Gareth gave her a look. “It’s a wonder I still have my feet.”
“It’s a wonder you still have your ears, my dear boy,” she said with lofty disdain.
“I will take that away again,” he warned.
“No you won’t,” she replied with a cackle. “I’m leaving with Penelope to find a glass of lemonade. You keep Hyacinth company.”
He watched her go, then turned back to Hyacinth, who was glancing about the room with slightly narrowed eyes.
“Who are you looking for?” he asked.
“No one in particular. Just examining the scene.”
He looked at her curiously. “Do you always sound like a detective?”
“Only when it suits me,” she said with a shrug. “I like to know what is going on.”
“And is anything ‘going on’?” he queried.
“No.” Her eyes narrowed again as she watched two people in a heated discussion in the far corner. “But you never know.”
He fought the urge to shake his head. She was the strangest woman. He glanced at the stage. “Are we safe?”
She finally turned back, her blue eyes meeting his with uncommon directness. “Do you mean is it over?”
“Yes.”
Her brow furrowed, and in that moment Gareth realized that she had the lightest smattering of freckles on her nose. “I think so,” she said. “I’ve never known them to hold an intermission before.”
“Thank God,” he said, with great feeling. “Why do they do it?”
“The Smythe-Smiths, you mean?”
“Yes.”
For a moment she remained silent, then she just shook her head, and said, “I don’t know. One would think…”
Whatever she’d been about to say, she thought the better of it. “Never mind,” she said.
“Tell me,” he urged, rather surprised by how curious he was.
“It was nothing,” she said. “Just that one would think that someone would have told them by now. But actually…” She glanced around the room. “The audience has grown smaller in recent years. Only the kindhearted remain.”
“And do you include yourself among those ranks, Miss Bridgerton?”
She looked up at him with those intensely blue eyes. “I wouldn’t have thought to describe myself as such, but yes, I suppose I am. Your grandmother, too, although she would deny it to her dying breath.”
Gareth felt himself laugh as he watched his grandmother poke the Duke of Ashbourne in the leg with her cane. “Yes, she would, wouldn’t she?”
His maternal grandmother was, since the death of his brother George, the only person left in the world he truly loved. After his father had booted him out, he’d made his way to Danbury House in Surrey and told her what had transpired. Minus the bit about his bastardy, of course.
Gareth had always suspected that Lady Danbury would have stood up and cheered if she knew he wasn’t really a St. Clair. She’d never liked her son-in-law, and in fact routinely referred to him as “that pompous idiot.” But the truth would reveal his mother—Lady Danbury’s youngest daughter—as an adulteress, and he hadn’t wanted to dishonor her in that way.
And strangely enough, his father—funny how he still called him that, even after all these years—had never publicly denounced him. This had not surprised Gareth at first. Lord St. Clair was a proud man, and he certainly would not relish revealing himself as a cuckold. Plus, he probably still hoped that he might eventually rein Gareth in and bend him to his will. Maybe even get him to marry Mary Winthrop and restore the St. Clair family coffers.
But George had contracted some sort of wasting disease at the age of twenty-seven, and by thirty he was dead.
Without a son.