Lord Perfect (3 page)

"I never met the lady before in all my life,"
Benedict said. "I know nothing about her. The children had a
dispute, and we were obliged to intervene." He glanced at
Peregrine, who'd returned to his drawing, altogether unaffected by
recent events. Youth was so resilient.

Benedict, meanwhile, was still short of breath.

Bathsheba. Her name was Bathsheba.

Fitting.

Lady Ordway, too, looked at his nephew. Lowering her
voice, she explained, "She comes of the ramshackle branch of the
DeLuceys."

"We've all got one of those," Benedict said.
"The Carsingtons have my brother Rupert, for instance."

"Oh, that scamp," said she, with the same
smile and in the same indulgent tone most women adopted when speaking
of Rupert. "The Dreadful DeLuceys are another story altogether.
Thoroughly disreputable. Imagine Lord Fosbury's reaction when his
second eldest, Jack, declared he was marrying one of them. It would
be like your telling Lord Hargate that you intend to marry a gypsy
girl. Which, really, is what she was, for all they tried to make a
lady of her."

Whoever had tried to make a lady of Bathsheba Wingate
had succeeded. Benedict had detected nothing common in her speech or
manner, and he had a fine ear for the nuances that betrayed even the
best-schooled imposters and posers.

He had assumed he was speaking to one of his own class.
A lady.

"Beyond a doubt that was how they lured poor Jack
into parson's mousetrap," Lady Ordway said. "But the
marriage did not enrich her family as they had hoped. When Jack wed
her, Lord Fosbury cut him off with a shilling. Jack and his bride
ended up in Dublin. That was where I last saw them, not long before
he died. The child looks like him."

At this point, the lady found it necessary to catch her
breath and fan herself. These measures proving inadequate, she
availed herself of the nearest bench. When she invited him to join
her, Benedict complied without hesitation.

She was silly and wore too many frills, and rarely said
anything worth listening to—and one must listen, for she was
one of the multitude who believed "conversation" and
"monologue" were synonyms. On the other hand, she was an
old acquaintance, a member of his social circle, and married to one
of his political allies.

More important, she had prevented his committing an
appalling breach of both propriety and sense.

He had very nearly followed Bathsheba Wingate out of the
Egyptian Hall.

And then…

And then, he was not sure what he would have done, so
bedazzled had he been.

Would he have stooped to teasing her until she told him
her name and direction?

Would he have sunk so low as to follow her secretly?

An hour earlier, he would have believed himself
incapable of such gross behavior. That was the sort of thing
infatuated schoolboys did. In his youth he had experienced the usual
assortment of infatuations, naturally, and behaved in the usual
absurd manner, but he'd long since outgrown such foolishness.

Or so he'd thought.

Now he wondered how many crucial rules he might have
broken. Her being a widow rather than a married woman made no
difference. For a short time he had not been himself but a sort of
madman, bewitched.

Impetuous behavior is the province of poets, artists,
and others who cannot regulate their passions.

And so he sat patiently with Lady Ordway and listened
while she went on to the next topic, not at all interesting, and the
next, which was less so, and told himself to be grateful, because she
had broken the spell and rescued him from a shocking folly.

Chapter 2

BATHSHEBA WAITED ONLY UNTIL THEY'D EX-ited the Egyptian
Hall before she took her daughter to task. Children, Bathsheba had
found, were like dogs. If one did not administer a punishment or
lecture immediately after the crime, one might as well forget the
matter altogether, for they certainly would.

"That was outrageous, even for you," she told
Olivia as they made their way across the busy street. "In the
first place, you accosted a stranger, which you have been told
countless times a lady never does, except when her life is in danger
and she requires help."

"Ladies never do anything interesting unless
they're about to be killed," Olivia said. "But we are
allowed to aid persons in need, you said. The boy was frowning as
though he was having a difficult time. I thought I could help him. If
he were unconscious, lying in a ditch, you wouldn't expect me to wait
for an introduction, surely."

"He was not lying in a ditch," said Bathsheba.
"Furthermore, striking him with his sketchbook meets no
criterion of charity I ever heard of."

"I thought he looked afflicted," Olivia said.
"He was scowling and biting his lip and shaking his head. Well,
you saw why. He draws like an infant. Or someone very old and
palsied. He's attended Eton and Harrow, can you credit it, Mama? That
isn't all. Rugby, too. And Westminster. And Winchester. They cost
heaps of money, as everybody knows, and one must be a nob to get in.
Yet not one of those great schools could teach him to draw even
adequately. Is it not shocking?"

"They are not like schools for girls,"
Bathsheba said. 'They teach Greek and Latin and little else. In any
event, the topic is not his education but your improper behavior. I
have told you time and again—"

She broke off because a gleaming black phaeton had
rounded the corner at a speed that threatened to overturn it, and was
racing straight at them. Pedestrians and street vendors scrambled to
get out of the way. Bathsheba hauled Olivia to the curb and watched
it fly past, her hands clenched while she longed for something to
throw at the driver, a drunken member of the upper orders with a
trollop giggling beside him.

"What about that one, with his fancy piece?"
Olivia said. "He's a nob, isn't he? It's so easy to tell. The
way they dress. The way they walk. The way they drive. No one minds
what they do."

"Ladies know nothing about fancy
pieces and they never use the word
nob
,"
Bathsheba said between her teeth. She made herself count silently to
twenty, because she still wanted to run after the phaeton, tear the
driver from his perch, and knock his head against the carriage wheel.

"It only means he's got rank or money," Olivia
said. "It isn't a bad word."

"It is slang," Bathsheba
said. "A lady would refer to him as a
gentleman
.
The term serves for men belonging to the gentry and the aristocracy
as well as the peerage."

"I know," Olivia said: "Papa said a
gentleman was a fellow who didn't work for his living."

Jack Wingate had never worked for a living and simply
couldn't do it, even when it was a choice between working and
starvation. For all of his life before he met Bathsheba, someone else
had paid the bills, shouldered the responsibilities, and made a path
through the difficulties. For the rest of his short life, she was the
someone else.

Still, in every other way, he had
been everything she could want in a husband, and he'd proved to be
the best of fathers. Olivia had adored him and, more important,
listened
to him.

"Your father would make one of
his wry faces and say, 'Really, now, Olivia,' if you spoke of
nobs
to him," Bathsheba said. "One does not use the word in
polite conversation."

Wishing Jack had taught her the trick of getting through
to their daughter, Bathsheba went on to explain how certain words
were interpreted. This word would prejudice people against one, by
indicating lower-class origins. She explained—for the
thousandth time, it seemed—that such judgments were an
unfortunate fact of life, with practical and often painful
consequences.

She concluded with, "Kindly discard it from your
vocabulary."

"But all those gentlemen can do
as they please, and no one scolds
them
,"
Olivia said. "Even the women—the
ladies
.
They drink to excess and gamble away their husbands' money and go to
bed with men who aren't their husbands and—"

"Olivia, what have I told you about reading the
scandal sheets?"

"I haven't read one in weeks,
ever since you told me to stop," the girl said virtuously. "It
was Riggles the pawnbroker who told me about Lady Dorving. She pawned
her diamonds again to cover her gaming debts. And everyone knows that
Lord John French is the father of Lady Craith's last two children."

Bathsheba hardly knew where to begin responding to this
declaration. Riggles was an undesirable acquaintance, not to mention
indiscreet. Regrettably, Olivia had been on easy terms with such
persons practically since birth. Jack always dealt with them, because
he'd had the most practice with pawnbrokers and moneylenders. And he
always took

Olivia, because even the stoniest heart could not resist
her enormous, innocent blue eyes.

When he fell ill, and Bathsheba had so many other cares,
the then nine-year-old Olivia took over financial negotiations,
carrying the remaining bits of jewelry and plate, household
bric-a-brac, and clothing to and fro. She was even better at it than
Jack had been. She had his charm and her mama's obstinacy combined,
unfortunately, with the Dreadful DeLucey talent for bamboozlement.