to view a particularly lovely sunset in privacy, without the requisite accompaniment of a chaperone. ”
“Even so,” Kate said, “you thrive here. Out in society, amongst—amongst the Ton.”
“For at most a few weeks at a time,” he said, with a crooked smile, that dimple carving itself into his cheek. “After a time…it all becomes too close, don’t you think? Too crowded, too busy.”
“Too noisy,” Kate agreed, drawing her hands into her lap to link her fingers. “Too—too public.”
“Yes,” he said. “That’s it. That’s it, exactly.
I keep my lodgings here because London is where Richard and Rebecca spend most of their time.
But it’s not where I would prefer to be, and I am already eager to leave it.
” A little lift of his shoulder. “If we did not have business here, probably I would have by now.”
Yes; the business of finding him a wife.
Once again, her eyes strayed across the theatre.
Miss Applegate and her brother had gone from the crowd.
Off visiting, like Rebecca and Richard? “Have you given any thought to where you’ll live?
” she asked. “I mean to say…if not in London?” He was a third son.
He had money of his own, to be sure, but he hadn’t the vast array of lands and estates—entailed and otherwise—that his eldest brother, Devon, had inherited.
“Oh, yes,” he said. “Obviously, I couldn’t bring a wife back to Longthorpe Manor indefinitely.”
“Certainly not.” Devon wouldn’t stand for it. He was a solitary creature, mostly, and accustomed to a certain amount of privacy. No doubt his brothers would be welcome for visits—but not to live perpetually, while growing families of their own.
“But still,” he said, “I wouldn’t want to be far away. I have a fondness for it, for that particular patch of countryside. All of my best memories are there.”
So were hers. The vast majority of them included him.
“And it’s not all entailed, you know. The land surrounding Longthorpe Manor.”
Kate’s head swiveled toward him. “It isn’t?”
“No. In fact, Longthorpe began rather modestly, as far as country estates go. Most of the land was acquired in parcels, a bit at a time, across a century or so. Much of it was added to the entailment so that the land remained one parcel, to be passed down through the hands of each successive duke. But around my great-grandfather’s time, the estate suffered some financial difficulties.
The family came through them, of course, but it was a near thing, and the entailment meant he had little in the way of assets to sell which might have eased his financial burdens.
So although he continued to acquire more land, he kept it separate from the entailment, just in the event that the family faced such difficulties again in the future. ”
“Oh,” Kate said. “But I thought—Longthorpe is still just one property, and Devon owns it, does he not?”
“It acts as one property,” he said, “because as the duke, Devon presently holds the whole of it. Most of it—the entailed bit; eighty percent or so of the property as a whole—will always be in the hands of the duke, whoever that happens to be. But certain prime acreage belongs to Devon in his own right, and he is free to sell it or parcel it out as he sees fit. I thought I might ask him to sell a bit of it to me. So that I might build a house of my own in a place that is so close to my heart.”