“Beatrice,” Rosalind asked, “when did you realize that you loved Van Doren? It must have been a very great shock.”
“A few days ago, when I thought he might propose to Lady Mary. And it was a shock indeed.”
“That moment that you knew, was it as Miss Mayton has described?” Cordelia asked. “As if your hair had been hit with lightning, and you were drowning but had air, and your heart going too fast but feeling well?”
“Mostly, I felt sick,” Beatrice admitted. “But I am well now. Very well.”
*
The last guestshad been got into their carriages and Tattleton was finally at his leisure. He’d gone down to the servants’ hall, leaving the earl and Lord Van Doren with port in the library.
The rest of the servants had been sent to bed, there would be time to clean up the mess made from the ball on the morrow. Only Mrs. Huffson had waited up. And the wretched cats, who had since been let out of her sitting room.
As that pack of diabolical felines prowled around pretending to look for mice they were never going to catch, the housekeeper poured him a brandy, and one for herself too.
“What a night this has been, Mr. Tattleton. I never saw an engagement coming between Lady Beatrice and Lord Van Doren. I never did see it coming a mile away.”
“Nor I, Mrs. Huffson,” he said. It was the truth, even though he had been an unwilling conspirator to Lord Darden’s scheme to make it so. He’d thought the whole idea preposterous and Lord Darden completely out of his wits to imagine it possible.
“It’s entirely befuddling,” Mrs. Huffson went on. “They don’t seem to have a lick in common. Miss Mayton was so overcome that Lynette had to apply a vinaigrette. What do you suppose drew them together?”
“I cannot say for certain, Mrs. Huffson, but I have been shocked to my shoes by some of the things I have observed this night.”
Mrs. Huffson leaned forward and Tattleton was well aware that she would not sleep well unless she were informed as to why she might be equally shocked to her shoes.
Quietly, he said, “They were alone for hours in the library, the earl said not to look for them there, they entirely missed supper and did not even stand at the door when the guests departed. Then, what do you think I found when I was finally let into that room?”
“What?” Mrs. Huffson said, rather breathless.
“There wereseveralhairpins on the carpet.”
“Several!”
“Several,” Tattleton confirmed. “I saw them with my own eyes. And Lady Beatrice’s gown was rumpled.”
“Rumpled?”
“Decidedly so,” Tattleton said, nodding meaningfully.
“Well then,” Mrs. Huffson said, “it seems theydohave something in common.”
*
The banns hadbeen read, the church had been got to, and the wedding breakfast commenced. It was a small affair, as both Beatrice and Van Doren agreed that outsiders had interfered enough in their affairs.
Of course, they also agreed that had those outsiders not interfered, they probably would have got nowhere.
Darden’s plan to bring them together had been fully revealed and Beatrice was rather admiring of its many layers. Van Doren deemed it insane, despite having worked.
Though, he’d privately admitted to Beatrice that he also found himself relieved to know the reason why he’d never been invited to put himself forward for the YBC. Darden and his cronies could not have conspired about him if he were forever hanging about.
The days that had followed the ball had gone by on a regular schedule. Van Doren would make his way across the road at the earliest possible moment.
Rosalind, Viola, Cordelia, and Juliet would peer at him and question him and then step back and examine him again.
Beatrice would finally steal him off to her father’s library, or they would ride out to the park, or they would visit Lackington & Allen and get lost in the winding corridors of books.
More than several hairpins were somehow lost during these activities.
