Page 50 of The Muse of Maiden Lane

“I know you didn’t. It’s merely the reality of things.” Teddy saw no point in skirting around the issue. His walking days were over. It wasn’t as if he could conceal the fact. “My sources of inspiration haven’t diminished just because I’m in a chair. There are avenues in Paris with as many interesting faces as there were flowers in that wood.”

“Interesting faces?” she repeated. “Not beautiful ones?”

He smiled to himself. “Are you angling for a compliment, Miss Hobhouse?”

“Not at all. I only wonder how fleeting your interest might be in my face, with so many other flowers to divert your attention.”

“You’ve kept my attention for three full months. I expect you’ll still command it three months from now, when we meet again in London.”

Her bosom rose and fell on a weary exhalation of breath. “Not that again. I’ve already told you—”

“So you have. And yet…you’ll be in London in March, as will I. What harm is there in meeting again?”

“I can’t imagine the circumstances where we would.”

“Then you lack imagination.”

“Really—”

“A museum. A gallery. The theatre. A shop in Bond Street. We could cross paths in any of those places, or wherever else it is you go for amusement.”

“Rotten Row,” she informed him without hesitation.

“Riding, of course. But surely that can’t take all your time?”

“Most of it. I must take Locket out at least twice a day. She needs exercise to blunt the edge of her temper. I ride her once at dawn, and then again during the fashionable hour. Sometimes I ride at midday as well, when the weather is fine.”

“In Rotten Row, then,” he said. “That’s where we’ll see each other.”

“You would visit the row in your wheeled chair?”

“If you were there, I would. If”—he added—“there was the smallest chance I could persuade you to sit for me.”

“I wish I could sit for you,” she said frankly. “I wish I could take the risk.”

He gave her an alert look. “Nothing is stopping you but your outdated ideas of propriety.”

“Not outdated. Not for a young lady in my position. Besides, I already push the bounds of propriety far more than I should.”

“In what respect?”

Removing a hand from her muff, she enumerated the ways on her leather-gloved fingers. “I gallop when I should walk. I dance with my friends when we haven’t any gentlemen partners. I color my hair. I—”

“And here I thought you didn’t aspire to be thought an eccentric.”

“I don’t. That doesn’t mean I must embroider pillows all the day long.”

He grinned. “How do you plan to spend your days, then, now that your final season is over?”

“Aside from riding and sketching? I don’t yet know. My future is too uncertain to make firm plans. If my brother decides to get married—”

“To the tyrant.”

She winced. “I shouldn’t have called her that. It was uncharitable of me. Miss Trent was doing nothing more than any other determined young lady might do to secure her own happiness.”

“Alienating potential in-laws?”

“Attempting to consolidate her power.”