Lord Perfect (The Dressmakers 3)

More important, she had prevented his committing an appalling breach of both propriety and sense.

He had very nearly followed Bathsheba Wingate out of the Egyptian Hall.

And then . . .

And then, he was not sure what he would have done, so bedazzled had he been.

Would he have stooped to teasing her until she told him her name and direction?

Would he have sunk so low as to follow her secretly?

An hour earlier, he would have believed himself incapable of such gross behavior. That was the sort of thing infatuated schoolboys did. In his youth he had experienced the usual assortment of infatuations, naturally, and behaved in the usual absurd manner, but he’d long since outgrown such foolishness.

Or so he’d thought.

Now he wondered how many crucial rules he might have broken. Her being a widow rather than a married woman made no difference. For a short time he had not been himself but a sort of madman, bewitched.

Impetuous behavior is the province of poets, artists, and others who cannot regulate their passions.

And so he sat patiently with Lady Ordway and listened while she went on to the next topic, not at all interesting, and the next, which was less so, and told himself to be grateful, because she had broken the spell and rescued him from a shocking folly.

Chapter 2

BATHSHEBA WAITED ONLY UNTIL THEY’D exited the Egyptian Hall before she took her daughter to task. Children, Bathsheba had found, were like dogs. If one did not administer a punishment or lecture immediately after the crime, one might as well forget the matter altogether, for they certainly would.

“That was outrageous, even for you,” she told Olivia as they made their way across the busy street. “In the first place, you accosted a stranger, which you have been told countless times a lady never does, except when her life is in danger and she requires help.”

“Ladies never do anything interesting unless they’re about to be killed,” Olivia said. “But we are allowed to aid persons in need, you said. The boy was frowning as though he was having a difficult time. I thought I could help him. If he were unconscious, lying in a ditch, you wouldn’t expect me to wait for an introduction, surely.”

“He was not lying in a ditch,” said Bathsheba. “Furthermore, striking him with his sketchbook meets no criterion of charity I ever heard of.”

“I thought he looked afflicted,” Olivia said. “He was scowling and biting his lip and shaking his head. Well, you saw why. He draws like an infant. Or someone very old and palsied. He’s attended Eton and Harrow, can you credit it, Mama? That isn’t all. Rugby, too. And Westminster. And Winchester. They cost heaps of money, as everybody knows, and one must be a nob to get in. Yet not one of those great schools could teach him to draw even adequately. Is it not shocking?”

“They are not like schools for girls,” Bathsheba said. “They teach Greek and Latin and little else. In any event, the topic is not his education but your improper behavior. I have told you time and again—”

She broke off because a gleaming black phaeton had rounded the corner at a speed that threatened to overturn it, and was racing straight at them. Pedestrians and street vendors scrambled to get out of the way. Bathsheba hauled Olivia to the curb and watched it fly past, her hands clenched while she longed for something to throw at the driver, a drunken member of the upper orders with a trollop giggling beside him.

“What about that one, with his fancy piece?” Olivia said. “He’s a nob, isn’t he? It’s so easy to tell. The way they dress. The way they walk. The way they drive. No one minds what they do.”

“Ladies know nothing about fancy pieces and they never use the word nob,” Bathsheba said between her teeth. She made herself count silently to twenty, because she still wanted to run after the phaeton, tear the driver from his perch, and knock his head against the carriage wheel.

“It only means he’s got rank or money,” Olivia said. “It isn’t a bad word.”

“It is slang,” Bathsheba said. “A lady would refer to him as a gentleman. The term serves for men belonging to the gentry and the aristocracy as well as the peerage.”

“I know,” Olivia said. “Papa said a gentleman was a fellow who didn’t work for his living.”

Jack Wingate had never worked for a living and simply couldn’t do it, even when it was a choice between working and starvation. For all of his life before he met Bathsheba, someone else had paid the bills, shouldered the responsibilities, and made a path through the difficulties. For the rest of his short life, she was the someone else.

Still, in every other way, he had been everything she could want in a husband, and he’d proved to be the best of fathers. Olivia had adored him and, more important, listened to him.

“Your father would make one of his wry faces and say, ‘Really, now, Olivia,’ if you spoke of nobs to him,” Bathsheba said. “One does not use the word in polite conversation.”

Wishing Jack had taught her the trick of getting through to their daughter, Bathsheba went on to explain how certain words were interpreted. This word would prejudice people against one, by indicating lower-class origins. She explained—for the thousandth time, it seemed—that such judgments were an unfortunate fact of life, with practical and often painful consequences.

She concluded with, “Kindly discard it from your vocabulary.”

“But all those gentlemen can do as they please, and no one scolds them,” Olivia said. “Even the women—the ladies. They drink to excess and gamble away their husbands’ money and go to bed with men who aren’t their husbands and—”

“Olivia, what have I told you about reading the scandal sheets?”

“I haven’t read one in weeks, ever since you told me to stop,” the girl said virtuously. “It was Riggles the pawnbroker who told me about Lady Dorving. She pawned her diamonds again to cover her gaming debts. And everyone knows that Lord John French is the father of Lady Craith’s last two children.”

Bathsheba hardly knew where to begin responding to this declaration. Riggles was an undesirable acquaintance, not to mention indiscreet. Regrettably, Olivia had been on easy terms with such persons practically since birth. Jack always dealt with them, because he’d had the most practice with pawnbrokers and moneylenders. And he always took Olivia, because even the stoniest heart could not resist her enormous, innocent blue eyes.

When he fell ill, and Bathsheba had so many other cares, the then nine-year-old Olivia took over financial negotiations, carrying the remaining bits of jewelry and plate, household bric-a-brac, and clothing to and fro. She was even better at it than Jack had been. She had his charm and her mama’s obstinacy combined, unfortunately, with the Dreadful DeLucey talent for bamboozlement.

Bathsheba and Jack had left the Continent and moved to Ireland to get Olivia away from the unwholesome influence of Bathsheba’s family.

&nb

sp; The trouble was, Olivia was drawn to shifty characters, rogues and vagabonds, spongers and swindlers—persons like her maternal relatives, in other words. Apart from her teacher and classmates, the pawnbrokers were the most respectable of her London acquaintances.

Undoing the education her daughter received on the streets was becoming a full-time occupation for Bathsheba. They must move to a better neighborhood very soon.

All they needed was a few shillings’ increase in monthly income.

The question was where to find the money.

Bathsheba must either obtain more commissions or acquire more drawing students.

Neither students nor commissions were easy for a woman artist to come by. Needlework was, but it would earn a contemptibly small wage, and the working conditions would ruin her eyesight and health. She was ill-qualified for any other occupation—any other respectable occupation, that is.

If she was not respectable, her daughter could not be. If Olivia was not respectable, she could not marry well.

Later, Bathsheba counseled herself. She would fret about the future later, after her daughter was in bed. It would give her something productive to think about.

Instead of him.

The Earl of Hargate’s heir, of all men.

Not merely a bored aristocrat, but a famous one.

Lord Perfect, people called him, because Rathbourne never put a foot wrong.

If he hadn’t identified himself, Bathsheba might have lingered. It was hard to resist the dark eyes, especially, though she couldn’t say why, exactly.

All she knew was that those eyes had very nearly made her lose her resolve and turn back.

But to what end?

Nothing good could come of knowing him.

He was not at all like her late husband. Jack Wingate was an earl’s younger son with no sense of responsibility and as little affection for his family as she had for hers, though for different reasons.

Lord Rathbourne was another species. Though he, too, was a member of one of England’s most prominent families, his was also one of the most tightly knit. Furthermore, all she’d ever heard and read about him led to one conclusion: He was the embodiment of the noble ideal, everything aristocrats ought to be but so seldom were. He had high standards, a powerful sense of duty—oh, what did the details matter? The scandal sheets never mentioned him. When his name appeared in print—as it did regularly—it was on account of some noble or clever or brave thing he’d done or said.