“I won’t give up, you know,” she said, her voice strangely bleak.
It took a skipped heartbeat to realize she was not addressing him, but her semicomatose aunt.
“It is possible, isn’t it?” she asked the unresponsive Mrs. Douglas.
What was it? What did she want?
She leaned down, kissed Mrs. Douglas, and left.
In the morning, Elissande ordered breakfast sent to everyone’s room except Lord Frederick’s. Then she settled down in the breakfast parlor to wait for the latter to come, so that they might enjoy a leisurely time together.
She would ask him to tell her more about art, and perhaps something about London. She’d listen attentively, nod her head, and take an occasional ladylike sip of her tea. And then—what? She liked Lord Frederick. Very much. But she had no innate grasp on how best to court him, unlike…
There was no point denying it. With Lord Vere, she had not worried at all about the specifics of courting. The only thing that had mattered was that they decrease the distance between them—her whole person had yearned to be closer to him.
Until her whole person had been repelled by him.
Even so, when he had stated cavalierly that he would kiss her—
No, she had felt nothing at all at his inappropriate flirtation, nothing except outrage and disgust.
Lord Frederick appeared at the door. Excellent, her plan had worked. She smiled at him. In the next moment her smile froze. Lord Vere followed him into the breakfast parlor—Lord Vere who had copious mud on his boots and sticks of straw in his hair.
“Oh, hullo, Miss Edgerton,” Lord Vere trilled. “I was out for a long walk. Came back and met Freddie coming down the stairs. So here we are—we’ve brought our appetites and our captivating company for you.”
She should pity him: He could not help being an idiot. But the only thing she felt was a burning irritation. His presence was spoiling her carefully laid plans.
“How sweet of you,” she made herself say. “And here I was all by myself. Do please fill your plates and sit down.”
But how to salvage breakfast? She would need to bombard Lord Frederick with questions about art—his art in particular—the moment he took his seat.
But Lord Vere thwarted her yet again by commencing his monologue while still standing before the sideboard, loading his plate with fried eggs, broiled herring, and buttered muffins. The topic of his dissertation was animal husbandry. Apparently he’d been to an agricultural fair or two and considered himself an authority.
He expounded at considerable length on the Shropshire mutton sheep, its merits and demerits, and then compared it to the Southdown, the Oxford Down, and the Hampshire mutton sheep, the rams of which possessed something of a Roman nose, in his opinion.
Despite her country upbringing, Elissande knew nothing of sheep. But she could just imagine the atrocious mistakes he was making. She still wanted to shake him by the shoulders and ask him how she could possibly have Raphael’s Deliverance of St. Peter in her dining room when it was a wall fresco at the Palace of the Vatican—part of the architecture of the papal apartment itself.
At some point Lord Vere shifted his focus from sheep to cattle. He had not only attended agricultural fairs, he wanted Elissande to know, but he had seen actual scorecards. “My, those fine animals were put through a rigorous judging—head, body, forequarter, hindquarter. But do you know what the most important aspect of judging a dairy cow is?”
“No, I’m sure I don’t, my lord,” she said, stabbing her knife into the muffin on her plate.
“Mammary development, Miss Edgerton, worth a whopping thirty-five percent of the overall score. The udder must be very large and very flexible. The teats must be of a nice size and evenly placed. Milk veins, extensive; milk wells, capacious.”
He was no longer looking at her face but at her chest. “I don’t believe I’ve viewed a dairy cow quite the same since. Now when I see cows, instead of just saying to myself, ‘Oh, look, cows,’ I study their udders and teats for their conformity to the principles of animal husbandry—and for the sheer enjoyableness of studying udders and teats, of course.”
Elissande could not believe her ears. She opened her eyes a little wider and nodded a little more vigorously. Then she slanted a look Lord Frederick’s way, certain that the latter must be frowning at Lord Vere, trying to warn his brother that his speech had quite smashed through the bounds of acceptability.
But Lord Frederick was not paying any attention. He ate slowly, his eyes on his plate, his mind obviously elsewhere.
Lord Vere went on about udders and teats, his gaze fixed to her torso. In his enthusiasm he dropped two forks and a spoon, overturned his teacup, and finally caused a fried egg to land directly onto his own lap, at which point he jumped up, loudly upending his chair. The egg on his trousers flopped to the floor, but not before leaving behind a perfect round of sticky yellow yolk just where no one ought to look.
The commotion finally brought Lord Frederick out of his reverie. “Penny, what the—”
“Oh, dear,” said Elissande. “You’d best change fast, my lord, if you don’t want your good clothes ruined.”
For once, Lord Vere did the sensible thing and departed. Elissande slowly unclenched her hands underneath the table. It was, however, another few seconds before she could master herself enough to smile at Lord Frederick.
“And how are you this morning, sir?”
The breakfast tray in his room and the lack of one in Freddie’s told Vere everything he needed to know: Miss Edgerton had meant to have breakfast with Freddie, just the two of them.
He could not fault her taste: Freddie was the best of men. She with her plentiful smiles and scheming ways, however, was not remotely worthy of Freddie. But let her try. He would thwart, foil, and destroy every last one of her plots.
But for now he needed to speak to Lady Kingsley. He slipped a note under her door. She met him five minutes later at the turning of the grand staircase, from which point no one could approach them unobserved.
“I’ve asked Holbrook for Nye,” said Vere.
Nye was a safecracker. After Vere had left Mrs. Douglas’s room, he’d changed, written a seemingly rambling note that Holbrook would know how to decode, and walked into the village just in time for the telegraph office to open. On his way back he’d caught a ride on a hay wagon and laid his head down for a pleasant nap after a sleepless night, arriving at Highgate Court as Freddie came downstairs for breakfast.
“Where is the safe? And you still have straw in your hair.”
“In Mrs. Douglas’s room, behind the dead-man painting,” said Vere, running his fingers through his hair. “Do you have the servants’ movements?”
“They don’t go into Mrs. Douglas’s room unless called for. Twice a week Miss Edgerton puts her in a wheelchair and walks her up and down the passage. That’s when the servants go in to clean and change the bedding and so on. Otherwise only Miss Edgerton—and I imagine Douglas himself—enters the room.”
“In that case, Nye can start working as soon as Miss Edgerton comes down for dinner.”
Lady Kingsley glanced up and waved at her niece, who returned her wave before disappearing down the passage, probably to visit one of her friends. “How long will he need?”
“He has opened a combination-lock safe in as little as half an hour. But that was when he could drill. Here he cannot drill.”
Lady Kingsley frowned. “Last night when the ladies retired, Miss Edgerton went to Mrs. Douglas’s room before she went to her own.”
“We must make sure then she doesn’t retire so early tonight.”
“We’ll do that,” said Lady Kingsley. “And I can invent a reason to keep her with me for a while even after the ladies retire, but not for too long.”