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Lady Felicia had married early and well, and for a few years the ton had considered her to have made a good marriage. But now everyone knew that Henry Saville was stark raving mad. The tip-off was when he rode a horse up the steps of St. Paul’s Cathedral, insisting that the horse was his brother and should be baptized without delay. So Felicia watched the Darbys with her eyes narrowed. She didn’t mind admitting that she found the company of Fool for Love

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ravishingly happy couples hard to bear. But after a few minutes of watching the Darbys, curiosity replaced her agitation.

“There’s something odd there,” she told Bunge.

“What? What?” Bunge was always eager for gossip but desperately unobservant, to her mind.

“The newlyweds,” she said slowly. “Lady Henrietta doesn’t seem—look! Darby just deserted her to dance with Mrs. Ravensclan. What a grotesque affront to his wife. I can hardly believe it.” Felicia felt a growing sense of cheer.

“Come along, Bunge,” she said impatiently, “let’s go befriend the poor woman.”

Darby was finding it difficult to completely ignore his sharp-tongued little wife. He had something of a rudimentary plan when they arrived at the ball: he meant to desert her in the rudest fashion possible, then flirt extravagantly under her very nose. That would presumably make her feel an iota of the black misery that had engulfed him since dinner. How dare she believe him a man of so little honor that he would take a mistress, after what she had said . . . after what she had said. No one could talk of love and yet believe he was without honor. She didn’t know him after all. Or love him. His jaw set.

It would do his wife good to realize that he was a power in the ton. He wasn’t some country bumpkin, to be tricked into a contrived marriage. He was respected. His influence was felt throughout London, or the civilized world, which was the same thing.

He swung his partner through the motions of a country dance and looked back to feast on his wife’s discomfort. He swallowed a curse. Felicia Saville had appeared out of nowhere and was introducing Henrietta to that nitwit, Lord Bellington.

The dance ended. Perhaps he should return to Henrietta. There was no doubt but that his behavior would be noted by 332 Eloisa

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half the ballroom, given that Lady Saville was performing a role that should be his. His eyes narrowed. Henrietta was greeting Lord Bellington with that smile of hers, the one that melted a man’s bones. He turned on his heel and found himself before the buxom Selina Davenport. She greeted him with the sloe-eyed desire that he wanted only from his wife. An hour later, his wife was established as a roaring success. Acquaintance after acquaintance had congratulated him on her exquisite beauty, her wit, her sense of dress. Their eyes sparkled maliciously as they noted his absence from her side. They positively giggled in his face when he couldn’t bring himself to answer urbanely to their little barbed comments. Gerald Bunge was the worst, hovering at his side like an insect, buzzing about how he couldn’t have found a better spouse. And all the time Bunge’s little body trembled with lust to find out why he was on one side of the room and his wife on the other.

Darby could feel his reputation for urbane calm falling to shreds about his feet. She’d done it, by God. She’d turned him into someone akin to his mother. His self-command was paper thin.

At some point during the evening, he had started drinking. Heavily. Rees turned up at the ball around one in the morning and found Darby wandering through the ballroom, glass of whiskey in hand.

Having known Darby since he was breeched, Rees instantly put together the dazed misery in his friend’s eyes with the fastidiously upright way he was prowling across the dance floor. Like a bloody savage he looked. Last time Rees remembered seeing Darby that way was when his mother—

an outright bitch if there ever was one—scanned him from head to foot just before his first London ball, and then made a laughing remark about a popinjay to her husband before turning away.

That evening Darby had bowed so sharply that he almost Fool for Love

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cut the air, and proceeded to get so drunk that the evening ended in the stables with Rees holding Darby’s head. Of course, he was only fifteen then, as proud of his yellow pantaloons as he was resentful of his knife-edged mother. It always struck Rees as unfortunate that Darcy’s mother died a few months after that episode.

No doubt it was again a woman that had put him in this state. “Where is she then?” Rees asked, hauling Darby off the ballroom floor.

“My wife?” Darby asked airily. “God knows.”

Rees looked around.

“She’s been talking to Henry Piddlerton for the last half hour,” Darby said, revealing that he knew Henrietta’s whereabouts precisely. “The poor old sod is staring into her eyes as if she were the holy grail. Down her gown too.”

Rees sighed and towed him into a card room off the library. “What the hell is going on?” he said, leaning against the door in case Darby tried to make a run for it.

“It’s all quite commonplace, really. I should have taken your advice and avoided matrimony,” Darby said, not meeting his eyes. He ranged the room, picking up trinkets and putting them down with enough force to crack them. “Wives are devils.”

Rees opened the door and sent a footman for a pot of strong coffee.

It took quite a while to pry the situation out of Darby. Only after drinking three cups of coffee did he become at all coherent.

“I tend to agree with you,” Rees said slowly. “At the very least, an expert should examine her hip.”

“She definitely wants the child. I believe that Henrietta’s limp would not be an impediment to carrying a babe.”