Even marquesses and the daughters of dukes.
"My lady," he said, addressing Lady Freyja, "surely you are mistaken. This gentleman is the Marquess of Hallmere and grandson of Lady Potford, a longtime resident of our city. Perhaps this slight misunderstanding can be cleared up quietly outside?"
His voice was courteous, but it held a thread of steel. He took Lady Freyja by the elbow, but she shrugged him off and looked at him along the length of her nose as if he were a worm.
"This slight misunderstanding?" she said with haughty emphasis. "A peer of the realm assaulted a poor serving girl on a lonely stretch of lawn in Sydney Gardens yesterday despite her piteous screams for help and was about to drag her off into the bushes to complete his wicked designs on her while I witnessed all, and it is a slight misunderstanding? It is something to be hushed up discreetly beyond the confines of this room? I do not believe so. This matter will be cleared up here and now and before the respectable citizens of Bath. Have the courage to perform the duty for which you are employed and expel this man from Bath without further ado."
There was a smattering of applause from the gathered spectators.
Joshua grinned at Lady Freyja, who was looking magnificent enough to be a queen of the Amazons. He even made a slight kissing gesture with his lips.
Mr. King sighed and turned his attention to Joshua.
"Do you have anything to say on this matter, my lord?" he asked.
"Yes, indeed," Joshua said. "The lady has a vivid and lurid imagination."
She looked at him with haughty contempt. "I might have predicted," she said, "that you would deny it all."
"Did you see Lady Freyja in Sydney Gardens yesterday, my lord?" the master of ceremonies asked.
"Most certainly I did," Joshua said. "She was alone and wearing a dark green walking dress with a feathered hat. And she punched me in the nose."
There was another gasp from the spectators, followed by a buzzing, followed by the inevitable shushing noises.
Mr. King looked pained.
"For nothing at all, my lord?" he asked. "You expect us all to believe that she struck you, a stranger to her, for no reason whatsoever?"
"She came rushing upon me when I was holding a serving girl in my arms," Joshua explained. "Probably she had heard the girl scream a few moments before. She appeared to have concluded that I was about to-ahem!-have my wicked way with the wench."
"But you were not, my lord?" the master of ceremonies asked.
In the short pause Joshua allowed to fall before he replied, he could see the suddenly arrested look in Lady Freyja's eyes, the dawning realization that perhaps she had made a ghastly mistake. That she had just made a prize ass of herself, in fact.
"A squirrel had stepped into the girl's path as she crossed a lawn in the park," Joshua explained. "It startled her and she stopped abruptly. But instead of bounding away as any sensible squirrel would have done under the circumstances, it attempted to take refuge under her skirts and she screamed. By the time I hurried to the rescue, having witnessed the whole catastrophe, the poor girl was hysterical, though the squirrel had long ago recovered its wits and made off for the nearest tree. I, ah, gathered her into my arms to steady her."
He had, of course, been about to kiss her too, with her full and enthusiastic compliance, but there was no need to add those incriminating details.
"It was at that moment," Joshua added, "that Lady Freyja Bedwyn rushed onto the scene, frightened the poor serving girl into screaming again and taking flight, and punched me in the nose."
Mr. King transferred his gaze from Joshua to Lady Freyja. So, Joshua estimated, did everyone else in the Pump Room.
"Could this be the explanation of what you witnessed, my lady?" he asked.
To do her credit, she did not crumble or look as if she were searching the Pump Room floor for a deep hole to crawl into. Neither did she bluster or make a further idiot of herself by trying to insist upon the truth of her story. Her eyes narrowed and she continued to stare haughtily at Joshua.
"Why did you not explain all this to me yesterday?" she asked imperiously.
"Now let me see." He lifted one hand and stroked his chin with his thumb and forefinger. "I asked if I might be permitted to explain, and you replied to the effect that you knew perfectly well what you had seen and what you had heard. You added, I believe, that you were not stupid. It would have been quite ungallant of me to contradict you."
There was a titter from some members of their audience.
Her eyes grew steely again. "This was deliberate," she said. "You led me into this quite deliberately."
"I beg your pardon for contradicting a lady." He made her an elegant half-bow. "But I believe it was you who approached me this morning."
"It would appear," the master of ceremonies said, raising his voice slightly, looking about him with genial affability, and speaking with firm finality, "that this altercation has been over a slight misunderstanding. We must have you shake hands, my lord, my lady, so that all will see that there is no remaining rancor between the two of you."
Joshua, with a deliberately courtly gesture extended his right hand, palm up. He smiled. He was enjoying himself enormously. He was very glad she had not collapsed into an ignominious heap of feminine mortification-that would have lessened his pleasure in besting her. Her nostrils flared again, her chin came up and with it that splendid aristocratic nose, and like a queen conferring a favor on some poor inferior mortal, she set her hand on his.
He closed his own about it and raised it to his lips.
Again there was a smattering of applause, and then everyone got back to the serious business of strolling and gossiping or-for the intrepid few-drinking the waters.
"I will get you for this," she murmured.
"The pleasure will be all mine, I do assure you, my lady," he murmured in return-and smiled at her with the full force of his considerable charm.
Lady Holt-Barron was so severely discomposed by the scene in the Pump Room that she was quite unable to go shopping after breakfast. Indeed, even her breakfast had to be reduced to dry toast and weak tea, the only items she thought herself capable of digesting. She retired to her room afterward to lie quietly upon her bed.
"Oh, dear," Freyja said to Charlotte when they were alone in the morning room, "I forget that there are ladies with such inconveniences as delicate constitutions. Ought I to apologize to your mama, do you suppose?"
But Charlotte had turned purple in the face and was attempting to stuff her linen handkerchief into her mouth. Nothing, though, would stifle the laughter that came bubbling out of her.
"Oh," she wailed, "if Mama hears me she will have a major fit of the vapors and we will end up having to send for the physician."
She stifled further whoops as best she could.
"It might all have seemed like the farce at the end of the drama to you," Freyja complained. "I could cheerfully have died."
"If you could just have seen yourself," Charlotte said. "Stalking across the Pump Room like an avenging angel while all the dowagers gaped after you. And then speaking to the marquess just as the headmistress at my school used to talk to us when we were in major trouble. And jabbing at his chest with your finger."
But the memories were too much for her composure. She spread her handkerchief over her face and rocked with merriment.
"He knew that I would do it," Freyja said, thinking with indignation of the grinning marquess, whose immaculate good looks had only fueled her wrath. "That was why he did not insist upon telling me the truth in the park."
"And if you could have seen Mama trying to make herself invisible," Charlotte continued, "and that horrid Mrs. Lumbard swelling to twice her size and Miss Lumbard's eyes fit to fall out of her head and-oh, everyone." She went off into whoops again.