Why didn’t I get her name? What a fool I was.
“I take it you haven’t found your mysterious lady, then?”
He flinched, glancing over his shoulder. Henry stood there, hands jammed in his pockets, smiling wryly.
“No,” William answered shortly. “I haven’t.”
“Pity. Do you intend to carry that locket around for the rest of the Season?”
“It looks valuable, and has a portrait inside it,” he answered defensively, pushing the locket back in his pocket. “I’m just trying to be a gentleman.”
“You surpassed the boundaries ofgentlemanlya long time ago. We all know that thelady-gentlemanidea is nonsense. It’s designed to keep people in their proper places. It keeps the women at home, with their children, and gives the men freedom to do what they want, so long as they’repoliteabout it.”
William sighed. “You’ve spent too much time in Paris, I think.”
“And you’re blind as a bat. Do you think I’m wrong?”
“I think that now isn’t the right time to discuss the building blocks of our Society.”
“Fair enough,” Henry conceded, coming to stand beside his older brother. The two of them stood in silence for a moment or two, elbows resting on the stone wall, staring out at the darkness. Far below, a pair of footmen walked across the courtyard, talking in low voices. The shorter footman made a comment, and the other laughed quietly at it.
“I bet they don’t have to dance until their feet feel as though they’re going to fall off,” Henry muttered.
“No,” William conceded, “but they do have to stand until they want to collapse and offer drinks to drunken fools like you and me until the sun comes up. And then, when we all go home, they have to clean up after us.”
Henry eyed his brother. “And you calledmea revolutionary.”
“Hm. Well, what are you doing out here? Isn’t the delightful Sophia Redford waiting for you inside?”
“Yes,” Henry responded shortly, “and that’s why I’m out here. She’s a beautiful girl, but entirely full of herself. I can’t stir a step without her mamma collaring me and dragging me off to converse with them. And what about you and your merry widow? You’re the Duke of Dunleigh, you could have any of the debutantes for asking.”
William winced, conjuring up an image of the terrified, wide-eyed girls in white, some no older than sixteen or seventeen, making their first come-out. The poor things were besieged by men, some old enough to be their fathers or even grandfathers.
“I think I’d like to marry an adult woman, thank you very much, Henry.”
“Mother knows you well, then. She pushed Lady Victoria towards you. What about it, then? You could marry her.”
William bit his lip until he tasted copper.
“I want to be in love, Henry,” he blurted out, and immediately wished he hadn’t. Henry shifted to look at him, his expression unreadable in the gloom.
“Well,” he said softly. “Is that my austere older brother displaying afeeling? I had no idea.”
“Don’t laugh at me.”
“I’m not,” Henry shot back, and it sounded as if he meant it. “I know how you feel. Marriage is… it’s sacred, is it not? It should be special. Katherine married a man she loves, and she’s happy. I see plenty of marriages of convenience, and nobody seems to be having a good time. I don’t know what I’m waiting for, William, but I think I want the same as you. I want to marry someone I care for.”
William clenched his fingers into tight fists, longing to take out the locket and smooth the pad of his thumb over its patterned surface.
“We don’t have time for that, though,” he said at last. “For love, or anything like that, really. Father saw to that.”
Henry’s lip curled. “Yes, yes, he did. But wouldn’t it be nice to spit in his face, to let the whole fortune slip away? He wouldn’t have expected that.”
William turned away from the dark garden.
“I don’t have that option, Henry,” he answered simply. “I just don’t. Come, we should go back inside.”
Chapter Ten
