Evelyn Richardson (2 page)

Naturally a woman who possessed as strong a sense of self-preservation as Lavinia Granville kept the liaison between herself and the Marquess of Charlmont discreet, but the fact that she had managed to capture and hold the attention of a man whose fickleness was legendary only served to add to the growing acknowledgment that Lady Granville was “something of a beauty,” though of course her lack of truly ancient and respectable blood kept her from being declared a diamond of the first water.

The beauty was now doing her best to appear both charming and respectful under the unflinchingly critical stare of Mrs. Drummond Burrell, but it was heavy going in the face of the patroness’s notoriously unbending attitude toward anyone ill-bred enough not to have been born into the Upper Ten Thousand.

Fortunately, the Marquess of Charlmont had been born to that select group, his birth and breeding being superior even to Mrs. Drummond Burrell’s. In addition to that, he possessed charm in abundance, which, whenever he chose to use it, could be extremely effective, as it was at this particular moment.

Lucian favored the patroness with a smile that caused the rigidly disapproving line of her lips to curve ever so slightly into something approaching an answering smile. “But now, if you will excuse us, we must not be selfish and take all your attention when it is plain to see there are others clamoring for it.” He turned to his lovely partner. “Come, Lady Granville, I see Lady Robert Thornhill looking in our direction and it would never do to ignore one of your Somerset neighbors.”

Sketching a casually elegant bow to Mrs. Drummond Burrell, he held out his arm to Lavinia, steering her deftly toward the opposite corner of the room. “There, now, you may consider yourself to be thoroughly launched. And if you do not find yourself the toast of the town within this Season or the next, I shall be very much surprised.”

Lady Granville sighed gently. “It is very kind of you Charlmont, to do this, but…” The beauty paused to look up at him in a way that had never failed to melt even the most unsusceptible of masculine hearts.

“But what?” Too late, Lucian realized that he had fallen into the trap that he had been so carefully avoiding since their arrival at Almack’s, the request that had been hovering on Lady Granville’s lips all during their waltz. He had managed to distract her with the promised introduction to Mrs. Drummond Burrell, but even a diversion of that magnitude was futile in the face of Lavinia Granville’s resolve.

Sighing, he gave in to the inevitable. “Very well. You had better tell me what is troubling you now so that I have the rest of the evening to ponder it.”

He was instantly rewarded by a brilliant smile and a grateful squeeze of his hand. “Oh Charlmont, I knew I could depend on you. You are always so generous, so…”

“Cut line, my dear. I am nothing of the sort. Now, what is it?”

“It is Lady Catherine.”

He looked blank.

“Granville’s widow.”

This enlightening explanation did not appear to elucidate the situation. The marquess continued to stare at her blankly.

“She has begun a school.”

“Surely that is an admirable and proper thing for a widow to do.”

“This is not a charity school for children of the local village. It is an academy where young ladies pay to be educated, an academy that she styles Lady Catherine Granville’s Select Academy for Genteel Young Ladies. It is utterly mortifying to have one’s name connected with trade. Granville, of course, is furious. Now that he is head of the family, the responsibility for maintaining the reputation of the Granville name falls entirely upon his shoulders. Naturally, he made the most forcible representations to her about the scandalously inappropriate nature of this enterprise in the first place, and then when he discovered how she had chosen to style her establishment, why… Well, not to put too fine a point on it, he was horrified.”

“And the widow?”

“Paid not the slightest attention. She is excessively strong-minded.”

“Something of a dragon, is she?”

“Worse.” Lady Granville shuddered delicately. “She is a veritable bluestocking.”

“An intellectual woman? How dreadful for you.”

The ironic gleam in the marquess’s eye was lost on his companion. Wringing her hands she cast a pleading glance at him. “Now you see why I am desperate for your help. If she will not listen to reason from the head of her own husband’s family, she…”

“Is not likely to listen to it from a complete stranger.”

“But Charlmont, everyone listens to you.” Lady Granville’s eyelashes fluttered charmingly and she shook a playful finger at him. “And you know very well, my lord, that there is not a woman alive who can resist you. Why even Mrs. Drummond Burrell…”

He saw that it was hopeless. “Very well, Lavinia, what is it that you are hoping I will be able to do?”

“Go to her. Speak to her. Make her see that she cannot do this. It will ruin everything for me to be known as the relation of a woman who runs a boarding establishment in Bath.”

“If Granville’s argument was not sufficiently compelling to make her change her mind, I fail to see what reasoning
I
can lay before her that will make her do so.”

“I know you will think of something. Everyone says that you are excessively clever.”

The marquess was silent for a moment, thinking. “It is true that my niece, who has been allowed to run wild since her father died, is in desperate need of an education and that her mother is most concerned about the hopelessly inappropriate friendship she seems to have formed with the squire’s son. Perhaps I should pay a visit to this academy for genteel young ladies on her behalf.”

Lucian was rewarded by a brilliant smile. “The very thing! I knew you would save me. Believe me, I am grateful indeed for this and all that you have done. You know that if you were to call on me, say, ah…later this evening…I could prove to you just how grateful I am.”

“I have not solved your problem yet. I have still to meet the dragon, you know.”

“I have every confidence that you will bring her around. You know that no woman is proof against your charm, even a dragon.”

Chapter Two

The dragon, however, was far from charmed when a week later a letter arrived from the Marquess of Charlmont informing her of his impending visit.

“Oh dear,” she gasped faintly as her eyes fell on the crest adorning the heavy cream paper and the boldly scrawled “Charlmont” at the bottom.

“What is it, Catherine? It is not Granville causing more trouble again, I trust?” Her companion looked up from the stack of bills she had been organizing.

“No, worse. The Marquess of Charlmont is considering sending his niece to the academy and is coming to inspect it.” Lady Catherine Granville glanced hurriedly through the letter. “Tomorrow!”

“But surely that is excellent news. Not only is the marquess the biggest landowner in two counties, but the family has been one of the leading families since they came over with the Conqueror. To have Charlmont’s niece as a pupil would be a feather in your cap indeed!” Margaret Denholme, the local vicar’s daughter, mathematics instructress at Lady Catherine Granville’s Select Academy for Genteel Young Ladies, and Lady Catherine Granville’s closest companion, looked up from the bills she had been sorting.

“If it were the marquess’s daughter, perhaps, it would be.” Frowning thoughtfully, Catherine gazed out the window. It was clear from the faraway expression in her eyes, however, that she was not looking at the rose bushes in die garden behind her office but at something a good deal further away in space and time. “But his niece?” She shook her head. “I…er…was introduced to Charlmont’s brother Lucian Verney during my Season in London and, at that time, he had a reputation that did not bear looking into.”

“Ah.” Margaret watched with great interest as the faintest tinge of color crept into her friend’s cheeks. Lady Catherine Granville, mistress of a vast estate for eight years, widowed for two, and founder of a steadily growing academy for young ladies was not the sort of person whose sensibilities caused her to blush at the mere hint of scandal. Though still young, she had always been an independent thinking, practical, and competent woman who welcomed and even sought out the challenges that life brought her way. It was unlike her to cavil at a man’s reputation, even if it were out of concern for the reputation and good name of her fledgling establishment.

“But it is quite possible that, now, as the father to a school-age daughter, the Marquess of Charlmont’s brother has mended his ways. Perhaps he is now a pattern card of respectability.”

“Perhaps.” Lady Catherine sounded doubtful, and the blush, instead of fading, grew deeper. She continued to focus her gaze on the scene outside the window with an intensity that told Margaret she was deliberately avoiding meeting her friend’s eyes.

Silence reigned once again in the library that now functioned as the office of Lady Catherine Granville’s Select Academy in Bath’s elegant Royal Crescent. Margaret again bent her head over her accounts while Catherine perused the other letters the post had brought. But there was something in the way Catherine kept looking up from her correspondence and staring off into space from time to time that told Margaret her mind was not on the rest of the letters in front of her. Surely there was more to this than met the eye?

From the moment Catherine’s husband had died so unexpectedly and she had been hustled off by his heir to the dower house without so much as a by-your-leave, Catherine had fought to remain involved in the world in which she had played such a vital part as Lord Granville’s wife, a world that the new heir was equally determined to divest of her. She was no longer welcomed at Granville Park where the staff’s clear preference for its former mistress made it difficult, if not impossible, for the new Lord Granville to establish any authority over them. And in the surrounding countryside where Lady Catherine’s popularity was constantly being thrown in his face, the heir had made it abundantly clear that he considered it the height of impropriety and a blot on the family name to have a recently widowed woman so constantly in the public eye. All Catherine’s protests that it was charitable work and not social interaction that took her out among her neighbors had fallen on deaf ears, and in the end, she had been forced to curtail even those minimal activities.

For the past two years Margaret had watched her friend simmer with frustration as she sought other avenues in which to invest her abundant energies. When at last the mourning period was over, she had thrown herself into new projects with the force of a whirlwind, hardly pausing to rest. All this—the seething discontent and the ensuing activity—now made this sudden fit of abstraction seem all the more remarkable and out of character for a woman whose every waking moment proved her to be a creature of enormous vitality and a possessor of a restless, inquiring mind.

Margaret did not for a moment believe that it was the prospect of a student whose parent’s name was associated with long-ago scandal that was causing this unusual reflectiveness. No, it was much more than that. After all, if Lord Granville’s accusations were to be believed, the very existence of Lady Catherine Granville’s Select Academy for Genteel Young Ladies was a scandal in and of itself and a blot on a noble name that had existed unsullied for over five hundred years without any member being remotely connected with “trade,” as Lord Granville termed it. It almost seemed to Margaret, nibbling thoughtfully on the end of her pencil as she observed the faraway look in her friend’s eyes, that there was some sort of connection between the widow and this man of unsavory reputation, something beyond the mere introduction that had been alluded to.

Margaret forced herself to continue sorting the bills in front of her, but her mind was seething with questions. What possible connection could a woman like Lady Catherine—sober, respectable, and intelligent, widow of an equally sober, respectable, intelligent, and responsible landowner—have with a man of the
ton
whose “reputation did not bear looking into”? It was an intriguing question, and Margaret, who had spent her entire life in a quiet country vicarage looking after a widowed father of reclusive, studious habits, adored intriguing questions.

In fact, it was this fondness for intriguing questions that had drawn her to Lady Catherine Granville in the first place. The minute she had encountered Lord Granville’s young wife the morning Lady Catherine had come to call on the parish’s spiritual advisor, Margaret had recognized a mind and a spirit as restless as her own, another person burning to make a difference, no matter how small, in the world. She was another woman who disliked sitting idly by while there were poor cottagers to feed, village children to educate, the sick and infirm to visit, and a whiff of political reform in the air.

None of the women with whom Margaret was acquainted read anything more daring than
Ackermann‘s Repository
, if they read at all, much less a newspaper, but she soon discovered that Lady Catherine Granville not only absorbed every scrap of news to be gleaned from the
Times
each day, she also devoted herself to
Blackstone’s
and the
Edinburgh Review
. In addition, she thoroughly enjoyed a spirited discussion of topics as wide-ranging as the poor laws, parliamentary reform, the slave trade, or the beneficial effects of crop rotation.

From that moment on, the two women had become close companions, sharing their hopes and their dreams as well as the minutiae of village life while they ministered to the poor and afflicted and expanded the efforts of the local school so that the older children were able to further their education in the evenings.

Margaret and her father had long applauded Lord Granville’s responsible administration of his estates and constantly reminded the parishioners how fortunate they were in having a landlord who was not only a fair and honorable gentleman but someone whose passion was the improvement of his estate and the implementation of modern agricultural practices. In fact, the only criticism anyone could voice concerning Granville Park or its owner was that it lacked a feminine touch. There had been great rejoicing when it was announced that on a trip to Yorkshire to look after his interests in a joint venture in a canal Lord Granville had met a young lady and decided to make her his wife.