Page 23 of Gentleman Jim

“She’s lovely,” Miss Trumble responded graciously. She lowered her glasses. “It seems you have a bevy of young ladies waiting for you. How selfish of us to keep you as long as we have.”

“We won’t keep you any longer,” Trumble said.

St. Clare ignored him. His attention was riveted on Miss Honeywell, and unless he was very much mistaken, her attention was equally engaged with him. He reached for her gloved hand and she gave it to him willingly. He bowed over it, retaining it in his grasp a few seconds longer than was proper. “Until tomorrow, Miss Honeywell.”

She met his gaze. “I look forward to it, my lord.”

He reluctantly let her go, and after taking his leave of Miss Trumble and her brother, left the theater box with Mattingly close behind him.

The passage was crowded with people bustling about during the interval. St. Clare navigated through the crush, proceeding toward the stairway that would take them back up to their own box. At the first opportunity, Mattingly drew level with him. “The Honeybee,” he said.

“What?” St. Clare asked, distracted.

“That’s what Margaret Honeywell was called during her come out.” Mattingly chuckled. “Not at first, mind. When she first arrived, all the gents were calling her the Pocket Venus. You never saw a girl so beautiful. And with such a figure! She drew quite a court around her, too. Then the first chap got stung. And then the second.” Mattingly reflected on this with evident appreciation. “Used to deliver some of the sharpest set-downs you ever heard. Rather indecorous as well. Galloping her horse in Hyde Park. Firing a pistol during a country house party. And that temper of hers! More spleen than sense, Miss Honeywell.”

St. Clare listened to his friend’s words with avid attention, all the while wondering how to reconcile the picture Mattingly painted of a fiery, hoydenish hellion with the wan, quiet figure who had fainted into his arms in his library. An illness, her maid had said. What sort of an illness? And did she suffer from it still?

“Miss Honeywell doesn’t strike me as a temperamental sort of female,” he remarked absently.

“No? She was buzzing about you a fair bit just now. What was she saying, St. Clare? Looked to me as if she was calling you to account for something.”

“Did it? How odd. We were simply discussing the play. Miss Honeywell is quite passionate about Shakespeare.”

“Hmm. Well, it stands to reason that she’s not going to be as high-spirited as she once was. Advanced age, you know.”

St. Clare flashed his friend an amused smile. “She’s hardly in her dotage.”

“She’s five and twenty if she’s a day. And still unmarried, by Jove. Hardly seems possible.”

“No, it doesn’t.” He’d been perplexed by that fact himself. “Were there never any serious admirers?”

“Loads of ’em! I know of at least six chaps who made her an offer. Decent fellows, too, and all but one of them with a respectable fortune. Miss Honeywell refused them out of hand. As for the rest… Timid chaps all. Quickly stung and easily dispatched. Not that it mattered in the end. Come to find out, she was wearing the willow for another fellow.”

St. Clare looked at him sharply. “Who?”

Mattingly shrugged. “Some soldier. I never met him. And seeing as how she’s still unwed, I suppose nothing came of it. Perhaps the poor sod died in the war?” He cast a brief glance at St. Clare as they shouldered past a group of raucous young men. “Burton-Smythe’s an admirer of sorts.”

“I’m aware.”

“The way I hear it, he’s been trying to fix his interest with her for ages.”

“And failed, it seems.”

“She’s poorly suited for him, anyone can see it. He needs a nice quiet mouse who’ll never say a word against him.” Mattingly chuckled again. “Now you… Well, I should have known you’d take an interest. Miss Honeywell fits the pattern card.”

“What pattern card?”

“Miss Honeywell is your type is what I mean.”

St. Clare gave an abrupt laugh. “I won’t deny it. But I can’t think how you would know one way or the other.”

“Quite easily. When Vickers and I first met you in Italy, the only females that ever caught your attention were the ones with dark hair and blue eyes. The bluer the better. Vickers used to make a joke of it. Anytime a fair-skinned gel with dark hair and blue eyes passed by, you’d do the most damnable about-face. As if you’d seen a ghost. Never failed to send Vickers and me into whoops.” He laughed at the memory, but at the sight of St. Clare’s grim expression he quickly schooled his features into more somber lines. “Not that I’m comparing Miss Honeywell to a continental light-skirt, mind. She’s a lady. No one would dare say otherwise. All I’m trying to say—and badly, apparently—is that Miss Honeywell fits the pattern card.”

St. Clare was silent for a moment. When he finally responded, his words were quiet ones, inaudible to his friend and quickly lost in the noise of the crowded theater. “Miss Honeywell is the pattern card.”

The following afternoon when Maggie and Jane returned to Green Street after a morning of shopping, culminating in a lengthy visit to Hookham’s Library, they were met by a note from Lord St. Clare.

“Rather presumptuous of him to write you, don’t you think?” Jane asked, stripping off her gloves. “But then, perhaps such things are done with ladies on the continent? What does he say, Margaret? Is it a love letter?”