Page 80 of The Gentleman’s Leading Lady

“My father was the sculptor Andrea Manelli. My mother is the daughter of the Bishop of Gloucester. I call myself of Cheltenham, lately. Cerys came today to see the house I am building out by Charleton Park.” He’d slipped and used her given name again. This did not escape Penrydd’s lady.

“Gentleman?” Penrydd inquired, his voice clipped.

This was the question, wasn’t it? The question that determined whether or not he was worthy of Cerys, would be allowed even to woo her. Of course it would be the first thing about him her friends would want to know. The only thing.

“I’d like to think I am worthy of being so,” Dante said, his voice just as cool.

“As good as.” Andover nodded again. “For the rest. Manelli, this is the Viscount Penrydd and his viscountess, Lady Penrydd. This—” He turned to the other man. “I beg your pardon, my brain is a soup until I get my dinner.”

“Sir Hewitt Vaughn of Greenfield, Newport.” Dutton leapt into the breach, eager to be of service. “That is his wife, Lady Vaughn, over by the hedge. And this is, ah…” He trailed off as another couple left the cavorting children and came forward.

This must be Cerys’s mother. She was a stunning woman, with a regal set to her head and no sign of her age but a pair of lines set either side of her mouth, which pressed into a line as she regarded Dante.

“So this is the architect?” Her question was directed at Lady Penrydd.

“It would seem so,” Lady Penrydd replied. “He doesn’t know where she is, either.”

“She can be a goose, but she isn’t careless,” Cerys’s mother said. “Do you know where she might have gone, sir?”

“Allow me to dispense with the courtesies, Dovey bach,” said Lady Penrydd. “This is Mr. Dante Manelli, gentleman, or so we are told. Mr. Manelli, this is Mrs. Van Der Welle Evans.”

Dante extended his hand. “She looks very much like you,” he couldn’t stop himself saying. “Save for those eyes.”

Was he daft? This was not the way to address the mother of his beloved when he was meeting her for the first time. A vague and growing alarm had soaked his brain. Where was Cerys?

“And her hair.” Mrs. Evans smiled. “And this would be Mr. Evans,” she said of the man who joined her.

He was dressed more plainly than the others, in a riding coat with brass buttons and a pair of buckskin breeches. The empty sleeve of his coat lay pinned against his shoulder. He leaned on his crutch and extended his arm, and his grip was firm and strong. His steel-gray hair was pulled back in a queue, and his lined face spoke of years of worry and weather, but his gaze was steady and clear. Dante knew he was being measured, and from this man, more than the titled others, he wanted a good report.

“So we simply wait?” Mrs. Evans asked. “Until our Cerys decides to return?”

“Or we go looking for her,” Dante said. He turned to Mame. “Tell me what you know.”

He’d studied what was known in Cheltenham as the Great House, built decades earlier by Lady Stapleton, a dowager left widowed and wealthy by her prosperous husbands and her own sugar plantations in the Caribbean isles. The house was an imposing affair of red brick and rigid lines, leaning more toward the Jacobean style than the English Baroque. An enterprising man called Fisher, near Dante’s age, had taken over management of the place and was likely to make a going concern of it if the owners didn’t go bankrupt.

The Duke of Gloucester had graced the Great House with a visit from his royal person, and the town fathers were enormously pleased that the Duchesse of Angoulême, daughter of the French king beheaded in the Revolution, was staying for the season with her husband, le Duc. No doubt Bathsheba was enormously pleased, too, and was making every effort to ingratiate herself with French royalty, even if the woman was in exile.

Baeccon was in the drawing room when Dante pounded on the door of their apartments. His lordship rose with an expression first annoyed at the intrusion, then alarmed when he saw Dante’s face.

“Fetch your wife,” Dante said tersely.

“Devil it,” his lordship exclaimed, then caught himself when Penrydd loomed in the doorway behind Dante. “What’s she done now?”

Her ladyship sent word via her lady’s maid that she was at her toilette and could not be bothered. When Sir Hewitt shouldered his way into the drawing room, with Andover in his wake and Dutton pushing in behind, Baeccon decided his ladyship could be bothered.

“Dante.” Her gaze went straight to him, and she could not disguise the flash of emotion in her eyes—triumph, and eager delight. He hated to see it, and likewise to hear the betraying softness in her voice when she said his name. Whatever this woman had done to Cerys, she had done so thinking if her rival were out of the way, Dante’s attentions might turn back to Bathsheba. She had no ability to understand that, having his heart shattered by her once, he had hardened it forever against her. She was too accustomed to manipulating whatever she wanted from men.

“Cerys,” Dante said before anyone else could begin with explanations.

“Ah. The little actress.” She smoothed the bands of silk scalloping the low neckline and tiny sleeves of her velvet evening gown. Bathsheba was dressing for an evening of entertainment, and Cerys was—where? “She didn’t leave a note?”

“A note saying what?” Dante ground out the words, hating himself for having to play her game, but it was the only way Bathsheba would deliver the information he wanted.

Unless he seized her by her plump arms and shook her until her hard head rattled free from its fixation on him. He considered this.

“Hmmm. Well, you see, she asked me to set her down at the turnpike house. Said she was meeting someone there and was going away. Was very coy about it, you know how young girls are, but she was dying to tell someone about her intrigues.” Her ladyship smoothed one ungloved hand over her arm. “Seems she met a dashing young man. He came to one of her plays, she said? Wanted to carry her away, and she meant to let him. I tried to dissuade her, of course.”

She made a small moue with her lips. “Told her at least to send word to her friends, so they would know her whereabouts. She didn’t send word, then? Ah, the carelessness of youth.” Her lips turned up in the slightest smirk. “It seems you have been jilted, Dante. I am sorry to be the one to tell you.”