The Earl's Practical Marriage

Chapter Five

‘There is nowhere to sit,’ Laurel began.

Of course, with his luck, just then a chair beside them was vacated by a gentleman who was announcing to his wife that he was off to the card room before the orchestra began its infernal caterwauling.

Giles sat down without waiting for Laurel’s assent. On her far side Phoebe was clearly flustered at the sparking hostility. She said nothing though, perhaps as much at a loss as Laurel to know how to snub a perfectly respectable member of the ton in the middle of a Bath Assembly. A perfectly respectable, exceedingly handsome war hero, if Mr Gorridge’s remarks were to be believed.

‘We began on entirely the wrong foot this morning,’ Giles said, leaning forward so that he could address Phoebe across Laurel.

It gave the younger woman an excellent opportunity to admire the breadth of his shoulders and the crisp line of his recent haircut across the tanned skin of his nape. She told herself she could hardly avoid looking, not without turning away very rudely.

‘Ladies, I must apologise for approaching you directly the other day, and without an introduction. I imagine it must have been disconcerting to receive the impression that you were being, perhaps, stalked, Laurel.’ The expression in those blue eyes was perfectly serious.

Why is he being conciliatory? Laurel wondered. Why is he here at all? He could avoid me perfectly easily and that would be more comfortable for both of us.

When Phoebe uttered incoherent phrases about quite understanding and doubtless the best of motives and Laurel maintained her chilly silence, Giles added, ‘I can only excuse it because of the sense I had at that first meeting at Beckhampton that we were already acquainted, Lady Laurel.’

‘Acquainted? Certainly we were. I was apparently a hysterical girl and you... Words fail me.’

‘Oh, thank heavens for small mercies,’ Phoebe murmured beside her.

‘We must discuss that disaster in private,’ Giles said. ‘Neither of us can afford the appearance of a disagreement in public.’

‘We have no reason to discuss anything.’ Laurel wondered where the feeling of panic was coming from. She should send him on his way, firmly and coldly. They had nothing to discuss. Nothing. ‘We have no reason to meet, in public or in private.’

If only he wasn’t such a stranger and yet so familiar. The more she was close to him the more she heard the echoes of the past in his voice, saw it in those compelling eyes. And if only he wasn’t such an assertively male creature. Yet he was not behaving like his own father always had—loud, cheerfully dominating the world around him. Giles’s manner was perfectly controlled, his voice even, his movements elegant. He was being the perfect gentleman—or perhaps the perfect courtier she had assumed he had spent his time being in Lisbon. Only, perhaps not...

What had Mr Gorridge meant? Noble and courageous. Had Giles fought? But he hadn’t been in the army... Why was he even speaking to her?

‘I beg to differ, Laurel. We are both going to be in Bath for the foreseeable future. I imagine neither of us wishes to lock ourselves away for fear of encountering the other and if our relationship appears strained when we do meet it will cause comment. People will begin to recall the whispers of an old scandal and that can do your standing in Bath no good. Neither would I relish it. It would interfere with my own plans.’

‘Lady Laurel, to you, my lord,’ she retorted and got a faint, mocking smile in return. It would serve him right, him and his plans, if she slapped his face as he deserved.

‘And might I enquire what those plans are, Lord Revesby?’ Phoebe, who had apparently got a grip on her flustered nerves, gave Laurel a reproving look. Not in public, it said.

‘Marriage, Lady Cary. One of the things that will assist my father’s recovery is my making a suitable match. He has been alone too long and he will enjoy having a family around him.’

‘You will be in London for the next Season, I imagine,’ Phoebe remarked.

Laurel wondered where her stomach had dropped to and why it should. Why did she care who Giles married? He was no longer the man she had thought him, if he ever had been. But a family? A brood of small Gileses.

‘Perhaps, Lady Cary, if it takes me so long to find the right bride. But this is June, the Season is over for this year and Bath has its charms, I find.’ He was not looking at the dance floor where quite a number of ladies of marriageable age were being led out by their partners for the opening set.

He was looking at her, Laurel realised. What? No!

Beside her Phoebe made a small sound. Before either of them could say anything a gentleman in his late forties stopped and bowed slightly. ‘Lady Cary, good evening. Might I crave the favour of an introduction to your companion?’

‘Of course, Sir Hugh. Laurel, my dear, Sir Hugh Troughton. Sir Hugh, my niece, Lady Laurel Knighton, who has given me the great pleasure of coming to share my house with me. Laurel, Sir Hugh was a colleague of my late husband’s in the War Office and is in Bath to accompany his sister who has been unwell. I do hope Miss Troughton is feeling a little better, sir.’

‘A very junior colleague,’ he said, bowing over Laurel’s hand. She rather liked his smile and the openness of his plain face under a thatch of brown hair just greying at the temples. ‘Thank you, Lady Cary, my sister is finding the fresh air and the waters very helpful. I expect we will be returning to town next week. And...’ He looked enquiringly at Giles.

‘Revesby.’ Giles stood up and offered his hand.

‘Delighted.’ Sir Hugh shook it energetically. ‘I had heard you were coming home.’ He lowered his voice. ‘I have had the pleasure of reading many of your despatches. Very useful indeed, as I am sure you are aware. I think there is a letter on its way asking you to come in to Whitehall for a debriefing at your earliest convenience.’

‘I am attending my father who is unwell, but I will give whatever help I can, naturally.’ Giles spoke equally quietly. ‘You will doubtless let me know if there is anything more urgent.’

‘Excellent. Now, mustn’t bore the ladies with this, er, diplomatic talk. Lady Cary, I do hope you will do me the honour of the second set? And Lady Laurel, the third?’

When they both agreed Giles said, ‘And perhaps I can hope for the reverse? Lady Laurel, the next set? And Lady Cary, the third?’

His tactics are excellent, Laurel thought, irritation vying with admiration. I have already accepted an offer to dance and therefore etiquette forbids me from refusing another gentleman, whoever he may be. If I wish to claim a strained ankle or exhaustion, I will have to wait until I have partnered him for at least one dance.

‘I would be delighted,’ she said, smiling at him.

‘Such sharp teeth you have, Laurel,’ he murmured. ‘I still have the scars.’

‘Where?’ she asked, startled. Beside her Phoebe and Sir Hugh were in earnest discussion of the best choice of physician for his sister.

‘On my right calf. Surely you recall. You must have been about ten and you were furious with me because I had climbed the apple tree at the Home Farm to fetch my kite and refused to pick apples for you. You bit the only part of me you could reach.’

‘Goodness, yes.’ A chuckle escaped her at the memory. ‘How I made you yell.’

‘You were a little savage.’ The way he said it sounded almost approving.

‘You were most disobliging. “It isn’t our tree. It would be theft,”’ she quoted. ‘Scrumping isn’t theft.’

‘Try telling that to Farmer Goodyear.’

A discordant note from a tuning violin jerked her out of the happy childhood memories back to the present. This was becoming far too cosy. Why Giles should be so amiable she could not imagine, not after those gritted-teeth remarks in the Pump Room. And surely that significant look when he had been speaking about marriage to Phoebe had only been to provoke her?

‘As Mr Goodyear went to his just reward eight years ago, that is unfortunately not possible,’ Laurel said, deliberately sounding both pious and humourless. She needed to stop being charmed by reminiscence into relaxing, because the man was after something, she was certain. Or up to no good. Vengeance served very, very cold, perhaps.

From the way his mouth twitched she was not convinced that Giles took her remark at face value, but he sat back and watched the dancers, leaving her to recover her equilibrium. She shifted a little in her seat so that she could watch his profile covertly. Now she was over the first shock of seeing him again she was able to find more traces of the youth she had known beneath the handsome skin of the man he had become. The shape of his jaw and his nose and the arch of his brows were recognisable as she studied him. His hair had lightened from a honey-brown into blond, perhaps from the sun, because his brows were darker, as were his lashes. Those blue eyes, of course...

But the sensual curve of his mouth, the way his skin was tight over the bones of his face, his height and the breadth of his shoulders... Where had they come from? He must top his father by four inches and he looked hard and fit without a surplus ounce on his body. That might be expert tailoring, of course, but she very much doubted it.

She had the sudden urge to reach out and touch those shoulders. She had not touched him on the Downs. There he had only brushed her lips with his as they shared a few fleeting breaths...

‘Have I a smudge on the end of my nose?’ Giles enquired without turning his head.

‘No. As you are very well aware I was studying how you have changed in appearance,’ she said calmly, refusing to blush over staring at a man. At this man. ‘I doubt your character has changed as much as your looks.’

‘You think not? Over nine years, in a foreign country and on the edge of a war?’ He did turn his head to look at her then. ‘Forgive me, but I think experience and life create many changes.’

‘Not in fundamental character,’ Laurel said firmly.

‘So you judge me to be as fundamentally unsatisfactory as the last time we met, despite having barely exchanged a dozen sentences with me?’

‘Undoubtedly you are. And older and more experienced, which makes it only worse.’

‘That is sauce for the goose, as well as for the gander,’ he murmured as the music for the last dance in the first set ended and a smattering of applause broke out. The dancers walked off the floor and Giles stood. ‘Our set, I think.’

It was surprisingly difficult to rise gracefully to her feet and take Giles’s outstretched hand. Her knees seemed to have turned to jelly, as though all the nerves she had been keeping out of her voice and her gestures had fled to the back of her legs. She managed it somehow without stumbling and placed her kid-gloved hand in his.

‘I did not look to see what this set is,’ she confessed for something to say as they took their places at the end of a long line of couples. However she felt about him she was a lady and she knew how to behave in public. It would embarrass and distress Aunt Phoebe if her antagonism was obvious to onlookers. Some kind of small talk had to be found.

‘It is various country dances, I think.’

The music began and Laurel recognised it as a severely modified version of an old tune, slowed down and with all the bounce taken out of it. The measures that had been put to it were unfamiliar, but it was slow enough to be able to follow easily.

‘Whoever set this has a cloth ear for music,’ Giles observed after a few minutes as they paused, waiting their turn to promenade down the line. ‘And it is slow enough to be a funeral dirge.’

When they came together after a few more measures Laurel remarked, ‘I would have thought that dancing at the Lisbon Court would have involved any number of very stately measures.’

Giles was striking enough in ordinary evening dress—black-silk breeches, white stockings, midnight-blue superfine tailcoat—but if the diplomatic corps wore full Court uniform at the Portuguese Court as they did at St James’s then he would have looked even more magnificent with heavy silver lace on his coat. He was also a graceful dancer with the muscular control to move well through slow turns and promenades. She had often noticed that the slower the dance the more a clumsy dancer was caught out.

‘You are correct. Court dances there are rather slow and old fashioned, unfortunately. Very mannered with much posturing. At first it was hard not to laugh at the sight of us all peacocking about. But Wellington wintered in Portugal and he liked to throw a ball at the drop of a cannonball. He expected all his young gentlemen to dance and he liked things lively.’

‘And you were one of his young gentlemen, were you?’ The more she heard the more she was convinced he had spent the past years in the thick of the Peninsular conflict, not lounging around at the Court exchanging pleasantries and diplomatic chit chat in the intervals between minuets. Which was both admirable and infuriating, because now she would have to admire him for it and, she acknowledged, she did not want to have to discover any good in him.

Not one scrap.

‘I would drop by, on occasion.’ His face was shuttered now, the smile simply a reflex on his lips. ‘I was not in the army, Laurel. I was attached to the diplomatic corps.’

And something else, he cannot deceive me with that offhand manner. Intelligence work, perhaps? Interesting that he does not want to talk about that time, let alone boast about it. Oh, dear, another admirable trait.

‘Thank goodness that is over,’ Laurel said as the violins scraped their last mournful note and the dancers exchanged courtesies. ‘Ah, this one is much better.’ It was a proper country dance with vigorous, cheerful music. ‘It is familiar,’ Laurel said as Giles caught her hands and spun her around. ‘But I cannot place it.’

‘Neither can I.’ They stood aside for the next couple to spin. ‘Yet somehow I associate it with you.’

‘With me?’ And suddenly, as Giles joined hands across the circle and spun another of the ladies, it came back to her. The smell of lush green spring grass crushed under dancing feet, the scent of the blackthorn blossom in the hedgerows glinting in the torchlight, the cold white light of the moon and everywhere laughter and the scrape of a fiddle, the thud of the tabor and the squeak of a penny whistle.

‘The village May Day fête,’ she blurted out as he came back to her side and she was whirled into the circle away from him.

She had been what? Fourteen? They had all gone to the fête during the day which had been delightful, even though Stepmama had not allowed her to buy the gilded trinket she wanted because it was ‘vulgar trash’. And equally she had forbidden Laurel to go to the dance in the evening. It would be an unseemly rustic romp, quite unsuitable for any young lady, even one who had not yet let down her hems and put up her hair. Laurel had bitten her lip against the tears of disappointment and nodded obediently, but she had opened her window wide that evening, had put on her nicest dress and had danced by herself in her room to the distant music on the warm air.

And then there had been a scraping sound against the sill and Giles’s head had risen slowly into view. ‘I say, are you decent, Laurel? Still dressed? Good. Come on, I’ve got the orchard ladder. We can go to the dance.’

She had not needed asking twice. They had scrambled down the rough rungs and run across the meadows, somehow hand in hand, although there was no reason for her to need any help. They danced all evening with other people, Laurel mainly with the other village girls of her age because none of the sons of tenants would risk the consequences of being found romping with the daughter of the big house.

And at the stalls set up around the green Giles had bought her the trinket she had yearned for. He slipped it in his pocket for safekeeping just as the musicians had struck up with the tune they were dancing to now and he caught her hands and pulled her into the measure. They had danced until they were breathless and, at the end, when all the lads pulled their partners into their arms and kissed them, he had kissed her, too. Just the innocent, friendly brush of his lips over hers for a fleeting second.

They had run back as the clock struck midnight like the best of fairy tales, still hand in hand, and when she put one foot on the first rung of the ladder Giles had kissed her again, just that same harmless, laughing caress, and she had laughed back and kissed the tip of his nose.

‘Your charm,’ he said, digging in his pocket.

‘Look after it for me,’ she had replied. ‘If Stepmama sees it she will know I have been to the fair.’ Then she had scrambled up the ladder and arrived in the bedchamber breathless. And in love.

Looking back on it now, Laurel knew her feelings had been entirely innocent of any physical desire. There had simply been the certainty that she was Giles’s and he was hers and that this was an entirely satisfactory and inevitable state of affairs. Instinctively she had known that this truth did not need to be put into words or expressed in any way, any more than one needed to comment that rain was wet or that sheep were woolly. And, of course, Giles understood it, too, that went without saying as well. One day, when she was older, the words would be said...

It had not been until two years later, when Giles had left England and she was in disgrace, that it had occurred to her to look properly at herself in the mirror, to look and see a gangly, skinny girl with a mass of unruly brown hair and eyes that seemed too big for a face that had the odd freckle and a threatening pimple and no discernible beauty whatsoever.