Page 4 of The Husband Gamble
Lord Hythe bit back a groan.
She chuckled. “I am just as delighted at the prospect as you are, my lord.”
His eyes twinkled at her, and she could not resist smiling back. “Dancing would not be so terrible,” she acknowledged.
“Most of them would not be terrible if the others indulging in the activity have a modicum of talent,” he replied. “For the sake of the audience, I shall do my best to avoid anything requiring me to sing or play a musical instrument.”
Rilla nodded. “My Achilles heel is acting,” she confided. She had reason to know that an audience of any size caused her to forget every line she had laboriously memorised. In addition, even in rehearsals, she had never been able to step inside a part.
“You need to let go of yourself and become someone else,” Joseph had told her. Everyone around her seemed to find it easy, both in Society and in that other world. Rilla just went on being Rilla. In the end, Joseph gave up on her and allowed her to contribute to their enterprise in other ways.
“Mind you,” she told the earl, “I love a well-acted play. I so admire those who can draw us into a story so that we believe they really are Lady Macbeth tortured by guilt into madness, or Juliet, determined to die for love.”
“It is especially impressive when the child-bride Juliet is played by a woman in her fourth or fifth decade, is it not?” Hythe replied. “To make us look past the mature form and see the slender innocent—there is a magic to it. I saw Emma Pilkington in the part this year. She is still a young woman, of course, just in her twenties, but she was clearly with child at the time. Within minutes, I had forgotten.”
The Pilkingtons, husband and wife, had taken London by storm this year. Rilla had reason to know just how talented and creative they were.
“She has a gift,” Rilla agreed. “The Pilkington company is built on her talent, and on her husband’s strengths as a playwright and a producer.”
Hythe nodded. “Society does not quite know what to make of them. An earl’s daughter who made a runaway marriage and then went on the stage should not, in the public view, be a lady. But she and her husband are both well born and clearly devoted. Since they became reconciled with their families all but the high sticklers accept them.”
“I do not suppose they care,” Rilla observed. “They must be glad about their families, but for the rest? They have made their lives in the world of the theatre.”
The servants were carrying away dishes and replacing them with those of the second remove. Hythe, with another charming smile, turned to address a remark to the lady on his other side. Rilla turned to her other dinner companion, who spent the next half hour telling her about his hounds and his hunting.
Lord Hythe might be totally off-limits as a suitor, but he was certainly an excellent dinner time conversationalist.
CHAPTERTHREE
Certainly, the tale differs from house to house. So much so that Peggy Whitlow has not spoken to Maggie Cutler in three years since they came to hair-pulling and scratching when they were only fifteen over whether the white rider was an angel or the elf king. And many a promising pugilist has got his start in a dusty lane defending the honour of Miss Amaryllis from the accusation that she planned the whole thing.
[“The Abduction of Amaryllis Fernhill”, inCollected Tales from the Villages of England, by a Gentleman]
* * *
Hythe enjoyed the first remove at dinner far more than he had expected. Miss Fernhill was entertaining company with ideas of her own and not afraid to argue the point. Miss Fairleigh on his other side, whom Hythe quickly summed up as having more hair than wit, made the second half of the meal seem four times as long as the first. Their conversation was stilted until he threw out one of his prepared questions. “What do you like to do on a rainy day, Miss Fairleigh?”
After that, it took only the occasional comment to keep her prattling away about the relative merits of embroidery and water colours.
Hythe had two strong-minded sisters whom he respected and whose company enjoyed. He couldn’t understand why Society saw any appeal in insipid young women who concurred with the opinion of any man who interested them. What could possibly make such females desirable as wives for any fellow with the least modicum of intelligence or any hope of the same for future children?
Why couldn’t some of the eligible females be more like the very ineligible one he had brought in to dinner? On the other hand, perhaps Miss Fernhill had simplified Hythe’s task. Perhaps he just needed to make it clear to the young ladies that, when he asked for an opinion, he was in earnest.
The following morning, when some of the party walked up a nearby prominence to admire the view, he tried the strategy on one of the young ladies. It was not a success. Hythe could not help but wonder whether her marriageability had been impaired by deep-rooted stupidity. The thought was not worthy of him.
Lunch had been set out on sideboards for people to serve themselves, with multiple tables around the room so people could sit in groups of up to ten. Hythe chose a seat at the same table as Miss Fernhill, desperate for some reasonable discourse. He could try again with some of the other lady guests, but for now it would be restful to spend time with someone who expected nothing from him.
Of course, several others joined the table and conversation remained trivial until someone made a disparaging remark about the ongoing debate on voting reform.
Miss Fernhill expressed an opinion. “We need to make sure that voters truly represent the population across the whole country,” she said.
Miss Fairleigh asked, “Whatever do you mean, Miss Fernhill?”
“It is ridiculous that a large city like Manchester has no representatives in Parliament while a place like Dunwich returns two representatives. Dunwich has fewer than fifty people, and none of its thirty-two freemen voters actually live in Dunwich.”
Hythe agreed. In medieval times, Dunwich been a thriving port with eight parishes, almost all now swallowed by the sea. The remaining half a parish nonetheless retained the right to send two members to Parliament, voted in by non-resident voters, half of them nominated by only two men.
Miss Fairleigh’s fair brow furrowed. “I never worry about things like that.”
