Page 4 of To Tame the Wild Rake
It had been frustrating. He’d been obliged to find social occasions to corner the lords who held the future of the canal in their spiteful hands. He’d been in and out of balls, musicales and routs, often several in a night. Every evening another dinner party. Every afternoon a round of the clubs. There, at least, he could breathe easily, for they were male-only preserves.
“Will you be at the Weston ball this evening?” Sodfield asked. He chuckled. “M’wife wanted me to make you known to my daughter. She’s a taking little thing, but you needn’t worry. I know she’s not up to your weight. Only seventeen, you know, and if she has a thought beyond ribbons and fans, I’ve never seen it. M’wife has windmills in her head, and so I told her, but I promised I’d ask.”
Thank goodness for a man with common sense. “I would be pleased to meet Lady Sodfield and your daughter,” Aldridge replied. Sodfield had just potted the red ball and was ahead on points, but the move had left the man’s cue ball vulnerable to counterattack.
Mothers and marriageable daughters everywhere he looked, hounds to his fox. In the vicious hunt most debutantes and their mamas made of the marriage mart, a title, wealth, acceptable looks and amiable disposition marked a gentleman as a prime quarry.
He would retire to the country to become a hermit, if he could. The business of the duchy required him to be social and in London, but the risk of being saddled with a wife he hadn’t chosen required constant vigilance.
Sodfield shrugged as Aldridge took his revenge, though the two points scored still didn’t remove Sodfield’s lead. “Everyone knows you’re not putting your head in the noose. And I daresay you’d not make my Felicia a comfortable husband if you were fool enough to offer for her.”
Aldridge’s abysmal reputation remained something of a defence, then, at least with careful fathers. Add to that his constant vigilance, and the willingness to be ruthless when required. Even so, the inevitable gossip about his father’s swift decline and approaching demise had sent the hunt into a frenzy, and the usual measures were no longer enough.
And if his reputation was no longer protecting him from the marriage-minded, it was a positive incentive to widows, bored wives, and reckless spinsters looking for a companion in pleasure. He had long since lost any taste for casual sex, so had been ignoring lures and turning down blatant invitations for more than two years, but polite refusal seemed to spur some women on to even more flagrant attempts.
Baroness Thirby, for example. He had entertained the lady some years back, shortly after she was left widowed and wealthy. The marriage bed—or, more properly, Baron Thirby in the marriage bed—had bored her, but she discovered a new enthusiasm for the act with Aldridge and had spent the last four years experiencing—or so whisper had it—a wide variety of partners and encounters.
Now she seemed determined to revisit their brief affair, and did not believe that his ‘no’ was sincere.
Sodfield heaved a sigh of satisfaction as he managed a difficult carom that sent both Aldridge’s cue ball and the object ball into the pockets, and racked up enough points to finish the game.
“Excellent, excellent!” he exulted. “A good game, Aldridge. I thought you had me early on. I had better call it quits, least Lady Sodfield become anxious about her evening. Another game next week, perhaps?”
Aldridge bowed his agreement. “Of course.”Damn. How long was Sodfield going to string him along.
Sodfield was examining him closely. “Even if I say no to your canal?” he asked.
Aldridge summoned a smile and a nod. “You are a worthy opponent, Sodfield. It is a pleasure to play you.”
Sodfield chuckled. “Excellent manners. And all the while you are wishing you could roast my gizzard. Very well, Aldridge, I’ll sign your papers to let the canal cross my land, and I’ll back your bill in the House. But I still want another game, mind.” He held out his hand and Aldridge clasped it to seal the agreement.
“Tuesday next? Three o’clock in the afternoon?” Aldridge suggested.
“Done, and come and look me up tonight at Weston’s. I’ll present you to my wife and get it over. You’re a good man, Aldridge. You’ll have to marry one day. A duke needs an heir. Don’t make it to a foolish yearling like my girl. Marriage is forever, and a man needs more in a partner than a pretty face at the breakfast table.”
Which was good advice, but made one wonder about Lady Sodfield. Foolishness would not be a problem with the choice of Aldridge’s heart, Lady Charlotte Winderfield.
She was the extra goad that lifted the gauntlet he ran at every social occasion from discomfort to torture. In the past, both she and her twin avoided the broader social swirl, attending mainly those entertainments put on by family members. Aldridge did the same, and so they encountered one another perhaps twice a month, even at the height of the Spring season. The Haverford and Winshire families were estranged because the Duke of Haverford had declared it so, setting himself against the new Duke of Winshire when the man first appeared in London two and a half years ago. Indeed, he had gone so far as to attempt to have the man’s children declared illegitimate, and had even paid for at least two assassination attempts.
However, this month, Aldridge had been on a mission and so, apparently, were the twins, for every time he turned around, there was Charlotte. Encountering her night after night, sometimes several times a night, was further abrading his already raw spirits.
Most people thought her twin sister, Lady Sarah, was the lovelier of the two. The Winderfield Diamond, they called Sarah. Aldridge had never agreed. He freely acknowledged that Charlotte’s colouring was less fashionable than her sister’s: brown hair to Sarah’s fair and brown eyes to her sister’s blue.
Charlotte’s curves were subtler, too. She was the twin, though, who drew his eye, whose shape, mostly guessed at as the fabric of her gown shifted around her, fueled his dreams.
After his last failed proposal, he had put his raking days behind him, hoping Charlotte would soften towards the idea of marrying him. But she continued to be uncomfortable in his company, giving him little more than common politeness.
Sooner or later, he was going to have to accept that she really had sworn off marriage or that it was him, in particular, she objected to. And why wouldn’t it be? With his tarnished past, what had he to offer to someone who had earned thesobriquetSaint Charlotte as much for her immaculate behaviour and unblemished reputation as for her good works?
A sinner might aspire to admire a saint, but never to touch one.
Nonetheless, he poured himself another brandy, and sat looking at the fire, remembering a certain summer when he ran away to drown his sorrows in alcohol and willing women, and found an unexpected friend.
His lips curved as he sipped. Who would have thought that the most precious memory of that long-ago orgy would be an innocent schoolgirl, all skin and bone after an illness, brown hair in plaits as if to remind him to mind his manners? He could not, seven years later, recall a single woman from the house-party. They blurred into a vague impression of perfume, paint, giggles and curls. But he remembered Charlotte Winderfield.
1807, Somerset
“Mathematics is truth,” the girl told Aldridge, her thin face glowing with passion. “It is beauty. The world is patterns of logic and shapes, and the task of mathematicians is to understand those patterns, Lord Aldridge.”
