How the Marquess Was Won (30 page)

She slipped into her dove gray dress, which was cut much like her green one, but was shinier and exposed more white throat and bosom. She thought with longing of the springing pin curls the Silverton sisters sported, and settled for brushing her hair until it gleamed. She pinned it up as she normally did, as she hadn’t been offered the services of a Lady’s maid.

In a fit of inspired whimsy, she plucked a white hothouse blossom from the vase in the corner and tucked it behind her ear. She pinned it in place.

She’d only the one pair of gloves. She pulled them on over her arms and inspected the result in the mirror.

The creamy kid of the gloves echoed the creaminess of her skin and the blossom; the gold trim round them colluded with her hair to make her . . . gleam.

It was absurd, but she very nearly took her own breath away, so surprised was she by her reflection. She imagined the expression in the marquess’s eyes when he saw her . . . and hope was a shard in her chest. She breathed in deeply, breathed out, willing it away.

“You will stay here in this room,” she told Charybdis. “Which means no molesting the parrot. No becoming acquainted with the Pekingese. I’m going to close the door now, but I shall return.”

He yawned his indifference.

If the marquess attempted to claim a waltz . . . perhaps she’d do the very same thing.

Phoebe smiled and tossed her head and smiled with an entirely new bravado, and descended the stairs.

A
s it turned out, Lady Silverton, Marie and Antoinette’s mother, was a vague, wispily pretty woman thoroughly bemused by her vivacious daughters. She showed no symptoms of being a concerned chaperone or an aggressive matchmaker, likely believing fate would take it in hand if she exposed her girls to enough titles, as it had with her. She greeted Phoebe with a vague furrow of her brow.

“You’ve met Miss Vale, Mama,” Lady Marie lied wickedly.

“Have I?” She tipped her head and studied Phoebe, as if angling her brain in a different direction would aid her memory. She seemed puzzled by the flower.

“Of course,” Antoinette added. “You told us you liked her very much, and told us you wouldn’t mind having her to stay.”

From behind her mother, Marie winked at Phoebe.

“It was very kind of you to invite me.” Phoebe was astonished by how little goading into mischief she needed. “It was such a pleasure to meet you, Lady Silverton. I’m delighted to see you again.”

“I say so many things,” Lady Silverton allowed vaguely, pleasantly after a moment. “Welcome, my dear. Shall we? Your papa will meet us later.”

Phoebe’s confidence had flickered when she saw the other girls.

The beauty of their clothes found the chink in her armor, and she knew a fleeting, futile, fathomless yearning, the way she’d once looked at the bonnet in Postlethwaite’s shop. Marie and Antoinette were hopelessly sophisticated in shades of rose silk, and Lisbeth was in evening primrose, magnificent with her hair and eyes. They were all wearing jewels, real ones from the looks of things, rubies on the twins and a sapphire on Lisbeth, and the three of them sported complicated hair, curled, twisted, sparkling. Lisbeth was wearing a coronet, her signature, as it approximated a halo.

“I would never have thought of wearing an orchid, Phoebe! You are a picture!”

This came from Lady Marie and the compliment seemed genuine, as did the twins’ smiles and the sense of inclusiveness. Lisbeth, she suspected, smiled because it would have seemed wrong if she hadn’t. But while Phoebe had half expected one of Lisbeth’s pitying looks something speculative twitched across her face instead.

I must look well, indeed,
Phoebe thought happily.
Well enough for me, anyhow
.

“My pink chamber inspired me,” she told the girls somberly.

“My pink chamber inspired me . . .” Marie repeated slowly, wonderingly. Exchanging a rhapsodic look with her sister. They still found her enchantingly singular.

And off they went.

Chapter 21

I
n the carriage they all giggled at nothing at all, almost ceaselessly, as if the very air of the night was champagne and they took it in with every breath. Lady Silverton shushed them once.

“Surely you shouldn’t laugh so very much.” She sounded doubtful. “You’ll burst your stays and ruin your dresses.”

Which sent them into gales of giggles.

The Kilmartin ball promised to be a crush. Carriages had long since clogged the square so that no new arrivals could even get near, and now a river of silk-and-satin-clad humanity moved toward the town house, forced to disembark and walk gingerly the rest of the way. Footmen nodded at them as they passed (finally) into the house, and Lady Marie gripped Phoebe’s elbow with breathless anticipatory glee, as if this were her very first ball and not just another of dozens she’d attended. No one glared at Phoebe as though she were an interloper, an enemy breaching class lines. The smiles aimed at her were all pleasant, even slightly bored. These people all knew each other and saw each other again and again at parties and balls, and yet here they were again.

Imagine
growing tired of this, she thought.

And then she was swept inside with the crowds, exactly as if she belonged.

T
hey burst into the enormous ballroom in a scented, shining little cloud. The Silverton sisters were ton royalty, as it turned out, and out of the corners of her eyes Phoebe felt as though she was running a gauntlet of smiles and curtsies and outstretched hands and fans held up before mouths so others could comment on them as they went by.

They’re likely talking about me,
Phoebe thought with dazed amazement.
I am the new girl.

Postlethwaite might receive the broadsheets and save them for her, and she could say, “Oh, you can keep them, my dear Postlethwaite. I was
there
. In fact, page four, paragraph three is all about me.”

“We don’t greet simply
everyone
,” Marie explained as Phoebe was drawn through the dizzyingly gleaming crowd, while Antoinette nodded in earnest agreement. “That would never do.”

And now she saw how Lisbeth had become the glittering, brittle social creature, all mannerisms. Giddy was the only appropriate mood. Superficial was the only appropriate, or even possible, conversation. And if one was beautiful, one would never be encouraged to display a personality at all, beyond smiling.

The Silvertons drew her through the room, pollinating various little clusters of people with their popularity, extracting the nectar of gossip and attention, and moving on again.

The flower behind Phoebe’s ear was pronounced very original, indeed. Over and over. Until it became clear the word
original
was becoming nearly synonymous with her.

Eventually they encountered Lord Waterburn and Sir d’Andre, who were already flushed with heat, or drink, or both. They greeted the girls like prodigals.

“You must,” Sir d’Andre said, “I pray thee, bestow one of your waltzes upon me, Miss Vale. It’s all I dream of.”

Phoebe tapped her chin thoughtfully. “Well, what do you think, ladies? Should I?”

“I
beg
of you, Miss Vale.” He dropped to one knee, and seized her hand, in a pantomime of yearning.

Oh, for heaven’s sake.

“And me, Miss Vale. I am so overcome by your unique loveliness. I yearn to look upon it again for the duration of a waltz. And to compliment your ribbon.”

They were so
silly
it was difficult not to laugh. What a different man Waterburn had turned out to be from the bored, cold, unpleasant aristocrat she’d originally met. Clearly she’d leaped to conclusions about him the way she’d leaped to conclusions about the marquess.

She batted the thought of the marquess away as if it were a wasp on her periphery and returned her attention to the clowning of d’Andre and Waterburn. She was aware that everyone around them in the perimeter was watching with varying degrees of amusement.

“She says ‘bloody,’ too,” Waterburn confided to d’Andre, on an exaggerated hush. “It’s never sounded better, that word, than when it spills from her lips.”

The two of them dropped to their knees, hands clasped before them in entreaty, to the great delight of the Silverton sisters and to the stiff-smiled suffering of Lisbeth. Phoebe made a great show of consulting somberly with the Silvertons, who pretended to weigh the benefits of waltzing with the two men.

“Now, d’Andre has the finer curls,” Lady Marie reflected.

“But Waterburn, he’s so large one scarcely needs to move at all. He does the waltzing for you,” Lady Antoinette offered.

In the end, Phoebe capitulated, and graciously gave each of them one of the four waltzes. And they launched into paroxysms of gratitude and rose to their feet again, and departed.

And when they moved away, another crowd of men were hovering on the periphery and swelled forth, begging for introductions to Phoebe and for dances from all of them.

“You see? It’s all such great fun,” Marie said to her.

Phoebe couldn’t disagree, though she felt a little winded from all the theatrics.

Ratafia was found for them by the handsome gentlemen and pushed into their hands. And then a gentleman who needed to one-up the others produced champagne, and Phoebe took a sip. Which led to three more sips.

She didn’t mind in the least that she wasn’t the Queen Bee. That role belonged unquestionably to Lisbeth this season, who could have auctioned off her dances and paid the national debt. Because within what seemed like minutes of their arrival, Phoebe’s dance card was entirely full.

She gazed down at it, ran her thumbs over the names of men who wanted to be with her, knowing she would keep it forever, no matter what turn her life took.

And for the first time, a bit of doubt crept in about whether she might want to go to Africa, after all.

When she looked up again, it was to discover that the Silverton twins and Lisbeth had been born away, or had drifted away, like petals on a river of bonhomie. And in Phoebe’s line of vision, just like the bloody North Star, was Jules.

He was quite inappropriately staring at her.

It was no good. No good. Despair and joy tugged her between them. Because in his usual simple black and white, he should have blended into the crowd like shadow and light. Instead, he stood out in stark relief, and everything in the room suddenly seemed like a gaudy prop, all those young men like silly members of a musicale chorus, clowns. He was the only real thing in the room. He would always be the only real thing.

She was almost abashed. She turned her head quickly away, worried that even despite the noise and crowd someone would notice the sheer potency of the beam of the gaze they exchanged. She knew she oughtn’t speak to him alone. Not only was she an unmarried woman, he was the Marquess Dryden, for God’s sake, and his every move was scrutinized and reported to the broadsheets.

She tried to flee. Her body, however, was in complete disagreement with her mind when it came to the marquess.

Jules found himself moving toward her, as surely as he was being furled by a cord.

She looked to him . . . like the moon and the stars. She looked like no one else in the room, and there were hundreds of women in the room, so many of them beautiful by anyone’s definition. What was
wrong
with him that he only wanted to look at one of them?

And then he stood before her. “I didn’t expect to find you here,” he said finally.

“At the ball or in London?”

“Both, naturally. Given that Africa was your destination. Given that we said
goodbye
.”

“Well, I was invited, you see. By the Silverton sisters. It seems they were quite taken with me. I decided to seize the moment. And good heavens, they’ve introduced me to so many
fine young men
, all of whom demanded dances.”

She presented this with ironic defiance. But she couldn’t disguise her own shy pleasure. She was radiant with her own success.

“Have they?” He was ridiculously torn between feeling genuinely pleased for her and feeling positively impaled by jealousy.

“Yes.”

“Fortunate young men, indeed.”

“So they all would have me believe,” she said wryly. “The compliments have thus far centered about this.” She touched the flower in her hair. “They all seem to think it’s very
original
. And I just pulled it out of a vase in my room!”

He was peculiarly speechless. So full of competing emotions no words could emerge. He took refuge in a mundane question.

“How long will you be in London, Miss Vale?”

“A fortnight, I should think. I was invited for that long, anyhow.”

“Who is minding Charybdis while you’re in London?”