Page 33 of Ne'er Duke Well
Iris gave him a little nod. “You may.”
He bid her farewell. And then he looked around, trying to catch a hint of dark-blond hair. Because after that conversation, what he really wanted to do was recount the whole thing to Selina. He wanted to know what she would say.
Chapter 9
… Of course, Lady Jersey, my brother the duke and his wife are eager to continue their patronage of Almack’s. But you must know that my brother takes a personal interest in His Grace, the Duke of Stanhope. I forbear to suggest that my brother will not attend if Stanhope’s voucher is withdrawn—and yet…
—from Lady Selina Ravenscroft to Lady Jersey, patroness of Almack’s
“Don’t tell me there’s another one.”
Aunt Judith raised one silver brow and then deposited the newspaper onto the breakfast table. It slumped in front of Selina’s plate of buttered brioche.
Selina dropped her forehead to the table with a groan. “I simply cannot look at it.”
Daphne reached out from several seats away to pluck at the paper. “I can.”
“I’ll admit to some interest myself,” Nicholas said. “What’s Stanhope done this time?”
Selina raised her head from the table to peer at Daphne while she perused the paper.
“It’s quite a good likeness,” Aunt Judith said drily. “No doubt whom the engraving is meant to represent.”
“Hmm,” said Daphne. “Well, it’s not as bad as the time he climbed the exterior wall at the Cleeves’ townhouse—”
“Please do not remind me,” Selina moaned.
“And certainly less exciting than when he rescued Lydia from a runaway horse—”
“Oh for heaven’s sake, you know as well as I do that Lydia wasriding away—”
“But it’s pretty bad.”
Selina pinched the bridge of her nose. “Just get it over with.”
“It seems he took Iris Duggleby to an art exhibition yesterday—all appropriately chaperoned, no need to worry, Selina—and he started a fistfight.”
Selina dropped her head back into her arms. “I don’t understand.”
Daphne’s voice was muffled when it reached Selina’s ears. “Honestly, I don’t think this gossip columnist was even there. Really,whyLord Ambrose would take issue with Stanhope’s aspersions on the portraitist is not entirely clear to me.”
“I believe”—that was her brother’s cautious interjection—“that Lord Ambrose and the portraitist are quite close.”
“Is that right?” This was Aunt Judith, who never turned up her nose attongossip.
“Well, one can hardly blame Stanhope for not being aware of that,” said Daphne.
“I can blame him.” Selina lifted her head and glanced around the table at her arrayed family members. “I can absolutely blame him.”
It had been two weeks since the Strattons’ ball, and Stanhope had applied himself to the project of courting Georgiana Cleeve, Lydia Hope-Wallace, and Iris Duggleby with purpose. Withdisastrouspurpose.
He’d taken Georgiana Cleeve for a ride in his curricle, which—according to Lydia’s extremely capable maid, Nora, who had a cousin in the Cleeve household—had gone reasonably well. Then, when he’d returned Georgiana to the Cleeve residence, she had left her hat in the conveyance.
It had, Selina supposed, probably been some kind of flirtatious offering on Georgiana’s part. An invitation to Stanhope to come back to call on her another time. But Stanhope had taken the accessory as some kind of a challenge, and had decided to return the thing to Georgiana directly.
By climbing the clematis on the side of the house while carrying the hat between his teeth, according to the print that was now being sold at several Bond Street news stalls.
The scandal was just beginning to break when he’d dropped by Rowland House to describe his progress to Selina. He’d seemed flabbergasted that she knew about the hat. And the climbing.
