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“Yes,” he agreed dryly. “Her enthusiasm is evident in the way she greeted me as if we last saw each other at breakfast this morning.”
“She does tend to daydream, and we always— Oh, but we’ve not been introduced!”
She slapped a hand over her mouth, looking as mortified as if she had stumbled into his bedchamber at night.
“It hardly matters.” Guy leaned toward her and added in a conspiratorial tone, “Let’s pretend.”
“But the rules of etiquette, my lord! Whatever must you think of me?”
“What I think, Miss Treadgold, is that your aunt married my father, so we do not need an introduction. I also think you are very becoming.”
Even her coquetry was becoming. Perhaps it was simply her pleasant sweetness in contrast to Arabella, so vibrant and demanding and ruthless. He was uncomfortably aware that Arabella was right: Miss Treadgold nicely matched his image of the ideal bride.
She blinked her long lashes. “My lord, you and Lady Frederica have much to discuss, after so many years apart. I shall leave you together.”
Bobbing another curtsy, Miss Treadgold left. Guy twisted to watch her go, but through the crowd, his eyes landed on Arabella, talking to… Hell, was that Sculthorpe? He turned back to Freddie, who was studying a pair of acrobats.
“Do you prefer to be called Frederica now?” he asked her.
“Lady Treadgold prefers to call me Frederica.LadyFrederica,” she said absently. “Freddie is a man’s name and not becoming on a lady, Lady Treadgold says.”
“You can choose what people call you,” Guy said. “You don’t have to do everything they say.”
Freddie said nothing. An indifferent stranger. Perhaps he could have done things differently, but as a confused, angry twenty-year-old, leaving England had seemed his only choice.
Guy dropped onto the wall beside her, the mist from the fountain cooling his neck and arms. He absently arranged his skirt over his knees, watching the partygoers, picking out familiar faces, reminding himself of names.
With every hour back in England, the years of his exile became more removed, his adventures as remote as if he had read them in another man’s journal. Despite everything, he had enjoyed his adventures, relished the freedom he could never know in England. Upon his return to London, he had worn out his comfortable boots rediscovering the city on foot. As for the time spent chasing Sir Walter from one country house to another— For all Guy’s complaints, it had felt good to ride through the familiar countryside. It had felt good to stop in a village inn for a pie and a pint and a chat about the crops.
It felt good to be home.
Yet still a restlessness plagued him, with his big houses holding nothing but memories of Father and a keen awareness of the emptiness of his life.
“How have you been?” he asked Freddie.
Her fierce brows drew together. “Would you like me to summarize eight years in one word, or may I have a whole sentence?”
“Good point.” A new riddle: how to converse with one’s sister when she had become a surly stranger. “Did you know our father well?”
“Indeed,” she said. “The descriptions in the newspapers were very informative.”
“Do Sir Walter and Lady Treadgold treat you and Ursula well?”
“We are family now, they say.”
“What is Ursula like?”
“She is two years old.”
“What was our stepmother like? Ursula’s mother.”
Freddie shrugged, her eyes on a pair of acrobats performing, one balanced on the other’s shoulders. “She was bored. She’d spend hours dressing or paying calls or playing cards, being bored. I think that’s why she died. Life was too boring for her to bother staying alive.”
“Who are your friends?”
“Everyone.”
“Everyone?”
