A Marriage of Inconvenience (14 page)

Less than half the guests were already known to Lucy. For so grand an occasion, Lady Marpool had sent invitations to all the nobility and gentry for many miles around. As the guests moved down the line, several young gentlemen asked her for a dance, and within a quarter of an hour, half her sets were taken. But no one had asked her for the first or supper dance yet. She supposed none of her partners wanted to bestow such an honor upon her when there were so many grander ladies at the ball.

Lady Marpool had urged her to attend the ball for the sake of attracting potential suitors, but as she stood in the receiving line, Lucy felt sure she would do nothing of the sort. The Cathcarts were a kind family, but she could not imagine bluff, horse-mad Ned suddenly deciding that he must have her as a bride. Even more absurd was the thought that any of the gentlemen she was only just meeting—the third son of the Earl of Salperton, a well-dressed vicar from Gloucester proper, the grandson and heir of a baron—might be so overwhelmed by Miss Arrington’s dark, plain little cousin that they would give her a second thought after the evening was over.

“The Earl and Countess of Dunmalcolm, Viscount Selsley and Miss Wright-Gordon,” the footman at the door announced.

At that Lucy’s preternatural calm dissipated. Her heart raced, and her lungs grew tight. She couldn’t look.

Hal let out a long breath and spoke to Sebastian over Lucy’s head. “
That’s
Miss Wright-Gordon? Brother, you’re the luckiest man in the world.”

“Well do I know it.” Sebastian’s voice was fervent, reverent, and Lucy blinked hard.

With an effort of will, she made herself turn her head and look toward the Orchard Park party as they greeted Lord Almont and Lady Marpool. Her eyes flicked past Lord and Lady Dunmalcolm and settled on Miss Wright-Gordon, beautiful in white silk with colorful, intricate embroidery at the sleeves and waist. But the elegance of her dress hardly mattered. What Lucy truly envied was the light in Miss Wright-Gordon’s eyes, the happiness that radiated from her. Lucy hid a sigh.

The family began working their way down the receiving line. Lucy exchanged civilities with Lord and Lady Dunmalcolm—the countess gave her usual distant smile and a calm compliment on her dress, while the earl greeted her with his own usual warmth.

And then she found herself face to face with Miss Wright-Gordon. Now was the time to prove she could be gracious. She forced herself to meet the other young lady’s shining green eyes and smiled as genuinely as she could. “Good evening, Miss Wright-Gordon,” she said. “Welcome to our family.”

Miss Wright-Gordon smiled even wider, took Lucy’s outstretched hands and drew her into a brief embrace. “I’m so glad we’re going to be sisters, or almost.”

Still holding Lucy’s hands, she leaned back and considered her, and Lucy blushed for the simplicity of her dress and how plain she was in general when set beside Miss Wright-Gordon’s vibrant coloring and feminine figure.

“What a beautiful dress,” Miss Wright-Gordon said at last. “It suits you down to the ground.”

Amazed, Lucy studied her for any sign of mockery, but she seemed warm and sincere. “Thank you,” she replied, and fumbled for a compliment to pay in return, but Hal was already speaking to Miss Wright-Gordon.

“Good evening, Miss Jones.”

Lord Selsley bowed, and Lucy dropped into an automatic curtsey. As she stood straight again, her spine prickled with awareness, and she saw that he was staring at her, eyes wide.

“Last week you promised me two dances,” he said.

She could hardly believe he wanted to hold her to that promise after what had happened—she glanced at Sebastian—but she wasn’t engaged anymore. The kiss had still been wrong, but she would betray no one by dancing with Lord Selsley tonight.

“I did,” she replied.

“I hoped you hadn’t forgotten.” Something about his faintly lopsided smile turned Lucy’s knees to blancmange. “I know I said any two dances of your choosing, but…might I hope that the first or the supper dance remains unclaimed?”

She lifted her head, feeling suddenly confident. “Both of them do, sir.”

“Might I claim them?”

“You may.”

He bowed again, this time capturing her gloved hand, which he kissed—a brief gesture, but no mere civil kiss of the air just above her hand. The pressure of his lips sent a fresh shivery frisson across her body. With a final sparkle of those dark blue eyes, he was gone, moving on to greet Hal.

“
Well,
Lucy,” Hal said once Lord Selsley had followed the rest of his family farther into the ballroom. “So that’s the brother. If Miss Wright-Gordon has a hundred thousand pounds, what must
he
be worth?”

Abruptly Lucy realized that she was staring across the room without quite seeing anything, her hands clasped together, her thumb circling the spot on the back of her hand that Lord Selsley had kissed. She dropped her hands to her sides and looked up at Hal. “I confess I’d never given the matter any thought,” she said, hoping she sounded airy rather than shaky.

Hal gave her another one of those detestable leering smiles. “Don’t be sly, Lucy. It doesn’t suit you.”

The arrival of more guests spared her the necessity of a reply, but she burned with fury at Hal. All of this was his fault. If only he’d had even the slightest sense of responsibility, she still would have been betrothed to Sebastian, and her brothers’ future would remain secure.

Her brief rapture had fled entirely. How could Hal insinuate anything so ridiculous? Lord Selsley would never court her. A man of so much wealth, so much power and influence, to throw himself away on a penniless nobody?

She wished she’d stayed in her room after all, Portia’s gossip and Lady Marpool’s exhortations notwithstanding. She had no place in such exalted company. She was a poor relation, a charity case. Lousy Lucy from the workhouse. No amount of finery could truly disguise what she was, and Lord Selsley was only the most absurdly unlikely suitor of all the gentlemen gathered in the keep. Ned Cathcart could do better, and the younger son of the Earl of Salperton would never have asked her for so much as a single dance if he’d known her full history.

She might dance every dance tonight, since she was the cousin of Lord Almont’s bride and a guest of the castle. But the enchantment would not last beyond the evening, and after the clock struck midnight she would still be the same poor Lucy Jones, faced with an uncertain and dreary future.

As the moment for the opening dance draw near, Lucy became consumed by a more prosaic worry. The first dance was to be a minuet, and she was not sure she would remember all the steps. It had been years since those lessons with Portia’s dancing master, and they had spent far more time on the more popular reels and country dances. It would be embarrassing indeed to make a fool of herself before Lord Selsley and all this grand company.

But her fears could not delay the musicians. They had been playing soft music in the background all along, and when the stream of arriving guests slowed to a trickle they finished a song with a certain flourish and added volume. At that signal, the crowd drew back along the walls, clearing the floor.

Lord Almont and Portia took their place at the top of the room, the marquess red-faced and beaming, Portia cool and beautiful in yellow silk. Sebastian and Miss Wright-Gordon joined them, and one by one couples began taking their places opposite each other down the long room.

Lord Selsley came to Lucy and bowed when the floor was about half full—a coincidence, or had he delayed deliberately to spare her from the spectacle of Sebastian and his sister dancing together? She smiled tremulously as she placed her hand on his arm.

“Am I so very frightening?” he asked.

“The dance is,” she murmured. “I’m afraid the steps have completely fled my mind.”

“They’ll come back to you when the music starts,” he said.

He gave her a reassuring smile as they parted to stand opposite each other, awaiting the opening bars of the music. A few more couples joined them, but most of the guests lined the walls, watching the dancers. The minuet was unusual in that it required more space than the usual country dances, and one stayed with one’s partner throughout rather than working one’s way around a square or down a line.

The musicians began to play, and Lucy discovered that Lord Selsley was right. Suddenly her feet remembered what to do. As her partner bowed to her, she dipped into a deep, stately curtsey, and then they curved through the opening figures, crossing around each other without touching. At the appointed moment, she extended her right hand to take his, and they pivoted about, eyes locked. He grinned, and her knees wobbled, but she maintained the regal glide of the dance.

“I told you you’d remember,” he said when they came together again to turn around their clasped left hands.

“You were right,” she said.

He raised an eyebrow as they parted. “I generally am.”

She couldn’t help laughing. “But never humble.”

“I never claimed to be.”

They didn’t speak again, but Lucy felt connected to him by an invisible thread as they wove around each other. She realized to her surprise that she was enjoying herself, caught up in the music and captivated by Lord Selsley’s smile and his deep, vivid blue eyes that gleamed in the flickering torchlight.

Too soon the music drew to a close. Lord Selsley offered her his arm, and they strolled slowly along the edge of the room.

“You dance beautifully, Miss Jones,” he said.

“Thank you.”

Lord Almont approached them, beaming. “Your next partner, I suppose?” Lord Selsley asked.

“Yes,” she replied, rather wishing that it wasn’t improper to stay with one man throughout an evening.

He pressed her hand as he released her. “I shall await the supper dance with great eagerness.”

Lucy’s pleasure in the ball soon evaporated. To her mind, none of her procession of partners danced so well as Lord Selsley, and she grew exhausted from summoning polite responses to their conversational sallies. She remembered afresh that this wasn’t her life, wasn’t her world, and it became a burden to bound or glide through each dance as her thoughts dwelled on her future and her brothers’ fates.

She was glad when the supper dance arrived and Lord Selsley came to claim her again, but he stared at her and frowned. “Something’s amiss,” he said. “What has happened?”

She tried to force the same bright smile that had kept her other partners fooled. “Nothing at all. I’m having a wonderful time.”

He shook his head as he offered her his arm. “You’re fatigued, at the least. Come, let’s sit this one out.”

“But I could rest at supper…”

“Supper will be a sad crush, and it will take an age to find a place at a table,” he said, maneuvering them toward the end of the room. “There doesn’t look to be any place free to sit in here, but I believe the card rooms are through this door. We’ll find a quiet corner.”

Lucy followed meekly as he led her out a side door into an otherwise little-used section of the castle that had been made over into card rooms for the duration of the ball. The first two they tried were filled with whist players, but the third was empty but for a pair of tables, each ringed with chairs and holding an uncut deck of cards. Lord Selsley drew her inside, leaving the door just slightly ajar, and led her to a seat, not at the card table, but at a stiff, old-fashioned settee that Lucy supposed was too uncomfortable and unfashionable to belong in the regularly inhabited part of the castle.

She watched him warily as he sat on the other end of the settee. Open door or not, they were alone. She should have insisted upon dancing.

“Why don’t you tell me what’s troubling you?” he said. “You’ve trusted me before, and I’ll never tell tales.”

She sighed. “I don’t see what good it would do. Talking of it won’t solve anything.”

“But it might. Sometimes another person can see a solution one would have missed on one’s own. I’ve often found that talking of a burden lightens it. Besides, we’re family now, more or less.” His eyes narrowed. “Is that the trouble? Your cousin and my sister?”

It was, but such a small fraction of it. She shook her head. “Not really. Oh, I cannot tell you. It isn’t my place.”

“Ah. Is it your other cousin, then—Sir Henry of the debts?”

“You know about that?”

“Yes, as it happens. Lieutenant Arrington made a point of making a clean breast of his family’s circumstances to Anna and our uncle when he offered for her. He seemed to think it the honorable thing to do.”

There was a cynical twist in Lord Selsley’s voice. “Sebastian is very honorable,” Lucy said loyally. Of course, he had not behaved with honor toward
her,
but she supposed he’d had no choice. Perhaps he’d thought her earlier offer to release him from the engagement gave him
carte blanche
to break it when it suited him.

“Yes, a good, honorable soldier,” he said, still sounding as if he didn’t quite believe his own words. “So. Your cousin’s debts—why do they worry you so?”

“Because my brother Owen can’t go to Oxford now, and Hal is going to sell the living he was promised. Rhys will have to leave school, and he’s only thirteen—”

“Is that what they told you?”

“Yes. When Hal—Sir Henry, that is—told us the extent of his debts yesterday.”

“Yesterday? You learned of this
yesterday?
”

She nodded.

“The devil!” His brow furrowed, and his hand curled into a fist.

Of course. He must have realized that Sebastian had proposed to his sister practically the instant he had learned of Hal’s ruin, and Lord Selsley could not possibly like that. Lucy bit her lip. She hadn’t meant to reveal so much.

Lord Selsley took a deep breath, unclenched his hand and met her eyes, his expression once again calm. “Well, thanks to my sister, it shouldn’t be as dire as that.”

Lucy shook her head. “It’s not as though we have any claim…”

“But you will have one. I’ll see to it.”

“You will? How?”

He smiled, a different smile than she was used to seeing from him—a cool, self-satisfied expression rather than a comradely one. “Quite easily. As I am the acknowledged heir of my father’s financial acumen, which the Gordons, for all their abilities and pride, know they cannot rival, my uncle has asked me to see to Anna’s marriage settlements. It’s the simplest thing in the world to add a clause stating that a certain portion of my sister’s income must go to your brothers’ education and establishment in suitable professions.”