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It wasn’t that Henrietta was unfriendly. She looked at him with a perfectly cheerful air, as if she had been joined by a maiden aunt. There was just a trace of irony in her gaze, a look that dared him to live up to her expectations of manhood. She didn’t look at him with the slightly hungry awareness that he was used to. Your comeuppance has arrived, Darby thought with some amusement.

“Are you enjoying Limpley Stoke?” she asked. Perhaps he thought her blue eyes were clear only because there wasn’t even a hint of smoky awareness in them. Intelligent curiosity—

and nothing more.

“The better for your company,” Darby said, suddenly finding that he was enjoying himself very much.

“I suppose you find us countrified, if not worse.”

“To some extent.” The wallpaper was lined with bunches of posies, but none so jovial as the faces around them. Wiltshire society was a hearty, cheerful lot, interested in farming and hunting and, to a lesser extent, London and London matters. London matters covered a range of sins from Parliament to the Regent himself.

“Well, at least we’re welcoming,” Henrietta said, bristling at his bald agreement with her description. “From what I’ve heard, the city can be an unfriendly sort of place.”

“Actually not everyone here has been welcoming,” Darby said. “I haven’t the faintest interest in drains and farmland, and I’m afraid that several worthy gentlemen have found me incomprehensible . . . even contemptible.”

“That is surely too strong a word,” Henrietta said with the strong suspicion that he was absolutely right.

“One Mr. Cable was particularly taken aback by my admiration of his waistcoat.”

Henrietta smiled faintly. “Mr. Cable has jaundice, and I believe that sours his judgment. Moreover, his wife was re-62 Eloisa James

cently converted to a rather vigorous form of Christianity by a traveling Methodist preacher, and lately she speaks primarily in Bible verses. I’m afraid his home life is rather uncomfortable at the moment.”

“In the future, I will not mention a word about his sartorial efforts,” Darby promised.

Henrietta was rather fascinated to find that the man had a way of laughing without even opening his mouth. The laughter was in his voice and his eyes.

“What can you expect if you wear lace around your neck?” she asked. For he didn’t seem in the least perturbed by the slights dealt out by Wiltshire gentlemen. How could he be so confident and yet so out of place?

“I like lace,” Darby said. She was right: he was unperturbed.

“Lace has a symmetry, a perfection to it, that pleases me.”

“Symmetry? I think of lace as girlish.” There was no getting around the fact that lace didn’t look the least girlish on him, however.

Darby shrugged. “It pleases me. Symmetry is a quality of beauty, Lady Henrietta. Now you . . . you are quite pleasingly symmetrical. Your eyes are perfectly spaced in relation to your nose. Did you realize that beauty is intricately connected to the space between one’s eyes?”

“No, I didn’t,” Henrietta said. Somewhat to Darby’s annoyance, she didn’t seem to have even realized that he was offering a flirtation. Instead of giggling in delighted appreciation, her brows knit.

“There is a milkmaid in the village with one blue and one green eye, Mr. Darby. And she is considered quite lovely. In fact, all the village lads are striving mightily to gain her attention. Wouldn’t that fact suggest that you are wrong about the underlying attractiveness of physical symmetry?”

“I believe not. There an opposite theorem might take precedence. Luck is generally attached to matters of dissymmetry, as it is to a four-leafed clover.”

Fool for Love

63

“A four-leaf clover is quite symmetrical,” she pointed out.

“As is a three-leaf clover. But in the case of a four-leafed clover, its uniqueness makes it unsymmetrical.”

“Your theorem is unreliable. My milkmaid is beautiful by right of being unsymmetrical, but only when the word is twisted to mean unusual.”

“Let’s return to your personal symmetry,” he said silkily. But she changed the subject as if he hadn’t spoken. “Mr. Darby, I have been wishing to apologize for assuming that Josie and Anabel were your children and acting on that assumption. I should never have spoken to you in such a forthright manner.”

“Please do not give it a second thought. Your advice was admirable. The employment office in Bath is sending me two nurses for review tomorrow morning, and I shall be sure to ask them their views on wet clothing.”

She leaned forward, her eyes alive with interest. “Josie needs a particularly kindly woman, Mr. Darby. I’m sure you realize this, but perhaps you could find someone who knew of loss herself.”