This was where her good cheer would first falter. But she would think that he was jesting or had made a silly blunder. She would give him the benefit of the doubt.
Her merriment, however, dimmed not at all. “Not Mr. Albemarle Edgerton either, I’m afraid.”
“Their cousins the Brownlow-Edgertons in the next county? You must be related to them.”
Now there could be no mistake. Now she would see that he was not only below average in intelligence but hadn’t a clue of his below-average intelligence. But she only radiated pleasure, as if he’d inquired whether Helen of Troy had been a direct ancestress of hers.
“Not at all, no. But you seem to know them very well. Are they a very grand family then?”
Had she understood anything he said? How could she not react at all? It was human to respond to clearly recognizable stupidity with at least a pause. Where was her pause?
“Indeed, I do know them very well. And I was sure you must have descended from one of them. Truly wonderful people; a shame neither old Mortimer nor his brother ever married. And their cousins were all spinsters.”
At the beginning of the evening he could not have imagined that he would intentionally tip over into overt asininity. But he had not been able to help himself.
She nodded earnestly. “All the more reason they should have had children.”
No pause. No wavering. Not a single sign that she noted his absurdity.
He took a sip of his soup to buy himself some time to think—and found that he couldn’t. His head was in a state of paralysis. This was not how it was supposed to proceed.
And he could not—nor did he want to—understand what it meant.
He took two more sips of the soup, which seemed to have come directly from the Thames, and glanced surreptitiously her way. Her outward poise and perfection slew him. What was wrong with her on the inside? How could she carry on a conversation with him as if there were nothing at all the matter with him?
His eyes lit on the painting behind her.
“The artwork, is it Raphael’s Deliverance of Saint Peter?” He was going to provoke a reaction if it killed him.
“Do you think so, sir?” she asked evenly, her eyes wide with an admiration he most certainly had not earned.
For a moment he had considered—indeed, nearly hoped—that perhaps she was a dimwit herself. But she’d gone overboard with the flattery of her gaze.
She was angling for him.
It wasn’t something that never happened. He was a wealthy, titled man and from time to time a girl with five Seasons under her belt and no other prospects would try her hand at him. But he, fool that he was, had not believed it possible that she would join the ranks of opportunists.
“Well, Deliverance of Saint Peter has an angel and a man,” he said.
She looked behind herself a moment, turned back to him, and said happily, “And so does this one.”
Oh, she was good. So very good. Were he truly an idiot he would be thrilled.
Well, he had been truly an idiot this night, hadn’t he? One smile and he had been ready to pledge his undying love.
How could he have been so stupid? Why had he been so quick to conflate a devious woman he’d known for all of five minutes with the uncomplicated girl of his dreams? They were not one. They had never been one.
Miss Edgerton glanced at him. She smiled again, a smile luminous enough to serve as God’s own desk lamp. Almost immediately he felt it—the glee, the exhilaration, the swell of contentment. And in the next second, unchecked dismay.
A childish, illogical part of him did not understand that she was a smooth, clever actress. It saw only the same smile that had made him ecstatic before.
“Won’t you tell me more about your friends the Edgertons?” she asked.
Her question angered him—her question, her smile, his stupid inability to separate truth from illusions. He’d never before tormented the women who tried for his hand—they were usually a bumbling lot, dispirited and largely ashamed. Miss Edgerton, however…glossy, confident, cunning Miss Edgerton did not require such tender sympathy from him.
He canted forward slightly. “Why, certainly,” he said. “I can go on for hours.”
He went on for hours—no, days. Decades, possibly. Elissande’s face wrinkled and sagged with the passage of time.
The Edgertons of Abingdon, the Brownlow-Edgertons of the next county, the Edgerton-Featherstonehaughs of the next other county, and the Featherstonehaugh-Brownlows two counties over. They were a family with numerous branches and offshoots and Lord Vere was intimately acquainted with every last leaf on the blooming tree.
Or so he believed.
As he traced the descent of the family, not a single person whom he mentioned more than once managed to stay the same. Daughters became sons; sons became grandsons; a couple who’d had twelve offspring suddenly became childless. Women who had never married were subsequently referred to as widows. One particular boy was born on two separate occasions and then died once in London, once in Glasgow, and—as if that weren’t enough—one more time five years later in Spain.
And Elissande tried and tried to deny it.
When he’d come through the drawing room door, she had been enraptured. Not only was he handsome, he was strapping. She hadn’t known until that moment that she wanted some size in a man: He absolutely embodied the part of her knight, her bulwark, her fortress.
He seemed to feel precisely the same way, stopping in his tracks when he saw her for the first time. Then, for as long as they were in the drawing room, he’d looked at her as if she were air, water, and poetry…
And Aunt Rachel’s evening sitting in the water closet had proved fruitful! Elissande could not have asked for a more auspicious omen. She’d arrived to dinner vibrating with an almost fearful euphoria, the gongs of Destiny loud in her ears.
He was as handsome up close as he was from a distance, his features impeccably chiseled: neither too rough-hewn nor too refined. His eyes were a beautiful blue, almost indigo in the candlelight. And his lips—goodness, his lips had made her feel shy for no reason she could articulate.
Until they’d sat down at the table and those lips had started to move. He made distressingly less sense the more he talked. And the more distressed she became, the more engrossed she made herself appear and the more brilliantly she smiled—a lifelong reflex she could not stop all of a sudden.
He was her hope. He was her chance. She was desperate for their conversation to right itself, for his blunders to prove but a case of bad nerves. But the request to hear more about the Edgertons—she’d thought that speaking of people he knew and enjoyed would help—what a ghastly mistake on her part. Instead of family anecdotes, he unleashed a skull-scrapingly painful recitation of massacred facts on births, marriages, children, and deaths.
Even so, she’d hoped things might improve, until Lionel Wolseley Edgerton kicked the bucket for the third time, at which point her hope also gave up the ghost.
She smiled at him. Why not? What else was there for her to do?
“Have I told you the Edgertons’ motto?” he asked, after a beat of silence.
“I do not believe so.”
“Pedicabo ego vos et irrumabo.”
On her other side, Lord Frederick coughed, a hacking fit of it, as if he’d choked on his food.
Without a care in the world, Lord Vere rose, strolled to his brother, and struck him a few times between his shoulder blades. Lord Frederick, red-faced, muttered a word of thanks. Lord Vere ambled back to his own seat.
“‘We too have scattered arrows.’ Isn’t that what the Edgertons’ motto means, Freddie?”
“I—I believe so.”
Lord Vere scratched himself in his armpit and nodded in satisfaction. “Well, there you go, Miss Edgerton. I’ve told you everything I know about the Edgertons.”