Ladies waited.
Gentlemen signed their dance cards.
Couples danced.
Ladies went home and awaited the next morn, when those same gentlemen would return to present themselves as suitors, before invariably deciding said ladies were crass, coarse, and entirely too direct.
Or, at least, that had been the case where Lettice was concerned.
It was why she now found herself on the sidelines of the Marquess and Marchioness of St. Albans’ ball, partnerless and anticipating the arrival of the estimable Lord Exmoor—the only man who’d deemed her “courtship worthy.”
And though her mother was eternally pointing out she should be grateful for those attentions and that there must be something wrong with her selfish soul if she did not, she often found she’d prefer to be partnerless.
That included partnerless from Lord Exmoor…and the other Brookfield women.
Alas, she found herself sans only one of those souls this night.
“And do not smile that obscene smile,” her mother said under her breath.
Oh, even that was entirely too much for her straitlaced, despairing-of-her-daughters-ever-marrying mama.
“My smile is not obscene,” Lettie muttered.
“Her smile is perfectly lovely,” Caroline insisted, and Lettie mouthed a silent ‘thank you’ for that show of support from the sister at her side through this misery.
“As if you have any grounds to speak about anything pertaining to ladylike behavior, Caroline,” their mother said in a hushed whisper.
Caroline’s gaze instantly fell to the floor, and Lettie felt a surge of rage on her elder sister’s behalf. Years earlier, Caroline had been courted by a fortune-hunter and rejected by that same man when Miles had made it clear the dastard wouldn’t see a farthing of her dowry. Their mother had never forgiven Caroline for sins that belonged to another.
Lettie took a furious step nearer the dowager marchioness. “How dare—?”
“Not here,” Caroline implored, stealing a frantic glance about.
The dowager marchioness switched her wrath back to Lettie. “And for all the saints in heaven, do not mutter and mumble, Lettie.” Her mother’s voice tilted up ever so slightly, as she otherwise remained with what Lettie was to take was not an obscene smile on her lips as she waved to a passing couple.
“Hmm,” Lettie tapped a finger against her chin contemplatively. “One must wonder if there is a patron saint of marriage.”
“Of course, there is,” their mother said, not missing a beat. “St. Valentine.”
“I referred to the Church of England,” Lettie pointed out.
The dowager gave a toss of her head. “Yes, well, desperate times and all that.”
“Do not encourage her,” Caroline mouthed.
Lettie touched a finger to her earlobe. “What?” she returned in an equally soundless query. She shook her head slightly and mouthed, “I can’t hear you.”
Her sister’s lips twitched.
“And perhaps if either of you bothered praying, then one of you would at last succeed in making a respectable match,” her mother said through an even, painful-looking smile as she postured and waved to Lord and Lady Montfort as they passed. After the couple had gone, Lettie and Caroline’s mother turned to them, angling her body in a way that ensured the world did not fully see her state with maternal disapproval, “Two unwed daughters. Two.” As if there were any doubt of the count, her mother discreetly lifted and waggled two fingers.
“Yes, but Rosalind is happily married,” Lettie pointed out, gesturing to her sister, who was being waltzed about the room by her proper and properly dull husband. She shuddered. If ever there was a reason to avoid the matrimonial state like the plague, Rosalind’s tedious existence was proof enough. “Surely that matters some?”
“Sixty-six percent of my daughters are unwed, and only thirty-three percent of them are,” her mother said crisply. “I know you’ve never been skilled with your numbers either but let me inform you that those numbers are decidedly failing, particularly as one of those daughters has so very little hope or prospects.” The dowager slid a pointed look Caroline’s way.
“Hey now,” Lettie protested, but Caroline put a staying hand on hers.
“Now, backs straight, girls,” their mother ordered. “Smiles on.”
Because she knew it was the only way to ensure the dowager marchioness would cease haranguing them and carry herself off to join the other vipers she called friends, Lettie forced her lips up into the requisite polite smile, the painful, measured, insincere one her mother now wore.
Her gaze lingered on her mother’s features, and it was as though she looked into a mirror and saw a glimpse of how she herself looked in this moment.
Lettie shuddered. There was nothing more horrifying than knowing she looked like that.
The dowager marchioness tapped her fan distractedly against her palm. “Where is he? Where is he?” she murmured. “I have it on the authority of the marchioness that the marquess would be here.”
As one, Lettie, Caroline, and their mother glanced off in the direction of the marchioness in question.
Lettie’s stomach clenched, and her efforts at smiling failed.
For there could be no doubting which he and which marchioness and which marquess.
None other than Wynn Masterson, the Marquess of Exmoor.
“Your smile, dear. Do remember your smile,” her mother said in a singsong voice as she searched the ballroom. “Why, is he not here?”
“Does this mean I no longer have to wear this ghastly grin?” she ventured, earning a startled laugh from Caroline. They would have no doubt received a good scolding from their mother if she had been at all focused on anything other than finding the gentleman.
He was a perfectly agreeable and affable and respectable gentleman, and he also would have been a perfectly suitable suitor…if Lettie’s mother hadn’t been so embarrassing in her attempts at pushing Lettie in the gentleman’s path.
Literally, she’d pushed her into the marquess at an affair at the start of the Season, and Lettie had tumbled head-first.
The papers had written about his heroic efforts, while in the next breath lambasting the clumsiness of the Brookfield Bluestocking, a moniker she was sure the gossips had arrived at only because of the lovely alliteration.
“I expect he should be here at any moment,” her mother murmured. “I will pay his mother a visit and see if I might find details.” She turned, and Lettie quickly plastered the requisite get-your-mother-gone grin on her lips. “Lovely, my dear. Just lovely.”
It was the closest the dowager marchioness had ever come to showing affection, and it all hinged on the falsity of Lettie’s feelings and the prospect of her marriage to a marquess whose plans to surrender his bachelorhood were known by one and all.
Lettie and Caroline’s mother sailed off.
“You can cease with that ridiculous smile now,” Caroline muttered. “She is gone, and you look like you’re holding in a fart.”
Lettie burst out laughing.
“Shh,” her sister whispered frantically, stealing a glance about.
“I-I cannot help it,” Lettie managed around her mirth. “I just did not think you were still in there.”
Caroline frowned. “Do hush. Please,” she entreated.
“I prefer you how you used to be,” Lettie said softly, sadness creeping in. Back then, Caroline had been Lettie’s partner in everything. “Back when we were incorrigible together.”
Incorrigible had long been the family name for them. At one time, Lettie, Rosalind, and Caroline had all reveled in that descriptor.
“Yes, well, I don’t have that luxury anymore, and as such, I can hardly afford to go about playing child’s games and behaving in a way that is anything but proper. I’ve already done that.” Caroline’s eyes grew sad as she wistfully eyed the dancers gliding through the set of the latest waltz. “You should learn from my mistakes.”
As if she felt Lettie’s eyes on her, Caroline schooled her features, quashing that romantic glimmer in her eyes, and a frown fell over her features. “What?”
“You should not listen to Mother,” She waggled her eyebrows. “lest you become her.”
Caroline snorted. “Me, a spinster of nearly twenty-nine years, when our mother was wed at sixteen and had two babes by the time she was my age, an heir and a spare at that, is nothing like her.”
No, she wasn’t. And thank God for that. “Egads!” Lettie recoiled in pretend horror. “Since when has our beloved brother Rhys become ‘the spare’? Now, you sound like Mother.” She lightened that statement with a teasing wink.
Caroline giggled; stifling that hint of mirth behind her gloved hand.
“That’s better,” Lettie said, looping her arm through her sister’s. “Either way, sixteen is entirely too young to wed,” she felt inclined to point out. At that age, she and her sisters had still been playing hide-and-seek at their family’s properties.
Her elder sister winged an eyebrow. “What about seventeen?”
“Still too—”
Caroline continued over her, “Eighteen, nineteen, twenty, twenty-one, twenty-two—”
“Your point has been—”
“Twenty-three, twenty-four, twenty-five, twenty-six, and twenty-.”
“—made,” Lettie muttered over that interruption.
“You would do well and be wise to allow Mother to help you along.”
“Help me along?” she mouthed.
“Do you want to find yourself a poor relation, dependent upon our elder brothers’ magnanimity? I, for one, do not but I have no other choice.”
“Well, then, you are free to marry Lord Exmoor,” she volunteered. As soon as the words slipped out, she wished to call them back.
Caroline’s features spasmed.
Her heart broken, years earlier, by a fortune hunter had left Lettie’s elder sister a shadow of the young woman she’d been, and also with zero marital prospects. “Caroline,” she said quietly. “I’m sorry. There are many good gentlemen—”
Her sister waved those assurances off. “I know my circumstances, and I know my future. Just as I know you have an option to not be trapped with mother forever.”
When put that way…
“He’s arrived,” Caroline whispered.
Lettie slid her gaze across the room, and her gut clenched.
It was him—the Marquess of Exmoor. She considered the gentleman with her sister’s earlier words weighing in her mind. “He’s not really interested in me—”
“Of course, he is.” Caroline scoffed. “Why wouldn’t he be? You are lovely and witty and—”
“And I thank you for that show of support,” Lettie interrupted, looping her arm through her sister’s. “Does he truly have feelings for me, though, Caro?” She gave her sister a pointed look. “Or is it merely that Mother continues pushing me at him and him at me?”
“That is how marriages are made in England,” Caroline said, like a governess schooling a slow-to-learn student.
“Then it is a wonder a single bride or groom makes it down the proverbial aisle without being covered in bruises and bloodstains.”
Another smile pulled at Caroline’s lips. “That is impolite talk.”
“This from the one who you used the word ‘fart’—”
Caroline laughed, and promptly buried that sound with her hand.
“And I’d hardly classify us as ‘poor’ relations, Caroline,” Lettie said, gently. Financially, they’d doweries that were secure and theirs, free and clear.
“Not in the financial sense,” Caroline said, her voice rich with exasperation and more animated than Lettie could remember in…well, ever. “As in ‘pathetic,’ Lettie. As in ‘pitiable.’ As in—”
“I believe you’ve quite made your point.”
“Good,” her sister said just as a buzz circulated around the room. “If I have, then one will expect you to start behaving with a good deal more—”
No longer attending Caroline, Lettie searched about to see what accounted for the crowd’s whispering.
And then she spied him.
He was several inches taller than the tallest gentlemen present, his shoulders broad, his features rugged, and his jaw just a touch too square to be truly perfect, softened only by a slight cleft.
And yet, his masculine perfection—though he was decidedly that—was not what snagged her notice.
Rather, there was something…familiar about the gentleman’s features. He was—
She gasped, drawing back slightly as recognition slammed into her with the force of a stampeding mount.
“Lettie?” her sister asked with concern.
“It is Anthony!” she exclaimed.
When her sister met that pronouncement only with perplexity, Lettie released a sound of frustration. “Anthony,” she repeated.
Because, really, was there another?
“As in Anthony, the Earl of Montgomery.” He’d not come around in years, and he was no longer an earl, but rather, the Duke of Granville.
Her sister looked out briefly. “So it is.”
That was it? “That is all you’ll say?”
Caroline frowned. “Very well. He’s no longer the Earl of Montgomery, but rather, the Duke of Granville.”
“Caroline!” Lettie didn’t care if he were a prince or a pauper. “This is Anthony, who was only ever Rhys’ best friend.” The same Anthony who’d given her rides upon his shoulders. Shoulders that had grown increasingly broad since she’d last ridden upon them. Her cheeks warmed under that notice on her part.
Her sister gave a dismissive wave. “They were boys, and it has been years.”
She opened her mouth to tell Caroline precisely what she thought of her lackluster response to Anthony’s return, but her sister’s words—it has been years—froze that particular argument and fixed her thoughts on another. “Why did he stop coming around?”
That query managed to penetrate even her sister’s blasé response about Anthony’s return. Clearly stymied, Caroline cocked her head. “I don’t know.”
As one, they located Anthony, now the Duke of Granville.
Lettie took note of a detail she’d previously failed to notice.
Anthony was flanked by his mother, the Dowager Duchess, and a golden-haired, flawlessly beautiful young lady dressed in a glorious white silk creation and adorned in diamonds from her neck to her neckline on down to her hem.
“She is magnificent,” Caroline said in reverent tones.
“Oh, hush. That is—”
“Destined to be the Diamond of the Season,” her sister finished over her.
“—his sister, Lady Eloise, I take it,” Lettie murmured. Late as they were to the event, no formal introduction had been made. But apparently, none was required.
The trio had already been swarmed by a sizable army of potential suitors vying for the lady’s dance card, while lords and ladies throughout the room strained to gain Anthony’s attention.
As the current dance ended, another commenced, and the lady was escorted onto the floor by a gentleman, while the Duchess of Granville conversed easily, engaging Lady Fitzhugh on her right, smiling and laughing.
“The duchess smiles,” Lettie remarked, and more, it was a real smile.
“Why shouldn’t she be smiling?” Caroline rejoined. “Her daughter is a Diamond and a success.”
Unlike them. Lettie bristled, snapping her focus away from the woman in question and over to her killjoy of a sister. “Hey now. I’d not qualify either of us as a failure.”
Her sister gave her a pointed look. “Are you wed? I’m certainly not, but do you somehow have a husband that no one knows about?”
“I’d hardly classify having a husband as the mark of greatness.” In fact, she’d never even had a suitor. Beyond Lord Exmoor, whom her mother insisted on pushing into her path.
A sad little sigh escaped Caroline. “A lady has no mark of greatness in society beyond her worth to some gentleman.”
Egad, her sister had become…even worse than she’d feared or had ever expected. “You cannot possibly believe that.”
“I do,” her sister said with entirely too much conviction. “Because that is the way of our society. A young lady is invariably looked after by a male, and the best one might hope for is to find someone who will respect and honor you.”
“Well, I disagree with you strenuously on that score,” she said. “I believe the best one can hope to find is a man who will respect one, who will treat one as an equal and partner, and who will love one most ardently and—”
“When you find this paragon, do let me know,” Caroline muttered.
“Hmph.” Though, she understood the reason for her sister’s cynicism, Lettie believed such a man existed. He had to. Her brothers treated their wives as partners in life and loved them, and as such, she’d proof that such men existed. Men who smiled and laughed and teased, and she found her gaze drifting once more to Anthony.
Aloof as she never recalled him, he stood with his arms folded at his chest and a frown on his lips.
That slight downward tilt to his hard mouth lent a further air of interest and mystery to him, an even greater handsomeness—if that were possible—and yet, even as her heart tripped in a peculiar way, it was not his male beauty that held her focus, but rather, that frown. And for altogether different reasons.
Anthony never frowned.
Well, that was, he’d never frowned unless he’d been playing the fox to her pig while pretending to huff and puff and blow her house down in a game of Three Little Pigs that she’d enlisted him to play with her and Rosalind and Caroline.
Lettie found herself frowning.
“Why is he frowning?” she wondered aloud.
Her sister gave her a quizzical look, and Lettie gestured discreetly in Anthony’s direction.
“On that, I agree. Isn’t it enough that there are two dozen gentlemen pursuing his sister he should crack at least a grin?” Caroline scrunched up her nose. “Unless he’s waiting for a grander title than the ones possessed by the men surrounding them.”
“Oh, come, Anthony was never obsequious and ostentatious.” Several years younger than Rhys, he’d been best friends with their second-born brother after all.
“It’s been years,” Caroline shot back. “He was a boy. Boys will spend their time with…anyone.” As Anthony had done with them. “But when those lords grow up, they keep company with men whom they declare are socially superior and marry…Diamonds with fortunes at the ready.” With that last utterance basically falling like an epithet from her lips, Caroline turned her attention back to the young woman gliding gracefully about the room in the arms of her dashing partner.
It was not, however, the particular man who commanded Lettie’s notice.
Anthony was on the move.
“Where are you going?” her sister whispered furiously after her.
“To investigate.” With her eyes on the tall, dark-haired gentleman winding his way through the crowd, Lettie set off in pursuit.
