The Lady Most Likely... Read online

  He knew enough to keep silent about that. But he had a shrewd idea that Gwendolyn’s father, whoever he was, wouldn’t be unhappy to learn that the Briarly estate was now one of the richest in all England. And if he offered to throw in Richelieu as a bridal present …

  “Kate is absolutely charming,” Georgina said. “An adorable laugh and a charming figure. Plus, she has beautiful teeth.”

  He didn’t like it that Georgina, of all people, was choosing a wife for him—and poking fun at him while she did it. Her own teeth were very white, as he could easily tell since she was laughing again. What was the matter with liking good teeth? No one would want to marry a woman who had a snaggletooth in front.

  “I agree that Kate Peyton is a brilliant idea,” Carolyn said. “Don’t you think so, Piers?”

  His brother-in-law shrugged. “No use planning these things.”

  There Hugh disagreed with him. “Just give me one more name,” he said. “I’ve got Gwendolyn, Kate, and—”

  “Georgina,” Finchley put in. “Why not Georgina?”

  Carolyn and Georgina burst out laughing, which nettled Hugh even more.

  “As if I’d want my dearest friend to spend the rest of her life trying to woo her husband out of the stables!” Carolyn exclaimed.

  He narrowed his eyes and waited until Georgina stopped laughing. “You are on the market, aren’t you?” he asked pointedly. “After all, it’s been two years since your husband died.”

  “Yes, it has,” she said, the laughter running out of her like air from a punctured balloon.

  A pang of guilt hit him. “I’m sorry. I never should have reminded you. Damn it, but I’m as careless as a stableboy.”

  “It’s quite all right,” Georgina said, producing a smile that curled her lips but didn’t touch her eyes. “I’d rather not be on your list if you don’t mind. I have a fancy not to marry again.”

  “Never marry again?” he asked, stunned. “Ever?”

  She shook her head. “Richard’s estate was not entailed. I have no need for the protection of a man’s income.”

  “That’s not the point,” he said. “What about someone to be with? What about children?”

  A shadow crossed her eyes, and he knew he had put a finger on the weakness of her argument.

  “Even I can remember how you dragged around that raggedy doll summer after summer,” he pointed out. “You were always putting her to bed and feeding her leaves and generally carrying on.”

  “We never fed our dolls leaves,” Carolyn said indignantly. “Acorns, yes, leaves, no.”

  “When we weren’t trying to sail them down the stream,” Georgina said. “Give way, Caro. I’m afraid that our treatment of our poor dolls would only prove our unfitness for motherhood. I am sorry that no children came of my marriage. But I can’t imagine myself marrying just for that reason. I shall never marry.”

  “I don’t agree,” Carolyn said. “You simply haven’t met a man who is a true grown-up. We’ll find you someone who’s a real man, like my Piers. Perhaps someone in the military.”

  Hugh opened his mouth—and shut it again. It was none of his business, after all. “Where the devil am I to meet this Gwendolyn if Almack’s is closed?” he asked his sister.

  “We’ll have a house party,” she said promptly. “I’ll send out the invitations for a fortnight from tonight. I’ll invite Gwendolyn and Kate. Oh, and some other debutantes as well. Once I drop the word in a few mothers’ ears that you’ll be there, I’ll have every nubile maiden you could possibly want.”

  Hugh grunted. He was vaguely aware that he was the subject of matchmaking fervor; one could hardly miss it given that he was regularly besieged at the races, especially Ascot. But he’d never paid the least attention before. “They don’t have to all be maidens.”

  “Well, that’s very liberal of you,” Carolyn said with a sisterly smirk. “But since I can hardly hand out a questionnaire as regards their experiences in that regard, we’ll have to leave it there.”

  “I mean that I’d be happy to marry an older woman,” Hugh said. “A widow. Not Georgina, since she’s apparently marked out for the uniformed crowd, but what I’m saying is that I’d just as soon my wife wasn’t sixteen years old.”

  “No debutantes are sixteen this year,” his sister said comfortably. “Seventeen, perhaps. But the fashion at the moment is to wait for a bit before debuting. I do believe that Gwendolyn is near twenty.”

  “She sounds better and better,” he said.

  “And since I can’t invite only women,” Carolyn said, “I know just whom I’ll invite for you, Georgie.”

  “For me?” Georgina exclaimed, looking less than thrilled, somewhat to Hugh’s pleasure.

  “She just said she didn’t wish to marry,” he pointed out.

  Finchbird gave him a look that told him it was useless to add anything to the conversation and, sure enough, Carolyn talked right over him. “Captain Neill Oakes. He’s a war hero with a lovely estate—not that you need it—and most of all, he’s just so manly. I don’t even like uniforms, and I shivered all over when I watched him being presented to the queen.”

  Georgina wasn’t so quick to scoff at that idea, Hugh noticed. “You’ll want to be careful there,” he said, in his role as big brother. “The war can do terrible things to a man.”

  “He has these fabulous jet-black eyes that just look right through you,” Carolyn said dreamily.

  Hugh could tell that Finchbird wasn’t enjoying the description any more than he was. His arm tightened on his wife, and it seemed to wake her up.

  “I’ll also invite the Duke of Bretton,” she continued. “Otherwise, Gwendolyn’s mama will never accept the invitation. I heard it said that she has her heart set on her daughter becoming a duchess. And who can blame her?”

  “You’ll hold this party in a fortnight?” Hugh said.

  “Yes. We’ll be at Finchley Manor, of course. The household is already scheduled to move tomorrow.”

  “We have the best grouse hunting south of Scotland,” his brother-in-law put in. “You’ve never been with us in September.”

  Hugh could hardly say that he disliked nothing more than tramping around the woods trying to kill something. Especially now that it had been established that war heroes made the best husbands.

  “Plus it’s my twenty-fifth birthday,” Carolyn said smugly. “Piers has promised me a particularly wonderful present, Hugh. So you can learn from him how to make a woman fall in love with you.”

  “You’re lucky you’re sitting all the way across the room,” Hugh said. “I’d love to pinch you.”

  The marquess grinned at him. “Don’t worry, old man. I’ll give you some pointers … if you give me the next foal from Monteleone’s line.”

  “Don’t even dream of it!” he said rudely. But that reminded him. “I’ll be bringing Richelieu, of course,” he told his brother-in-law. “Will there room for him in your stables?”

  “Absolutely!” Finchley replied. “Everyone is talking about Richelieu, and no one’s seen him yet.”

  “I can’t leave him, even for a week or two,” Hugh said. “I know he has the passion for racing. Something might happen to his mouth if I allowed someone else to finish his training.”

  “Richelieu is not invited to my house party,” Carolyn said pointedly. “I’m only inviting males of the two-legged variety, and they all have to be housebroken.”

  Hugh was about to tell her that he wasn’t coming in that case when Finchley gave his wife a little shake. “You can’t get the Duke of Bretton to come to the country just because there’s a beautiful debutante in the offing. She may have decided to marry him, but I’ll warrant that Bretton isn’t so hellfire keen to tie the knot.” He met Hugh’s eyes, and the knowledge passed silently between them that Bretton’s new mistress, an opera singer cheerfully known as Delicious Delilah, would likely keep him in London.

  “But if Bretton knew that Richelieu was training at my estate,” Finchley continued
, “he would come. And the other men too. That’s the lure that will bring in gentlemen.”

  “Bretton would be there in a sodding minute,” Hugh agreed. “He has tried to buy Monteleone from me five or six times.”

  “You don’t want Bretton to come,” Georgina said, looking amused. “He’s your competition for Gwendolyn’s hand, remember?”

  “The day that Bretton provides competition for me is the day that I—”

  “What?” his sister interrupted, laughing. “Throw in the towel? Declare that you’ll stay single forever?”

  She burst into giggles, and they were right back where the conversation had begun, so Hugh managed to get himself out of the room.

  Chapter 2

  When Gwendolyn Passmore was eighteen, she slipped on a muddy lane and broke her leg. The doctor did a splendid job setting the bone, but Gwen was required to stay off her feet for eight full weeks. Normally, this would have been utter torture. Gwen was a walking sort of girl; she loved nothing more than to slip out of the house when the dew was still fresh on the grass and walk for miles and miles, until the hem of her dress was soaked.

  But she broke her leg in April, which meant that she had to forgo what was to be her first London season. Her mother was devastated.

  Gwen was ecstatic.

  When she was nineteen, her brother was killed at Waterloo. The family went into mourning, and Gwen’s season was postponed by another year.

  Gwen had got to do all her lovely, long walks that spring and summer, but half the time she found herself sitting under a tree, crying. Her brother Toby had been the only person in the world with whom she had felt completely at ease. And now he was gone.

  When Gwen was twenty, she broke no bones, and no one died, and so in late March, she found herself being measured and poked and fitted and examined, and then she was taken off to London where she was measured and poked and fitted and examined by women with French accents (which somehow made the experience remarkably different although no less miserable).

  As her parents were the Viscount and Viscountess Stillworth, she received invitations to every important party, and on one chilly night in April, she was trotted out before the ton to make her debut.

  To her horror, she was an instant sensation.

  “I told you she looked like Botticelli’s Venus,” her mother said proudly to her father, after a fourth gentleman had commented on the resemblance. And indeed, with her wavy titian hair, alabaster skin, and sea-green eyes, Gwen did bear a striking resemblance to the goddess as interpreted by the Italian master.

  But each time someone commented on it, she could do nothing but stammer and blush because she knew as well as all the rest of them that Venus was standing in her clamshell with her hair covering only one breast.

  And so, less than a week into the season, Miss Gwendolyn Passmore was heralded the undisputed beauty of the ton. Sonnets were composed in her honor, the newspapers had taken to calling her Venus of London, and she had been asked to sit for a portrait by Sir Thomas Lawrence himself.

  Gwen’s mother was ecstatic.

  Gwen was miserable.

  She hated crowds, hated having to talk with people she did not know. She did not enjoy dancing with strangers, and the mere thought of being at the center of anyone’s attention was terrifying.

  She spent a great deal of time standing in corners, trying not to be noticed.

  Her mother was forever telling her to, “Smile! Smile a bit!” and “Be more cheerful!” Gwen wanted to please her parents, and she would have loved to have been one of those girls who laughed and flirted and was the life of every party.

  But she wasn’t.

  By June, Gwen was counting the days to the end of the season. In July, she gazed at her calendar, thinking—so close, so close. And then August (so tantalizing), and September, and—

  “I have wonderful news!” her mother exclaimed, rushing into her room.

  Gwen looked up from her sketch pad. She wasn’t terribly good at drawing, but she liked to do it nonetheless. “What is it, Mama?”

  “We have been invited to a house party!”

  Little fingers of dread began to uncurl in her belly. “A house party?” Gwen echoed.

  “Indeed. We have been invited by the Marchioness of Finchley. Isn’t that splendid? It is to be two weeks hence.”

  “I thought we were going home next week.” It did not matter that the London residence bore her family’s name; to Gwen, home would always be Felsworth, the huge, rambling estate in Cheshire where she’d grown up.

  “Finchley Manor is in the Yorkshire Dales. It is almost directly on our way to Felsworth,” her mother explained. “We shall stop off on the way. It will be a lovely diversion. So nice to break up the journey.”

  The journey wasn’t so long as to require breaking up by anything more than a few nights at inns, but Gwen didn’t bother pointing this out. Nor did she ask how, exactly, Yorkshire was on the way to Cheshire. There was nothing to be gained by it; her mother had made up her mind, and there would be no budging her.

  A house party, Gwen thought miserably. She supposed it couldn’t be worse than a London season.

  “Lady Finchley writes that Bretton will be there,” her mother said, holding up the letter as if it were a legal document. “I do think we have him close to proposing, Gwennie. This may be our opportunity to bring him up to scratch.”

  It was at times like these that Gwendolyn wondered if she and her mother inhabited the same world. Because in her world, it was quite obvious that the Duke of Bretton wasn’t anywhere near to proposing marriage. Although she would probably say yes if he did. She rather fancied being a duchess. As far as she could tell, duchesses got to do anything they wished.

  It might be rather entertaining to be an eccentric.

  And the duke seemed pleasant enough. Quite handsome, and terribly intelligent.

  “I shall have to write to Lady Finchley to see who else is coming,” Gwen’s mother said, her eyes taking on a terrifying strategic gleam. “Perhaps her brother—he is Lord Briarly, you know.”

  Gwen knew. She had memorized Debrett’s. It made talking to people a bit easier, knowing who they were and how they were all connected.

  “I wonder who else,” her mother mused. “I cannot think of anyone with whom Lord Finchley is friendly. Although one would think it is his wife who is composing the guest list.” She leaned forward and patted Gwen’s hand. “I know you don’t like these things, darling, but this won’t be so terrible, I promise. A house party is much different than London. It’s much more intimate. By the end, you shall be great friends with everyone.”

  Based on her experience with the young ladies of the ton thus far, Gwen thought tartly, she highly doubted it. She looked down at her sketch pad. She’d been drawing a rabbit. She decided to give him unpleasant teeth. Vicious little bunny. Excellent.

  “Now then,” her mother continued, “we shall have to get you a new riding habit, and perhaps three new day dresses as well. And oh, I am just so so pleased that Lady Finchley thought of this. I am so grateful for this last opportunity for you to meet a few gentlemen.”

  “I’ve met all the gentlemen,” Gwen insisted. It was true. She’d been introduced to every gentleman in London. She’d danced with most of them, and she’d received offers of marriage from four. Two had been rejected out of hand by her father, one had been nixed by her mother (“I know his mother,” she had said, “and there is no way I am subjecting my only daughter to that.”), and the last—Lord Pennstall—she had almost accepted.

  He had been very kind, and he was rather handsome, too, and only eight years her senior. There had been nothing wrong with him at all—until she found out that he wished to make his primary home in London. He was very interested in governmental issues, even extending beyond his seat in the House of Lords.

  Gwen just couldn’t do it. The thought of spending the rest of her life in London, acting as his hostess, giving parties and arranging salons—it was unbearabl
e.

  And so with some regret, she declined, explaining her reasoning to Lord Pennstall. (She could not imagine refusing an offer of marriage with anything less than complete honesty.) He had been disappointed, but he understood.

  Gwen knew that this meant she would have to endure another season unless she somehow managed to find the perfect husband back home. Still, one more season in London was infinitely preferable to a lifetime as a political wife.

  But she’d thought she had earned a respite. She’d thought she’d be free of this for another year. She looked over at her mother, who had apparently just composed a song called “A House Party La La La.”

  Freedom, it seemed, would be delayed.

  Alec Darlington had been the Earl of Charters for two years, but he still had not grown used to the name. “Charters” was his father, a gruff and strict old man who had never met a bit of his son with which he did not find fault. Alec had always enjoyed being “Darlington.” It was a roguish, devil-may-care sort of name, perfectly suited to a man who spent his life in the pursuit of pleasure.

  Alec had enjoyed living up to his name when he was Darlington.

  Charters, on the other hand, was dull. Charters made charts. Looked at ledgers. Acted responsibly.

  And it wasn’t so much that he wished to be irresponsible again. He’d simply have liked the option of it.

  But the carriage accident that had taken his father had also taken his mother, whom Alec had deeply and honestly mourned. And Alec had quite suddenly found himself entrusted with the care of his two younger sisters. He’d got Candida married off the year before, to a well-connected second son who worshipped the ground she walked upon. All in all, it had been a most satisfying arrangement.

  This left Octavia, who, at twenty, had just completed her second season with nary a proposal, despite the perfectly respectable dowry he’d settled upon her. She’d done everything right, or so their great-aunt Darlington (who had acted as chaperone) had told them. Her clothing had been from the finest of modistes. She danced like an angel. She could sing, and draw, and paint watercolors. In short, she could do everything a young lady of her birth was supposed to do.