Lord Perfect (The Dressmakers 3)

A sigh. “No, Mama.”

“Kindly apologize, Olivia.”

The girl ground her teeth. Then she took a deep breath and let it out.

She turned to Peregrine. “Sir, I most humbly beg your pardon,” she said. “It was a ghastly, unspeakable, heinous act I perpetrated. I hope the precipitous fall from the stool did you no permanent or disfiguring injury. I am so deeply ashamed. Not only have I attacked and possibly maimed an innocent person but I have disgraced my mother. It is my ungovernable temper, you see, an affliction I have suffered since birth.” She fell to her knees and snatched his hand. “Can you be so good, so generous, kind sir, as to forgive me?”

Peregrine, who had listened to this speech with increasing bewilderment, was, for perhaps the first time in his life, struck dumb.

The mother rolled her outrageously blue eyes. “Get up, Olivia.”

The girl clung to Peregrine’s hand, her head bowed.

Peregrine threw a panicked look at Benedict.

“Perhaps now you comprehend the folly of contradicting ladies,” said Benedict. “Do not look to me for rescue. I hope it will be a lesson to you.”

Speechlessness being alien to Peregrine’s character, he swiftly recovered. “Oh, do get up,” he told the girl crossly. “It was only a sketchbook.” The girl didn’t move. Voice moderating, he added, “Uncle is right. I ought to apologize, too. I know I’m supposed to agree with whatever females as well as my elders say, for some reason or other. If there is a proper reason. No one has ever explained the rule’s logic, certainly. At any rate, you barely hit me. I only fell because I lost my balance when I ducked. Not that it matters. It’s not as though a girl could do much damage.”

Olivia’s head came up, and her eyes shot deadly sparks.

The boy went on, oblivious, as usual. “It wants practice, you know, and girls never get any. If you did practice, you’d strengthen your arm at least. That’s why schoolmasters are so good at it.”

The girl’s expression softened. She rose, the subject having diverted her, apparently. “Papa told me about English schoolmasters,” she said. “Do they beat you very often?”

“Oh, all the time,” Peregrine said.

She sought details. He provided them.

By this time, Benedict had recovered his composure. So he believed, at any rate. While the children made peace, he allowed his attention to revert to the breathtaking mama.

“Her apology was not necessary,” he said. “However, it was most—er—stirring.”

“She is dreadful,” the lady said. “I tried several times to sell her to gypsies, but they wouldn’t take her.”

The answer startled him. Beauty so rarely came coupled with wit. Another man would have rocked on his heels. Benedict only paused infinitesimally and said, “Then I daresay there’s no chance they’d take him, either. Not that he’s mine to dispose of. My nephew. Atherton’s sole progeny. I am Rathbourne.”

Something changed. A shadow appeared that had not been in her countenance before.

He had presumed, perhaps. She might be as beautiful as sin and she might have a sense of humor, but this did not mean she was not a stickler for certain proprieties.

“Perhaps a mutual acquaintance is idling about who would introduce us properly,” he said, glancing about the gallery. At present, the space held three other persons, none of whom he knew or could possibly wish to know. They looked away when his gaze fell upon them.

Then a shred of sense returned and he asked himself what difference a proper introduction would make. She was a married woman, and he had rules about married women. If he sought to further the acquaintance, it would only be to violate those rules.

“I greatly doubt we have a mutual acquaintance,” she said. “You and I travel in different spheres, my lord.”

“We’re both here,” he said, his tongue getting the better of Rules Regarding Married Women.

“As is Olivia,” she said. “I can tell by her expression that she is nine and a half minutes away from getting one of her Ideas, which puts us eleven minutes away from mayhem. I am obliged to remove her.”

She turned away.

The message was plain enough. As plain as a bucket of ice water thrown in his face. “I am dismissed, I see,” he said. “A fitting return for my impertinence.”

“This has nothing to do with impertinence,” she said without turning back to him, “and everything to do with self-preservation.”

She collected her daughter and left.

HE VERY NEARLY followed her from the room.

Unthinkable.

True, nonetheless.

Benedict had even started that way, heart pounding, when Lady Ordway burst from a doorway and surged toward him in a flutter of ribbons, ruffles, and feathers. These, given her advanced state of pregnancy, created the effect of an agitated brood hen.

“Tell me I am not seeing whatyoucallems,” she said. “Those things they see in the desert—not oases, Rathbourne, but when one sees an oasis that isn’t there.”

He directed an expressionless gaze into her cheerfully stupid, pretty face. “I believe the word you seek is mirage.”

She nodded, and the ruffles, ribbons, and feathers of her bonnet danced giddily about her head.

He had known her forever, it seemed. She was seven years his junior. Eight years ago, he had very nearly married her instead of Atherton’s sister Ada. Benedict was not sure matters would have turned out more happily if he had. Both women were equally pretty, equally wellborn, equally well-dowered, and equally intelligent. Both were more handsomely endowed in all the other categories than in the last.

Still, precious few women had the wherewithal to offer true intellectual stimulation. In any case, it was Benedict who had failed his late wife, he was all too well aware.

“I thought it was a mirage,” said Lady Ordway. “Or a dream. With all these strange creatures about, one might easily think oneself in a dream.” She gestured at the objects about her. “But it was Bathsheba DeLucey truly. Well, Bathsheba DeLucey that was, for she was wed before I was. Not that the Wingates will ever acknowledge it. To them, she doesn’t exist.”

“How tiresome,” he said while he stored away the not-unfamiliar names. “Families feuding over an ancient triviality, no doubt.”

He was sure he’d gone to school with a Wingate. That was the Earl of Fosbury’s family name, was it not? As to the DeLuceys, Benedict couldn’t remember having met any. He knew his father was acquainted with the head of the family, the Earl of Mandeville, though. Lord Hargate knew everybody worth knowing, as well as everything worth knowing about them.

“It is far from trivial,” Lady Ordway said. “And pray do not tell me it is un-Christian to visit the sins of the elders upon the children. In this case, if one accepts the children, the elders will come, too, and they are so very dreadful, as you know.”

“I never met the lady before in all my life,” Benedict said. “I know nothing about her. The children had a dispute, and we were obliged to intervene.” He glanced at Peregrine, who’d returned to his drawing, altogether unaffected by recent events. Youth was so resilient.

Benedict, meanwhile, was still short of breath.

Bathsheba. Her name was Bathsheba.

Fitting.

Lady Ordway, too, looked at his nephew. Lowering her voice, she explained, “She comes of the ramshackle branch of the DeLuceys.”

“We’ve all got one of those,” Benedict said. “The Carsingtons have my brother Rupert, for instance.”

“Oh, that scamp,” said she, with the same smile and in the same indulgent tone most women adopted when speaking of Rupert. “The Dreadful DeLuceys are another story altogether. Thoroughly disreputable. Imagine Lord Fosbury’s reaction when his second eldest, Jack, declared he was marrying one of them. It would be like your telling Lord Hargate that you intend to marry a gypsy girl. Which, really, is what she was, for all they tried to make a lady of her.”

Whoever had tried to make a

lady of Bathsheba Wingate had succeeded. Benedict had detected nothing common in her speech or manner, and he had a fine ear for the nuances that betrayed even the best-schooled imposters and posers.

He had assumed he was speaking to one of his own class. A lady.

“Beyond a doubt that was how they lured poor Jack into parson’s mousetrap,” Lady Ordway said. “But the marriage did not enrich her family as they had hoped. When Jack wed her, Lord Fosbury cut him off with a shilling. Jack and his bride ended up in Dublin. That was where I last saw them, not long before he died. The child looks like him.”

At this point, the lady found it necessary to catch her breath and fan herself. These measures proving inadequate, she availed herself of the nearest bench. When she invited him to join her, Benedict complied without hesitation.

She was silly and wore too many frills, and rarely said anything worth listening to—and one must listen, for she was one of the multitude who believed “conversation” and “monologue” were synonyms. On the other hand, she was an old acquaintance, a member of his social circle, and married to one of his political allies.