The Countess
15 St. James’s Place, London
“You are the shame of your sex,” Lord Lockwood said, stretching out his long legs and regarding his boots with pleasure. “You make far too much of yourself, and have strayed into dissolute habits, and now your doom is upon you. I am inordinantly happy to see it happen.”
“Don’t be so intolerably smug,” his companion retorted. “Your reputation is as low as mine has ever been. ’Twas you who thought it’d be a good idea to bring Madeline and her friend to Sandleford’s house. I said it’d be a boring affair.”
“It wasn’t boring after you made such an ass of yourself quoting the bard,” Lockwood pointed out. “Would you put on a
shirt, if you please? It turns my stomach to look at your shoulders. You’re muscled like a barge man, Kerr. Grotesquely unfashionable, I might add.”
“The boxing does it,” the earl replied, unperturbed. He was seated at his writing desk, wearing only black pantaloons. “At any rate, I didn’t ask you here. I’ve a mountain of correspondence to get through, and I’m expecting my secretary any moment.”
“I’ll take myself off. Were you foolish enough to invest in Hensing’s canal scheme?”
“No. It sounded intriguing, but the man’s a fool.”
“I suppose that’s why your estate keeps growing, while my living shrinks,” Lockwood said. “But don’t you think there’s a chance he’ll make a go of it?”
“Unlikely,” Kerr stated, not even looking up as his pen scratched over a leaf of stationery.
But Lockwood paused at the door to the chamber and turned back, driven by insatiable curiosity. Kerr had finished sanding his letter and was reaching for a new sheet of foolscap. “So, are you going to marry, then? To be specific, are you going to marry Madeline Benoit, as all London appears to believe?”
Kerr narrowed his eyes. “You think less of me than I deserve.”
They’d been friends since Oxford, and yet Lockwood flinched slightly at the expression in Kerr’s eyes. “I merely thought—”
“I heard about your bet in White’s. You’ll lose that money, as you’ll lose any blunt you put into Hensing’s canal. I shall fulfill my obligations to Miss Loudan,” Kerr said, turning back to his sheet as if he had no further interest in the conversation.
A grin spread across Lockwood’s face. Kerr looked up and frowned. “What are you smirking about?”
“You just made up for Hensing’s canal. I placed a bet in White’s that you’d marry Mademoiselle Benoit, but that was only to give Etherege enough courage to take my bet on the other side . . . that you would honor your betrothal.”
“Etherege must have thought you were drunk,” Kerr observed. “Why the hell would you bet one way in White’s and place the opposite bet with him?”
“I gather he didn’t notice that the bet in White’s was for a shilling or two. He put a good four hundred pounds on your propensity to marry the mademoiselle, thinking I was too castaway to remember my own opinion.”
Kerr snorted. “Meet me at Miss Bridget’s tonight?”
Miss Bridget was a Frenchwoman who ran a house that was not precisely one of ill repute but damn near close, to Lockwood’s mind. “I see that your taste for Frenchwomen is much like the English taste for food: predicated on quantity rather than quality,” he remarked.
Kerr smiled faintly. “I thought it would amuse the ton to see me with a woman other than Madeline. We’ll take one of Miss Bridget’s young friends to the opera.”
Lockwood laughed. “That’ll put the cat amongst the pigeons.”
Kerr turned back to his papers. “Quite.”
Chapter Three
March 22, 1817
Mrs. Broughton to The Hon. Emma Loudan, St. Albans, Hertfordshire
Dear Miss Loudan,
Thank you so much for your gracious response to my letter; to be sure, I trembled before I took pen in hand. I should most dislike to be thought a gossipmonger, or some such, and yet I have every sympathy with your difficult position. I consider it my honor—if not my pleasure—to offer you such tidbits of news as might interest you. I hasten, then, to reassure you that it is no longer believed that the Earl of Kerr intends to marry Mademoiselle Benoit. Last night he and some friends made an appearance at the Royal Opera House accompanied by a group of young Frenchwomen. Everyone noted that Kerr paid particular attention to one of them, and since she cannot be considered a possibility for matrimony, the consensus is that your fiancé has a propensity for women of Gallic origin. This is a most unseemly topic, and I feel reprehensible for even bringing it to the attention of an unmarried lady. But my loyalty to Miss Proudfoot’s School rises above manners.
Yours with all esteem,