Chloe, if she'd heard this conversation, would have profoundly disagreed with Hugo. It didn't seem as if in the only thing that mattered she was any closer to getting her own way. Hugo seemed to be his usual self, and yet increasingly he wasn't. Something indefinable was missing from his manner toward her. That very particular attention she had come to expect and to rely upon was blunted, if not completely absent.
She tried various means to regain his attention. She flirted outrageously with all and sundry and drew only laughing approval. She went out alone and bought herself the most dashing and sophisticated walking dress she could find. Hugo had simply laughed and challenged her to wear it in Hyde Park during the fashionable hour of the promenade.
Laughter, she found, was a much more potent weapon than opposition. The dress remained in the ar-moire.
The only area in which she sensed his close attention was in her friendship with Denis DeLacy. It wasn't obvious, but his eyes sharpened when Denis was in the house, and whenever she danced with him she could feel Hugo watching her. Was it that he realized she
found Denis more appealing than her other playful suitors? Did he sense another dimension to the relationship? It was certainly there; Denis was infinitely more amusing to be with-much more entertaining and sophisticated than the other cheerful young men at her feet.
Perhaps Hugo was disturbed by that extra dimension. Perhaps, despite his behavior, he was jealous. Of course he wouldn't admit it… to her or to himself… but perhaps that was the explanation.
If it was, then all was not lost. With great deliberation she began to single Denis out for ever more marked partiality.
Hugo watched the growing intimacy closely and after a while decided that Denis couldn't know the truth. If he did, he would have behaved differently in Hugo's company. Instead of his habitual open, straightforward manner, he would surely have shown some deviousness, some shiftiness. He was far too young and inexperienced to be able to keep such a secret under Hugo's skillful probing.
Having reached that conclusion, Hugo decided he had nothing to fear from the friendship, yet for some reason he remained uneasy.
Chapter 21
"You always said you didn't care for Almack's," Chloe said at the luncheon table when Hugo announced his intention of accompanying her to the Subscription Ball that evening.
"Oh, I don't mind," he said, carving a wafer-thin slice of ham. "Curiously, my memories of insipidity strike me as false. Perhaps my advanced years have softened me." He smiled down the table at her. Chloe lowered her eyes to her plate and toyed with a morsel of chicken.
"Well, I own I'm grateful, Hugo," Lady Smallwood declared, taking several mushroom tartlets from the basket in front of her. "It's been such a week of engagements, I'm quite fatigued. A quiet evening at home will be wonderful. I shall ask Alphonse to prepare me some of his crab patties and a Rhenish cream for dinner." She nodded with a contented little smile.
"I'm perfectly happy to chaperone Chloe, ma'am, so don't give it another thought."
He was perfectly happy to chaperone her, Chloe thought disconsolately, because he was perfectly happy to flirt and dance with half a dozen women all of whom seemed to light up when he walked into the room. They weren't all married women either. Lady Harley was a widow in her early thirties whom Hugo seemed to find very good company. And then there was Miss Anselm, who had never been married and was pronounced a bluestocking, but she and Hugo could talk for hours about music and he said she had the purest pitch. He would accompany her singing at the slightest opportunity and, even from her jaundiced perspective, Chloe had to admit that they complemented each other very well. Indeed, only the other day someone had commented in jocular fashion that it seemed as if her guardian was heading for the altar.
And to make matters worse, while he was always welcoming when she came to his room at night, he often seemed to be thinking of something else. Or someone else, she thought miserably.
"What are your plans for the afternoon, lass?" He interrupted her dismal musing.
"I don't have any."
"That's unusual." Hugo gave her a teasing smile. "No young men beating down the door for once?"
Chioe didn't respond to the smile or the comment, both of which she found supremely irritating.
"Perhaps you'd like a singing lesson," Hugo suggested. "We could practice the Irish melody by Moore that you liked so much."
"If you wish," she said.
"No, lass, if you wish."
It was one of Miss Anselm's favorite songs. Chloe decided she wasn't going to compete. She was trying to find an excuse that wouldn't sound childishly petulant, when Samuel came into the dining room.
"Peg's times 'ere," he said without preamble. "Thought you'd like t' know."
Chloe leapt up, all thoughts of Hugo and his possible brides vanquished. "I'll go to her at once. We'll need hot water, Samuel, lots of it."
"Aye, I know," he said. "Mrs. 'Erridge is seein' to it."
"Oh, dear, shouldn't we summon the doctor?" Lady Smallwood said. "It's not something Chloe should be doing, Hugo. It's most indelicate for a young girl to be involved in such things… and with such a creature!" Peg had not found favor with Hugo's cousin.
"That's nonsense," Chloe said, her eyes flashing dangerously. "It's not Peg's fault she is who she is. And it isn't her fault she's pregnant. You should be grateful, ma'am, that God didn't choose that you should have been born into Peg's world." On which note she whisked herself out of the dining room.
Hugo grimaced as his cousin's color deepened, all her sensibilities outraged. "She'll apologize later, ma'am," he said. "But she does become very passionate about such matters."
"You encourage her," Dolly said.
"I don't discourage her, I agree. When someone has such a single-minded mission and such exceptional skills, it would be criminal… not to mention futile." He stood up. "But she will apologize for her incivility as soon as she thinks about it. And if she doesn't think about it, I will remind her," he added. "Now, if you'll excuse me, I'd better see if there's anything I can do." He paused at the door. "Peg's only a child herself, Dolly."
The house shivered throughout the long afternoon with the screams of the laboring child. Dolly retired to her bedroom with her smelling salts, trying to block out the sounds. Samuel, grim-faced, toiled up and down stairs with brass jugs of hot water and whatever else Chloe demanded. Hugo tried to find peace in his music, and when that failed paced the library as if he were the expectant father.
At four o'clock, unable to bear inaction any longer, he went up to the back bedroom Peg had been given and stood irresolute outside the door, listening to the shrieks. The housekeeper suddenly opened the door and rushed out. Hugo could see the bed and he could see Chloe bending over.
He stepped into the room. "Chloe?"
"Hold her hand," Chloe said matter-of-factly. "I can see the head, but she's so frightened, poor mite, she's not helping to push the baby out. Perhaps you can comfort her."
Obediently, Hugo took the small, clawlike hand of the waif on the bed. Peg's screams had become a low, monotonous wail, as much through exhaustion as anything, Hugo thought, gazing with pity at the waxen countenance on the white pillow, the lines of suffering about her mouth and the drenched, terrified eyes.
"Oh, my goodness, Sir Hugo, this is no place…" Mrs. Herridge came back with a bowl and a pile of linen.
"I've seen worse," he said shortly. The decks of a battleship, slippery with blood, littered with the dead, the dying, the hideously wounded… the foul, fetid hell of the hospital between decks, where surgeons cut, chopped, amputated desperately under swaying lanterns. "Much worse," he said. "Pass me something to wipe her forehead."