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‘Your charm,’ he said, digging in his pocket.
‘Look after it for me,’ she had replied. ‘If Stepmama sees it she will know I have been to the fair.’ Then she had scrambled up the ladder and arrived in the bedchamber breathless. And in love.
Looking back on it now, Laurel knew her feelings had been entirely innocent of any physical desire. There had simply been the certainty that she was Giles’s and he was hers and that this was an entirely satisfactory and inevitable state of affairs. Instinctively she had known that this truth did not need to be put into words or expressed in any way, any more than one needed to comment that rain was wet or that sheep were woolly. And, of course, Giles understood it, too, that went without saying as well. One day, when she was older, the words would be said...
It had not been until two years later, when Giles had left England and she was in disgrace, that it had occurred to her to look properly at herself in the mirror, to look and see a gangly, skinny girl with a mass of unruly brown hair and eyes that seemed too big for a face that had the odd freckle and a threatening pimple and no discernible beauty whatsoever.
Why would Giles have thought me anything but a plain child? she asked herself then. I have no looks, not like Portia whom he does want. He was kind to me, that was all it ever was.
She had grown up, of course, and found her looks—not conventional beauty, but something that was not so far from it—but by then it was too late, Giles had gone. And besides, better to learn early the lesson that all men are interested in is the externals, in beauty, dowry, breeding. Sex. Giles had kindly tolerated an awkward fledgling of a girl child several years his junior and she had not understood that until it was too late.
‘Yes, the fête,’ he said now. ‘Lord, I had forgotten that. It was good fun, was it not?’
‘Certainly it was,’ Laurel agreed, getting her smile firmly fixed in place. ‘Such fun.’ The most magical hours of her life and, for him, a long-forgotten piece of fun.
He walked her off the floor when the set ended to deliver her to Sir Hugh for the next. ‘Who would have thought it?’ he said, almost as though to himself.
‘Thought what?’
His attention focused on her as though he had come back from a great distance. ‘That you would have turned into such a beauty.’
‘Sauce for the goose, sauce for the gander,’ she echoed his jibe of earlier as she took Sir Hugh’s hand and sailed off to tackle the intricacies of the quadrille.
Chapter Six
He had deserved that and Laurel was as sharp as she had been as a child. He had been an unprepossessing youth who needed activity and excitement to provoke that last growth spurt into manhood.
Now the man had to marry the woman who had been that plain, gawky girl. Her adult beauty sugared the pill considerably, although it was an unconventional variety of attractiveness, more the charm of great dark eyes, the gloss of deep brown hair, the mobility of a wide, sensually expressive mouth and a deliciously curved, lithe figure.
She was not quite a classical beauty like Beatriz, who was superficially similar to Laurel, Giles thought as he led out Lady Cary to take their places in the forming sets. Laurel’s looks relied on her expression, her mercurial changes of mood, the hint of deep sadness in those eyes that promised to reveal so much and yet hid her secrets safe inside. It would last longer than conventional loveliness though, persisting when others faded.
Her character was another matter and their encounters so far did nothing to reassure him that the temper and the unpredictability that had resulted in that disastrous row had moderated to make her the gracious wife that he should be seeking. She had eavesdropped, she had told tales about things she knew nothing about, she had caused his estrangement from his father and a rift between their families, and she was still holding a grudge against him for it.
On the other hand...
He changed hands as he thought it, turning Lady Cary in a complicated move that he could carry out without conscious thought. On the other hand, he did not have much choice. The options were to marry Lady Laurel Knighton to restore the Thorne Hall lands and remove the burden of debt, or to struggle for the rest of his days to repay the money and make something of the estate that was left to him. And see his father fret himself into an early grave with the worry and shame of it.
Put like that, there really was no choice. He had left home an undutiful son, had spent nine years learning to do his duty in a hard school and now all he had to do to make his father happy, save his health, save the marquessate for generations to come, was to marry this rather beautiful lady of good breeding. Such a
marriage was as he had always intended, only the bride was one he had not imagined. Men of his class were wise to wed with their heads, not their hearts, and this match truly would be a marriage of practicality.
He could cope with Laurel’s quick temper and her resentments by ignoring them, he decided. He could take himself off to one of the other estates if she became difficult to live with—or send her to one. He had to get her with child, of course...
He turned and saw Laurel watching him for a moment as a gap opened up between the dancers. Did she know about the provisions of the will? His father said not and he could imagine that Laurel would throw the circumstances in his face if she knew them—and enjoy doing so, enjoy refusing him.
Best if she never knows, he thought. Let her believe he was taken with her just for herself, however surprised she would be. Although she was still bristling with suspicion and hostility, he could see hope that shared memories of happier times and old friendship would soften her, allow him to court her. That village dance so long ago came back to him now with surprising clarity for something he had not thought about for so very long. There had been a kind of enchantment about that night, an innocence that held within it the potential of the future. His fingers reached instinctively for his worry piece and he remembered that he had left it on the dresser so as not to spoil the line of his evening coat.
How old was Laurel now? Twenty-five, he calculated. Or twenty-six? If she had wanted marriage then she would have had plenty of opportunities, because surely she would have had a London Season or three by now and it was strange that she had not been snapped up. Bath was certainly not the place to find a husband unless she was deliberately looking for an older man, a widower perhaps. And why would she be doing that? Was her temper so shrewish still that she had driven away all her suitors?
Then he realised that he had no idea whether Laurel had had one or half-a-dozen London Seasons. With amazing tact his father had simply not mentioned their neighbours and their activities in his letters. His close friend from boyhood and in the Peninsula, Colonel Lord Nathaniel Graystone, had married Portia, Laurel’s cousin. That marriage had ended with her death in childbed and, as both Portia and Gray had been at the heart of the ‘Situation’, as his father referred to it, Gray never mentioned Laurel and her kin to him either.
The music stopped and Giles offered his arm to Lady Cary to escort her back to her seat. ‘And what are your plans, once your mind is at rest about your father, Lord Revesby?’ she asked in her chatty manner.
‘To get to know London and establish myself in society, look up friends, join some clubs, find a wife. I must spend a good deal of time at Thorne Hall supporting my father, of course.’
‘Oh, yes, you said earlier about seeking a bride. I am sure you will find yourself invited to any number of house parties for the summer once it becomes generally known that you have returned.’
She beamed at him, a sweet, rather dithery lady, he thought, smiling back.
