Page 1 of Miss Dramatic
ChapterOne
“Are you two out of your happily married minds?”
Gavin DeWitt did not shout, nor did he pitch the nearest porcelain vase to the hearthstones. The acting profession taught a man to control himself before all audiences, as did life in Crosspatch Corners. “The only curse worse than a house party,” he went on, “is a hen party, and you propose to gather up every clucking biddy ever to roost at a Mayfair ridotto.”
“Remind me again,” Lord Phillip Vincent drawled. “What exactly is a ridotto?”
His brother, Trevor, Marquess of Tavistock, lounged with an elbow propped on the library mantel. “The usual dancing and flirtation. Better food at a ball, better gaming at a ridotto.”
“Ah.” Phillip had taken to studying the niceties of polite society as Gavin might have applied himself to a Shakespeare soliloquy. “Interesting.”
Gavin considered pitching the vase at the marquess, his brother-by-marriage. “‘A learned fool is more a fool than an ignorant fool.’ If you know polite society so well, Tavistock, then you know this gathering will only end in disaster.”
“In finding you a wife, you mean?” Tavistock smiled in that urbane, self-possessed, annoying way of his.
Lord Phillip rose from the desk. “Stow it, Tavistock. Gloating is bad form even here in the shires. Just because you and I are the happiest of men, delighting in the affections of our darling wives, doesn’t mean you should tease DeWitt about his lamentable bachelorhood.”
Neither Molière nor the Bard offered a riposte worthy of that bit of inanity. “I like my bachelorhood very well, thank you, and I intend to enjoy it for some time.”
Tavistock and Lord Phillip exchanged a look possible only between men who were both in the early throes of wedded bliss. Tavistock was fair, Lord Phillip dark-haired, but the pair of them were tall and rangy, and they shared a certain resemblance in their features.
And in their patient pitying of Gavin’s bachelor state.
“I was like you once,” Tavistock said, as ifoncehad been ages and ages ago in a land far away, not the mere handful of weeks, and most of those weeks spent in Crosspatch Corners. “I was determined to avoid parson’s mousetrap, but I had a reason: My father’s example would have put any man off marriage. Phillip was concerned about his past overshadowing his future, which we can also lay at our late father’s feet. What’s your excuse?”
“Why do I need an excuse to enjoy my freedom? Phillip, you professed the self-same contentment until very recently.”
Phillip’s smile was sweet, and that hurt worse than Tavistock’s smug condescension. “Then I met my Hecate, and mere contentment would no longer do, though I understand your hesitation. Women like Hecate and Amaryllis are rare.”
Phillip had been raised in Crosspatch Corners, far from the madding crowd’s ignoble strife—and its licentiousness. He was in some regards the most innocent of men, though in his understated, soft-spoken way, also quite shrewd.
“You could not possibly understand why the prospect of a lot of spinsters and meddlers congregating beneath my very nose gives me the collywobbles.” Opening night on Drury Lane wouldn’t have been half so intimidating. “These are the ladies who make up numbers, who pop up on short notice when more fashionable guests decline an invitation at the last minute. They aren’t half so harmless as you might think. You have no idea…”
Phillip and Tavistock were looking at him as if he’d lapsed into Old English.
“You’ve been off racketing about the shires for two years,” Tavistock said. “Doing your Shakespeare impersonation. How could you predict the sort of women Hecate and Amaryllis will favor with an invitation?”
The former Miss Hecate Brompton was not well known to Gavin, but he was better acquainted with his sister Amaryllis than with any other person living upon the earth. He could predict exactly what sort of ladies she’d invite to Berkshire for a few weeks of summer socializing.
Dragons in disguise, basilisks in bonnets, wyverns in white gloves.
“While I was on the stage,” Gavin said, “my troupe was occasionally called upon to grace social gatherings.”
Phillip squinted at him. “You were hired to entertain in private homes. Juggle for your supper?”
If only the expected entertainments had been limited to juggling. “We enacted selected scenes, delivered famous speeches, and assisted with the amateur theatricals. We were also expected to serve as supporting cast.”
“Flirt with the dowagers?” Tavistock pushed away from the mantel. “So you rounded out the dance sets when you weren’t mooning about the court of Denmark or preparing to storm Agincourt. What of it?”
Both men regarded Gavin with genuine puzzlement. If he told them the rest of it, that puzzlement might well turn to disgust or amusement. The situation wanted some thought, some rehearsal. He’d find a way to explain, a way to say what needed to be said without making himself look like the ignorant bumpkin he’d been.
“For the good of all concerned,” he said, “the only role I will be playing for the next few years is the country squire conscientiously minding his acres right here in Crosspatch Corners. Perhaps after Mama has Caroline and Diana launched, I will see fit to add a wife to the cast at Twidboro Hall.”
“Wife is not a part to be acted,” Phillip said, “any more than husband is a role to be put on and taken off. One fears for your understanding, DeWitt.”
Better that than fearing for a man’s good name.
“You won’t run off?” Tavistock asked ever so casually. “Hecate and Amaryllis have quite warmed to the idea of a mostly ladies gathering, and if you were to absent yourself, they would be puzzled.”
