“It’s a shame you couldn’t have been in London this past Season,” said Miss Beauchamp. “Oh, all the jubilee fêtes.”
“Too many,” said Miss Duvall. “My feet were worn out dancing.”
“And I must have gained a stone,” said Miss Melbourne, who was as slender as a sapling.
“Miss Edgerton, don’t listen to Miss Melbourne,” said Miss Kingsley. “Every time she takes a sip of water, she vows buttons pop off her bodice.”
“My goodness,” said Elissande. “Gentlemen must form long queues to fetch Miss Melbourne her beverages then.”
The young ladies regarded Elissande in astonishment, then burst out laughing, Miss Melbourne most of all, doubled over with the force of her mirth.
Elissande almost joined them. She didn’t, in the end, because laughing herself was even more alien than hearing others do so.
Miss Beauchamp suddenly held up her hands. “Shhh. I think the gentlemen are here.”
With that, all the young ladies rushed to the windows, Miss Kingsley pulling Elissande along.
The open barouche had not yet reached the house, but already Elissande’s eyes were drawn to one passenger in particular—an outrageously good-looking man, with features of perfect strength, masculinity, and symmetry. His head was tilted back slightly, to better take in the house. And then he turned to the gentleman next to him and smiled with evident affection.
For a moment, she forgot the impossible task that lay ahead of her. A bright pleasure such as she’d never known lit within her, a pleasure that derived from something as inconsequential as the way the afternoon sun fell across the brim of his hat, or the way his hands rested atop the walking stick balanced insouciantly between his knees.
“Come away now,” said Miss Kingsley, again pulling at Elissande’s sleeve. “We don’t want them to see us just standing here like a gaggle of silly schoolgirls.”
Elissande allowed Miss Kingsley to guide her to a seat. She had no doubt of his identity—the handsomest one of them all. Her heart raced with a burst of nerve-wracking happiness. He rescued young women from plagues of rats; he had lovely friends; he looked like a hero of classical antiquity. And he was a marquess, an important man who could shield her aunt and herself.
She felt it. The shift in the tide, the reversal of fortune, the inexplicable thrust of destiny gathering momentum.
This was it. He was it. Her three days began this minute.
The carriage drew up before a three-story stone edifice built in the Gothic Revival style that had been still popular two decades ago. Ivy spread luxuriantly over the front of the house, lending it a greater air of authenticity and age. The windows were true lancets, rather than mere rectangular windows with a façade of pointed arches above. There were even grouted gargoyles to lead water off the steeply pitched roof.
The manor was more than respectable: It was grand. Yet despite its fine, geometric garden, there was something barren in its aspects.
An older country estate, such as the one Vere grew up in, was a hotbed of horticulture and animal husbandry. There was a walled garden that supplied fruits and vegetables for seventy people, a vinery that contributed hundreds of pounds of grapes, and half a dozen specialized hothouses that produced, among other luxuries, strawberries at Christmas and pineapples in January. And while the game park provided pleasure shooting, the duck pond, the henhouse, and the dovecote were entirely utilitarian.
Whereas Highgate Court was but a house and a severely manicured garden in the middle of nowhere. Truly nowhere: Shropshire was a rural and sparsely populated region and Highgate Court occupied one of the emptiest stretches within it.
He had a glimpse of the young ladies crowded around one large window before they quickly dispersed, like birds taking flight.
“I need to get myself a diamond mine,” said Wessex, who was always short on funds, in exasperated admiration as they walked into the manor.
“Diamonds are mined?” exclaimed Vere. “I thought they grew in oysters.”
“You are thinking of pearls, Penny,” said Freddie, patient as always.
“I was?” Vere scratched his head. “Anyway, nice place.”
“Everything is Louis the Fourteenth,” said Kingsley of the furniture in the spacious and elegant entry hall. And Kingsley knew about such things.
The walls and fixtures of the interior had yet to acquire the patina—indeed, the sensation—of age. But beyond that, one could not fault the sensitive taste of the master of the house, who had succumbed to none of the blatant displays of wealth and glitter Vere had expected of a man of such recent fortunes.
He quickly recalled the scant known facts of Edmund Douglas’s life. His father had been either a publican or a dockworker in Liverpool. He’d had two or three sisters, the birth of the last of whom had killed his mother. He had run away from home when he was fourteen, very fortunate timing, for influenza killed everyone else in the household soon thereafter. Eventually he had made his way to South Africa, established a reputation as a brawler, and profited handsomely from the discovery of diamonds.
Nothing Vere knew of Douglas suggested subtlety or restraint. In Kimberley, South Africa, people still remembered the wild, almost orgiastic festivities he’d mounted after becoming a very rich man overnight. Of course—Vere realized for the first time—nothing he knew of Douglas suggested that the latter would become a recluse either.
He glanced once more at the entry hall, noting the passages that branched from it, and then followed the other gentlemen into the drawing room. Once Freddie moved out of his line of sight, he had a direct view of Miss Edgerton, in an eye-catching, buttercup yellow tea gown.
Lady Kingsley had said that she was pretty, with a tremendous smile. She was indeed very pretty, shining strawberry blond hair, light brown eyes—an unusual combination—and the soft, fine, almost melancholy features of a Bouguereau Madonna.
She seemed slightly overwhelmed by the sheer number of men piling into her drawing room, her eyes darting from one gentleman to the next. Then her gaze came to rest on him—and did not move again. After a moment, her lips, very soft, pliant lips, parted and curved, showing off a row of even and notably white teeth. Dimples next appeared, deep, round, charming. And finally, a blaze of giddy, impossible pleasure in her wide, wide eyes.
There were so many things to do when entering a drawing room for the first time. He had to estimate where he might take a spill that wouldn’t damage his knees, which curios he could “accidentally” knock over without breaking, and always, when he visited a house in a professional capacity, to mark a way out of any given room, just in case.
This time he forgot everything. He only stood and stared.
That smile. Christ, that smile. He recognized it by the wave of ecstatic joy that all but knocked him flat on his back.
Had he thought himself incapable of happiness on a sustained basis? He was wrong—and how. He could never have enough of this sweet elation. He wanted to splash in it, swim in it, drink it by the gallons, until nothing but bliss pulsed in his veins.
The girl of his dreams. He had met her at last.
Lady Kingsley came forward. “Miss Edgerton, may I present the Marquess of Vere. Lord Vere, Miss Edgerton.”