Page 92 of Miss Determined
“Very good, my lord.”
“Some sandwiches, too, please,” Amaryllis said. “His lordship has just vanquished a nasty old dragon, and that is hungry work.”
Feeney bowed and withdrew, looking as pleasantly befuddled as young Jones had.
“The great slayer of dragons is nervous,” Trevor muttered when he was certain of privacy. “This house doesn’t feel like my home, but it’s where I grew up.”
Amaryllis glanced around the soaring foyer: white marble flooring, fluted pilasters, a circular skylight allowing beams of sunshine to bathe enormous ferns in copper pots.
Elegant, chilly, intimidating. Jeanette had not been permitted by the old marquess to make changes, and after his passing, she’d limited her influence out of deference to Trevor’s prospective bride.
“Lovely ferns,” Amaryllis said. “The place could do with some flowers, a padded bench or two for those of us who like to sit when we remove our spurs or change from boots to house slippers.”
“Consider it done.” Trevor wanted to be away from all the gleaming marble and shining brass, and away from anywhere a curious maid or footman might find him. “The family parlor is this way.”
“Don’t show me the family parlor just yet,” Amaryllis said. “Show me the place you like most in the whole house.”
“My study.” Trevor wasn’t about to sit with her out in the garden, where neighbors, gardeners, and assorted housecats could spy on them. “Jeanette insisted that if I was to be educated at home, a schoolroom would not do. The future marquess needed a quiet place to advance his education, a place worthy of his standing. The tutors agreed—the schoolroom is frigid in winter and stifling in summer—and thus I became the only ten-year-old in Britain with his own study.”
“Gavin’s bedroom had a sizable dressing closet,” Amaryllis said as Trevor escorted her up the curved staircase. “I heard him in there, memorizing the great soliloquies by the hour. I should have known he longed to take to the stage, but even if I had, I lacked the means to search for him.”
“I haven’t those means either, but I recalled that Kettering has connections to various opera dancers. This way.” He led Amaryllis past marble busts of philosophers, kings, and consuls, past Gainsborough landscapes and a pair of Reynolds portraits of scowling ancestors.
A museum of lordly consequence, not a home.
“What sort of opera-dancer connections does Kettering have?”
Woe betide poor Kettering if they were the wrong sort. “He handles their finances, gets ten of them together to buy one share of a promising venture, manages the accounting, finds a replacement investor if somebody needs to sell her portion.”
If Amaryllis was overawed by the splendor of the house, she was doing a good job of hiding it.
“Opera dancers,” Trevor went on, “know actors and actresses. They have family on the stage and backstage. Theater folk wash about between Paris, Dublin, the shires, Edinburgh, London… Kettering put the word out, and somebody eventually recalled a very attractive male lead playing east of Town. The fellow was down from Derbyshire and had true talent. Styled himself Galahad Twidham, and that was too much of a coincidence.”
“Mama will never stand forGalahadpursuing a life on stage.”
Trevor paused outside the door of his study. He’d peeked in since returning from France, but only that. “Will you stand for it? You know what it feels like to be forced onto a path you dread.”And so do I.
“You approve of Gavin’s aspirations?”
“I approve of allowing people to pursue their dreams. A good play makes us think, laugh, forget our troubles or view them in a different light. Where is the harm in a talented young man pursuing a vocation that does all that?” Amaryllis’s answer mattered, and not simply to Gavin’s prospects.
She opened the door and preceded Trevor into the only sanctuary he’d had as a boy. “Will you approve of Phillip hiding away in the shires for the rest of his life?”
Phillip had grown very quiet since leaving Lark’s Nest and had not ventured from the town house other than to sit in the nearest park by the hour.
“I doubt Phillip sees caring for his estate and assisting his neighbors as hiding away, and yes, if that’s what he wants to do, I approve heartily.”
Amaryllis picked up a small telescope and peered through it out the window. “You could inspect every corner of the garden with this.”
“I took it with me everywhere until I went off to university. Jeanette gave it to me.”
Amaryllis went on a slow tour of the room, which was all of twelve feet square. She studied the history books and travel logs, Caesar’s Gallic letters,Robinson Crusoe,Gulliver’s Travels. She opened the last of Trevor’s botanical journals.
“Are you certain you aren’t a Dorning of some sort? These sketches are quite good.”
“I got away with drawing flowers in the name of science. Papa would not have stood for it otherwise.”
Amaryllis put the journal aside and bent close to the world map framed above the desk. She peered at the leviathan rampant in the southeast corner.
