A Lady's Point of View (25 page)

In the garden, Angela was
astonished to find herself at the center of scene that might have enlivened a
Covent Garden melodrama. In a shadowed arbour, Sir Manfred had attempted to
press his mouth to hers. As an involuntary shudder wracked her,
 
a second gentleman burst upon them,
shouting, “Unhand her, you cad!”

Sir Manfred retreated a step and
uttered a feeble protest, before the fury of his opponent drove him reluctantly
toward the house. Edward appeared ready to give chase, then swung round to
scowl at Angela.

“You don’t understand.” She gazed
through tears at the man she loved. “I’m required to marry him. He came to call
one day while I was alone. He accidentally knocked me to the floor just as his
cousin came in and caught us compromised. Besides, there’s Mother—”

“Hang it all, Angela, you can’t
marry that windbag!” Edward caught her in his arms, and pressed her trembling
form against him. “If you have to marry someone, it might as well be me.”

With her faint remaining
strength, Angela wrenched free. “I can’t, Edward. I love you too much. How can
I accept a loveless marriage, always longing for the affection you cannot give
me? I’d be better off with Sir Manfred.” She began to weep.

“A loveless marriage?” Edward
nearly choked on the words. “But I adore you, my sweet. It was only... my duty
required... that is, how could I indulge my own happiness, at the expense of...
What the devil am I talking about?”

He dropped to one knee, and
pressed his suit with ardent words that thrilled his listener. Nearly afloat
with joy, Angela agreed to resume their engagement.

Sir Manfred was not by nature a
coward, no more than any other gentleman who has always lived comfortably off
inherited money and devoted himself to his own entertainment. He had
relinquished Angela not from any serious fear of injury—although he had a
healthy respect for Edward Cockerell’s fists—but from a knowledge of his own
guilt. It was he who had broken the loving couple apart, with his stratagem of
trapping the young lady into an engagement. He could scarcely claim that he’d
been wronged. Well, Sir Manfred would show the pair that he suffered from no
pangs of unrequited love.

Inside the ballroom, his gaze
fell upon Meg Linley standing beside her mother. With a bow, he requested her
company and was granted it. The lively country dance gave way to yet another
waltz and, with reckless disregard for propriety, Sir Manfred insisted upon two
dances in a row.

“Going to be family and all,” he
muttered, taking advantage of the sister’s ignorance to demonstrate his
heart-wholeness to Angela, who had reentered the room on Edward’s arm.

Let the chit see how little he
cared for her. Indeed, Sir Manfred reflected, he had had a narrow escape.

As he had been following Meg’s
movements throughout the evening, the marquis did not fail to observe Sir Manfred’s
breach of etiquette. What was wrong with the girl? the marquis demanded
silently. Meg couldn’t actually mean to marry that fop for his money, could
she?

Lord Bryn had only a slight
acquaintance with Sir Manfred, but he did recall that the gentleman was
comfortably fixed. While not a great catch, he remained an adequate one in view
of the Linleys’ difficulties.

His heart turned over at the
sight of Meg smiling tensely up at the portly fellow, no doubt forcing herself
to be polite. At that moment, Cynthia strolled by and murmured, “Do you expect
them to make the announcement this very evening?”

Although perhaps she intended to
arouse the marquis’s disdain, her words had the opposite effect. Andrew saw of
a sudden that he loved Meg desperately, and that to the best of his knowledge
she loved him. The only thing standing in their way was his own damnable pride.

The same pride had led him to
ignore his trusted Harry that tragic day on the Peninsula, with results that
would haunt the marquis as long as he lived. He was making the same mistake
again, but in such a different form that he had almost failed to recognise it.
He had allowed himself to wallow in self-righteousness, without a care for
Meg’s future.

Her marriage to that unpleasant
excuse for a man would be, in its own way, a death of all that was bright and
free in her spirit. She had told Bryn that the reason she failed to correct the
mistake in her identity at Brynwood was because she wanted to stay close to
him. Yet he had gone on brooding and doubting her motives until it was almost
too late.

If he continued this show of
indifference, the future stretched ahead, a long empty staircase of years,
without Meg to warm his household. There would be endless breakfasts with some
tedious woman pouring coffee and chattering inanely across the table, endless
evenings filled with polite phrases and reproaches at his coldness, endless
nights of tossing and aching for the scent of her hair across his pillow. He
must take action now.

Without further hesitation, the
marquis strode across the room.

Sir Manfred felt a hand clamp
onto his shoulder. He saw a dark glowering face, and heard a voice command him
to relinquish Miss Linley. Had the world had turned upside down? Dash it, no
man deserved to be accosted in this manner twice in one evening!

Snatched without warning from the
dance and marched out-of-doors, Meg had no inkling that Lord Bryn meant her
anything but further reproach. Well, she would not wait for him to strike
first.

“Have you uncovered some other
imaginary scheme of mine?” she demanded when they were alone in the garden.
“Have two more ruffians come to call for their cousin, who is not me?”

“Prickly lass,” said the marquis.

Meg glared at him. “This may be
sport to you, my lord, but I have serious matters to attend to.” Even now, Sir
Manfred might be raising a hue and cry over Angela’s defection. Meg had not
missed the sight of her sister and Edward Cockerell entering the room together,
oblivious to all but each other.

“So I observed.”

“What do you mean?” She folded
her arms, bracing for some new insult.

“Lady Darnet informs me that you
are forced to marry for money,” said the marquis gently. “If you must do so,
then I am considerably richer than Sir Manfred.”

“Is that meant to be a proposal?”
The man was mocking her. How cruel, when he must know that she loved him. Well,
Meg had thrown herself at his feet once and would not do so again. “Hardly my
idea of a romantic address.”

“Shall I go down on one knee?”
His handsome mouth twisted wryly. “It’s a bit damp for that this evening, but I
shall if you wish it.”

How adorable he was when he
smiled! Some other time, under some other circumstance, she might have laughed
and touched his cheek. But now she must disabuse him of this nonsense about a
forced marriage. “Well, you’re quite safe, because I have no intention of
marrying Sir Manfred or anyone. So you needn’t sacrifice yourself.”

“Dash it, Meg, I love you!” The
words seemed to explode from Lord Bryn’s heart. “It’s taken me a while to see
it, and I don’t mean to waste time begging for dances and conjuring rides in
Hyde Park. Just say yes, and be done with it.”

She slanted a dubious look at
him. “You really wish to marry me?” How improbable that seemed, yet how else to
explain his behaviour?

“I’ve just said so.” He took a
deep breath. “I need a wife, and you’ll do as well as any. Damn it, that’s not
what I mean. I need you. The children need you. The house needs you. If you
don’t marry me, I shall carry you off to Scotland and force the matter. Is that
clear?”

“Perfectly,” she said, joy
flooding her soul. “You leave me no choice. I shall have to marry you.”

It took a moment for the import
to strike him. “You’re accepting me?”

“I am.” Didn’t he know she cared
nothing for flowery courtships? All she wanted was to be alone with him once
more as they had been that night when she learned what it meant to love as a
woman.

“Not because I, er, threatened
you?”

Laughter bubbled from her lips,
“I was thinking of hauling you off to Scotland myself. But it might appear odd
to the children.”

With a shout of happiness, he
gathered her in his arms.

The music was quite soft, and
more than one set of ears in the ballroom heard Brynwood’s blissful cry. One
such pair belonged to a spiteful, determined young countess. She would have the
last word yet! A short time later, when Lady Mary silenced the orchestra and
stepped onto the platform to make an announcement, Lady Darnet was ready.

“I am happy to tell you that both
of my daughters are engaged to be married,” said the hostess, waiting while a
collective gasp rose from her audience. “My elder daughter, Margaret, shall
marry Lord Bryn, Marquis of Brynwood, and my younger daughter, Angela, is
betrothed to Mr. Edward Cockerell.”

Before the crowd could recover
from its shock, Lady Darnet raised her voice, her courage bolstered by repeated
sips of sherry. “This is an outrage!”

Heads swiveled. Eyes blinked. An
intensely interested silence rippled across the room.

“Meg Linley disguised herself as
a governess and invaded Lord Bryn’s home, living with him in the most
scandalous manner until he tossed her out!” the countess shouted, her voice
cracking slightly on the last word.

No one moved.

It was Helen Cockerell who spoke
next. “Nonsense! It’s true that Miss Linley visited Lord Bryn, but she was in
the company of my cousin, Germaine Geraint, who I’m sure will attest to the
propriety of their conduct.”

This countermove Cynthia had not
foreseen. Blast! Well, there was still that odious Angela to cut down.

“As to the younger sister, I
witnessed her sprawled on the floor with Sir Manfred in a state of undress,”
she declared.

The murmur that greeted this
sally was not entirely friendly. To the countess’s dismay, her cousin raised
his voice above the others. “Stuff and nonsense! I merely walked into the room,
slipped and knocked Miss Angela to the floor. My own clumsy fault. Cynthia,
you’ve got yourself foxed on sherry.”

With this juicy disclosure of her
alleged drunken habits hanging in the air, he stalked over and grasped Lady
Darnet by the elbow. She found herself unceremoniously dragged from the room.

“How dare you treat me in this
manner!” she scolded. She must return at once to demonstrate her sobriety.

“Had enough of this folderol,”
muttered her cousin as he demanded their cloaks from a servant. “A man can bear
only so much in one evening.”

Overcome by rage, the countess
cursed him with phrases colourfully descriptive, and seldom heard in a
respectable home. Too late, it occurred to her that just as she had caught Lord
Bryn’s shout earlier, others might have registered hers.

Distraught, the countess allowed
her cousin to propel her from the residence. As they rode home, and the
evening’s events repeated themselves in her mind, she could not avoid the
painful conclusion that many a door was likely to be closed to her for months
to come.

It was her turn now to retreat to the country.
Leaning back against the squabs of her carriage, Lady Darnet watched the
streets of London roll past, and reflected how very much she was going to miss
them.

While Lady Mary regretted the
unfortunate interruption, nothing could dim her happiness. At supper, she saw
Angela teasingly feed Edward a morsel of crab cake, and Meg rest her head
against the marquis’s shoulder, both of their faces a study in contentment.

For a bit of fluff and a chit who
couldn’t see, her daughters hadn’t done half badly, she mused, and treated
herself to a celebratory glass of claret.

The use of polished crystals, glass lenses and
water-filled globes to enhance reading dates to ancient times. By the Middle
Ages, some accounts say the Chinese had devised spectacles; others credit the
Venetians with inventing the magnifying glass. Around 1300, eyeglasses were in
use in Italy, as depicted in artwork of the period. Many improvements date to
the 1700s, including rigid sidepieces to fit around the ears. From the 1750s, a
quizzing glass—a single lens held up to the eye—came into style and was worn as
jewelry. These were especially popular with men. In the 1780s, Benjamin
Franklin invented bifocals by cutting in half the lenses from two separate
pairs of glasses and fitting them together. Beginning in the early 1800s, some
fashionable folk employed lorgnettes, which were double lenses attached to a
single handle and lifted to the eyes.

A love for the books of Jane Austen drew Jacqueline
Diamond to the world of the Regency-era romance, and her half-dozen novels in
the genre have delighted readers for nearly thirty years. Jackie has gone on to
sell some 90 novels ranging from mysteries and suspense to paranormal romances
and romantic comedies. A former Associated Press reporter in Los Angeles,
Jackie – who also writes as Jackie Diamond Hyman and Jacqueline Topaz -- has
received a career achievement award from Romantic Times magazine and two
finalist placements for the RITA Award. A full list of her books is available
on her website,
www.jacquelinediamond.com
.
You can keep up with her also on Facebook, at
JacquelineDiamondAuthor
,
and on Twitter, as @jacquediamond.

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