Page 22 of Miss Dashing
Too late, Hecate realized her attempt to change the subject had been awkward.
“I have lady cousins throughout the home counties. I have met two of them thanks to Tavistock’s kind offices. I will meet the rest in the autumn if I return to London.”
Hecate sipped her punch. This was her second glass—and would be her last of the evening. “I’m sorry. I ought not to have asked after your family. You truly don’t know them?”
“They did not know I existed, and neither did Tavistock, by the old man’s design.” Lord Phillip munched on a second or third sandwich with what appeared to be complete equanimity. “I knew of them, though. We get the London papers in Crosspatch, and the nieces of a marquess were launched with some fanfare. I knew less of Tavistock because he was on evasive maneuvers in France.”
Soon, Hecate would have to wade into the affray on the main terrace, monitoring the punchbowl and keeping an eye on the buffet. If Eglantine and Edna or Portia and Flavia—or all four of them—became quarrelsome, Hecate would separate the combatants before the gentlemen started exchanging bets.
“What was it like,” she said, “to know you had family you were forbidden to meet?”
Phillip rose and propped a hip on the balustrade. “Probably like having cousins in Canada. You wish them well, you wait for the occasional word of them, you go on with your life. Did you love him?”
“We really must work on your small talk, my lord.”
“He abandoned you,” Phillip said. “I could not blame my relatives for ignoring somebody whose existence was unknown to them, but in the case of your Johnny…”
“He was all of twenty. I give him credit for understanding that with a fortune comes responsibilities. He preferred adventure, and at his age, the choice was understandable. He said I’d get the family sorted if I could avoid matrimony until age twenty-one, and he was right.”
“Your family is sorted, then?” Lord Phillip lounged, drink in hand, just out of smacking range.
“Keeping the Bromptons sorted is a near run thing from Season to Season, but they are all on allowances and have learned for the most part to live within their allotted means.”
For the most part, sometimes, in a manner of speaking.
Lord Phillip resumed his seat, gaze on the darkening line of trees. “Are you proud of yourself?”
A third sandwich awaited, and Hecate told herself she really shouldn’t, and she ought not to, and Lord Phillip had had no business putting so much food on the plate.
“Why would I be proud of myself? My every need is met not because of some effort I put forth, but because I had the good fortune to inherit wealth. I’m healthy through no fault of my own, of sound mind and reasonable appearance. None of it my doing. What do I have to be proud of?”
Phillip peered over at her, his expression hard to read in the gathering shadows. “You describe a pair of cousins who used your money to make their way to Canada, where everything from their boots to their biscuits was provided by the crown until other employment beckoned. Yet you are proud of them for following a path smoothed by your coin.
“Great-Uncle Nincompoop,” Phillip went on, resuming his seat, “has no idea how to make his land profitable despite having decades to study on the matter. When the Corn Laws are repealed—and they will be—he will expect you to keep Nunnsuch going, if you aren’t already. Edna the Ostrich expects you to dower those two hoydens, and it will take a small fortune apiece to find souls stout enough to meet those two at the altar. Cousin Charles would have gambled himself into exile but for your steadying hand, and that’s the recitation I can offer on one day’s acquaintance with your family. But you take no pride in these accomplishments.”
Hecate finished her third sandwich, hearing criticism rather than praise. “What is money for, if not caring for loved ones and the less fortunate?”
“Who cares for you?” Phillip passed her two more raspberry tarts. Had they been peach or apple, she might have refused.
“I care for me.”
He propped a boot on the balustrade and tipped his chair back on two legs. “I haven’t your great self-sufficiency. I look after Lark’s Nest, which might be loosely analogous to a rackety family. Just when I think the irrigation system has finally been set up to manage all the right acres in the right manner, we get a wet spring and I have flooding.
“I choose a fine stud for my broodmares, and only half of them catch. I decide to put a field in mangel-wurzels—remind me to tell Tavistock about mangel-wurzel beer, which is very good for breeding females—and turnips become more fashionable. Managing a patch of ground is like playing chess with fate, but at least I can compare notes with my neighbors.”
He popped a raspberry tart into his mouth while Hecate cast around for yet another subject they might pursue besides her family. Did they truly think her so antediluvian that she could dine virtually in seclusion with an eligible bachelor?
“I have reinforcements, though,” Phillip went on. “The Crosspatch Committee for Outwitting Unkind Fate meets regularly in the common of the Crosspatch Arms. Fortified with our pints, we trade insights, share the latest pamphlets, and offer each other encouragement and ideas. The same committee meets in the churchyard and on market day. Occasional executive sessions pop up over Vicar’s chessboard. My neighbors aren’t related to me, but they took me on as family all the same.”
“And you took them on as family.” Amaryllis DeWitt had passed along that much. Phillip never entertained formally, but he was always available to assist with a difficult foaling or calving and never begrudged a neighbor the loan of a team or a plow.
“I didn’t know any better,” he said, finishing off a second tart. “Does nobody truly care that we are private as darkness falls?”
“My family trusts me.” To be able to say that should have satisfied some dictate of pride or loyalty. Hecate appropriated the last tart and wished Phillip had brought more.
“But on what basis,” Phillip said, “do they trustme? I’m Lord Bumpkin, unacquainted with Society’s finer manners. Why trust such a one with the family treasure?”
Because the treasure is my fortune, not me.To put matters that bluntly would offend those finer manners.
