“And what brings you here, Miss Bridgerton?” he asked. “I hadn’t realized you were such a lover of music.”
“If she loved music,” Lady D said from behind him, “she’d have already fled to France.”
“She does hate to be left out of a conversation, doesn’t she?” he murmured, without turning around. “Ow!”
“Cane?” Hyacinth asked sweetly.
“She’s a threat to society,” he muttered.
Hyacinth watched with interest as he reached behind him, and without even turning his head, wrapped his hand around the cane and wrenched it from his grandmother’s grasp. “Here,” he said, handing it to her, “you will look after this, won’t you? She won’t need it while she’s sitting down.”
Hyacinth’s mouth fell open. Even she had never dared to interfere with Lady Danbury’s cane.
“I see that I have finally impressed you,” he said, sitting back in his chair with the expression of one who is quite pleased with himself.
“Yes,” Hyacinth said before she could stop herself. “I mean, no. I mean, don’t be silly. I certainly haven’t been not impressed by you.”
“How gratifying,” he murmured.
“What I meant,” she said, grinding her teeth together, “was that I haven’t really thought about it one way or the other.”
He tapped his heart with his hand. “Wounded,” he said flippantly. “And right through the heart.”
Hyacinth gritted her teeth. The only thing worse than being made fun of was not being sure if one was being made fun of. Everyone else in London she could read like a book. But with Gareth St. Clair, she simply never knew. She glanced past him to see if Penelope was listening-not that she was sure why that mattered one way or another-but Pen was busy placating Lady Danbury, who was still smarting over the loss of her cane.
Hyacinth fidgeted in her seat, feeling uncommonly closed-in. Lord Somershall-never the slenderest man in the room-was on her left, spilling onto her chair. Which only forced her to scoot a little to the right, which of course put her in even closer proximity to Gareth St. Clair, who was positively radiating heat.
Good God, had the man smothered himself in hot-water bottles before setting out for the evening?
Hyacinth picked up her program as discreetly as she was able and used it to fan herself.
“Is something amiss, Miss Bridgerton?” he inquired, tilting his head as he regarded her with curious amusement.
“Of course not,” she answered. “It’s merely a touch warm in here, don’t you think?”
He eyed her for one second longer than she would have liked, then turned to Lady Danbury. “Are you overheated, Grandmother?” he asked solicitously.
“Not at all,” came the brisk reply.
He turned back to Hyacinth with a tiny shrug. “It must be you,” he murmured.
“It must,” she ground out, facing determinedly forward. Maybe there still was time to escape to the ladies’ retiring room. Penelope would want to have her drawn and quartered, but did it really count as abandonment when there were two people seated between them? Besides, she could surely use Lord Somershall as an excuse. Even now he was shifting in his seat, bumping up against her in a way that Hyacinth wasn’t entirely certain was accidental.
Hyacinth shifted slightly to the right. Just an inch-not even. The last thing she wanted was to be pressed up against Gareth St. Clair. Well, the second-to-last, anyway. Lord Somershall’s portly frame was decidedly worse.
“Is something amiss, Miss Bridgerton?” Mr. St. Clair inquired.
She shook her head, getting ready to push herself up by planting the heels of her hands on the chair on either side of her lap. She couldn’t-
Clap.
Clap clap clap.
Hyacinth nearly groaned. It was one of the Ladies Smythe-Smith, signaling that the concert was about to begin. She’d lost her moment of opportunity. There was no way she could depart politely now.
But at least she could take some solace in the fact that she wasn’t the only miserable soul. Just as the Misses Smythe-Smith lifted their bows to strike their instruments, she heard Mr. St. Clair let out a very quiet groan, followed by a heartfelt, “God help us all.”
Chapter 2
Thirty minutes later, and somewhere not too far away, a small dog is howling in agony. Unfortunately, no one can hear him over the din…
There was only one person in the world for whom Gareth would sit politely and listen to really bad music, and Grandmother Danbury happened to be it.
“Never again,” he whispered in her ear, as something that might have been Mozart assaulted his ears. This, after something that might have been Haydn, which had followed something that might have been Handel.
“You’re not sitting politely,” she whispered back.
“We could have sat in the back,” he grumbled.
“And missed all the fun?”
How anyone could term a Smythe-Smith musicale fun was beyond him, but his grandmother had what could only be termed a morbid love for the annual affair.
As usual, four Smythe-Smith girls were seated on a small dais, two with violins, one with a cello, and one at a pianoforte, and the noise they were making was so discordant as to be almost impressive.
Almost.
“It’s a good thing I love you,” he said over his shoulder.
“Ha,” came her reply, no less truculent for its whispered tone. “It’s a good thing I love you.”
And then-thank God-it was over, and the girls were nodding and making their curtsies, three of them looking quite pleased with themselves, and one-the one on the cello-looking as if she might like to hurl herself through a window.
Gareth turned when he heard his grandmother sigh. She was shaking her head and looking uncharacteristically sympathetic.
The Smythe-Smith girls were notorious in London, and each performance was somehow, inexplicably, worse than the last. Just when one thought there was no possible way to make a deeper mockery of Mozart, a new set of Smythe-Smith cousins appeared on the scene, and proved that yes, it could be done.
But they were nice girls, or so he’d been told, and his grandmother, in one of her rare fits of unabashed kindness, insisted that someone had to sit in the front row and clap, because, as she put it, “Three of them couldn’t tell an elephant from a flute, but there’s always one who is ready to melt in misery.”
And apparently Grandmother Danbury, who thought nothing of telling a duke that he hadn’t the sense of a gnat, found it vitally important to clap for the one Smythe-Smith girl in each generation whose ear wasn’t made of tin.
They all stood to applaud, although he suspected his grandmother did so only to have an excuse to retrieve her cane, which Hyacinth Bridgerton had handed over with no protest whatsoever.
“Traitor,” he’d murmured over his shoulder.
“They’re your toes,” she’d replied.
He cracked a smile, despite himself. He had never met anyone quite like Hyacinth Bridgerton. She was vaguely amusing, vaguely annoying, but one couldn’t quite help but admire her wit.
Hyacinth Bridgerton, he reflected, had an interesting and unique reputation among London socialites. She was the youngest of the Bridgerton siblings, famously named in alphabetical order, A-H. And she was, in theory at least and for those who cared about such things, considered a rather good catch for matrimony. She had never been involved, even tangentially, in a scandal, and her family and connections were beyond compare. She was quite pretty, in wholesome, unexotic way, with thick, chestnut hair and blue eyes that did little to hide her shrewdness. And perhaps most importantly, Gareth thought with a touch of the cynic, it was whispered that her eldest brother, Lord Bridgerton, had increased her dowry last year, after Hyacinth had completed her third London season without an acceptable proposal of marriage.