Eve turned the horses onto Park Lane while Deene counted to twenty in Italian.
“What was that comment Mr. Trottenham made about your colt beating Islington’s?” Eve asked.
Ah, she was Changing the Subject, bless her. Deene seized on the new topic gratefully.
“I got tired of hearing the old man brag on his colt and decided to turn King William loose for once.”
She clucked to the horses, who picked up the pace a touch. “King William is a horse?”
Deene propped his foot on the fender. “King William is a force of nature in the form of a colt rising four. He’s going to be the making of my racing stud, if only I can find the right balance of conditioning and competing for him.”
Eve smiled at the horses before them. “He has the heart of a champion, then. He wants to run even when he needs to laze about for a day or two, am I right?”
“You are exactly right. He doesn’t want to run, he needs to run, needs to show the other boys who’s fastest. Put him against a filly, and he’s greased lightning.”
She feathered the horses through a turn made tight by an empty dray near the curb. “I’d forgotten Devlin’s stud farm was originally one of your parcels. Do you spend much time there?”
Without Deene realizing exactly when or how, his ire at Georgie’s father, his towering frustration, and even—a man did not admit this outside his own thoughts—his sense of helplessness faded into any horseman’s enthusiasm for his sport. And Eve did not merely humor him with a pained smile on her features; she participated in the conversation with equal enthusiasm as Deene waxed eloquent about his stud colt.
“I’ve never met a stallion with quite as much personality as Wee Willy. The lads dote on him and cosset him as if he were their firstborn son.”
“Is he permitted apples?”
“In moderation. He’s a fiend for sugar or anything sweet, though.”
“Typical male.” She gave him such a smile then, it was as if somebody had put a lump of sugar on Deene’s own tongue. That smile said she was pleased with him, with herself, with life and all it beheld—and all he had done was talk horses with her.
When they turned onto the square before the Moreland mansion, Deene was almost sorry to see the outing end. He helped Eve down from the vehicle, then paused for a moment, his hands at her waist.
“We never did broach the topic I’d intended to bring up.”
She had her hands braced on his arms, making him realize again how diminutive she was.
“What topic was that?”
He let her go and signaled to the tiger to walk the horses while he offered Eve his arm. “I’ll walk you in, but let’s go by way of the gardens, shall we?”
She took the hint and trundled along beside him quietly until they were away from the street.
“My original agenda for requesting your company this afternoon was not to talk your ear off about King William.”
She took a bench behind a privet hedge and patted the place beside her. “Your agenda was rescuing me from Mr. Trit-Trot, though I fear you’re too late. He has that blindly determined look in his eye.”
“Trit-Trot?” While he took the place beside her, Eve took off her bonnet and set it aside, then smoothed her hand over her hair.
When that little delaying tactic was at an end, she grimaced. “Louisa finds these appellations and applies them indiscriminately to the poor gentlemen who come to call. She’s gotten worse since she married. Tridelphius Trottenham, ergo Trit-Trot, and it suits him.”
“Dear Trit-Trot has a gambling problem.”
One did not share such a thing with the ladies, generally, but if the idiot was thinking to offer for a Windham daughter, somebody needed to sound a warning.
And as to that, the idea of Trit-Trot—the man was now doomed to wear the unfortunate moniker forevermore in Deene’s mind—kissing any of Moreland’s young ladies, much less kissing Eve, made Deene’s sanguine mood… sink a trifle.
“He also clicks his heels in the most aggravating manner,” Eve said, her gaze fixed on a bed of cheery yellow tulips. “And he doesn’t hold a conversation, he chirps. He licks his fingers when he’s eaten tea cakes, though he’s a passable dancer and has a kind heart.”
Bright yellow tulips meant something in the language of flowers: I am hopelessly in love. In his idiot youth, Deene had sent a few such bouquets to some opera dancers and merry widows.
Rather than ponder those follies, Deene considered the woman beside him. “I never gave a great deal of thought to how much you ladies must simply endure the company of your callers. Is it so very bad?”
She shifted her focus up, to where a stately oak was sporting a reddish cast to its branches in anticipation of leafing out. “It’s worse now that Sophie, Maggie, and Louisa are married. One heard of the infantry squares at Waterloo, closing ranks again and again as the French cavalry charged them. I expect we two youngest sisters share a little of that same sense.”
Oak leaves for bravery.
He spoke slowly, the words dragged past his pride by the mental plough horse of practicality. “I might be able to help, Eve, and you could do me a considerable service in return.”
Now she studied a lilac bush about a week away from blooming. First emotions of love.
“You already rendered me a considerable service, Lucas.” She spoke very quietly, and hunched in on herself, bracing her hands on the bench beneath them.
She’d called him Lucas. He’d been Lucas to the entire Windham family as a youth, and now he was Lucas to no one save Georgie. He wasn’t sure if he liked this presumption on Eve’s part, or resented it.
“I can have a word with Trit-Trot if you want me to run him off.”
She waved a hand. “I’ll mention the fact that I have only two dozen pairs of shoes, and the Season is soon upon us. In the alternative, I can suggest I’m never up before noon because I must have my drops every night without fail just to sleep. The tittering has slowed him down some, and if that doesn’t serve, I’ll turn up pious.”
So casual, and yet as she sat there on the bench, scuffing one slipper over the gravel, she was a battle-weary woman.
On impulse, he reached over and plucked her a yellow daffodil.
“What’s this?” She accepted the flower in a gloved hand, bringing it to her nose for a whiff.
Yellow daffodils for chivalry.
“You look in need of cheering up, but I see my offer was arrogant.”
“What offer was that?”
“I was going to assist you to assess the prospects of the various swains orbiting around you, and you were going to keep me informed regarding the ladies circling me.”
Now that he put the scheme into words, it sounded ungentlemanly, but Eve was not taking offense. She sat straighter and put the flower carefully to the side on the bench.
“You’ve been traveling off and on for the past few years,” she said. “This can put a man behindhand when in Polite Society.”
Egypt, the Americas, anywhere to escape his father and the man’s scathing tirades.
“I’ll be keeping to home territory for the foreseeable future, and you’re right: I have no idea who is overusing her laudanum, who owes far too much to the modistes, and whose mama plays too deep in unmentionable places.”
Now that he enumerated a few of them, the pitfalls for an unwary suitor seemed numerous and fraught.
Eve regarded her slippered toes. “Before the boys married, we used to gossip among ourselves terribly. They never told us everything, I’m sure, but they told us enough. We did the same for them, my sisters and I.”
And this was likely part of the reason no Windham son had been caught in any publicly compromising position, nor had any Windham daughters. And now the Windham infantry had been deserted by both cavalry and cannon.