Page 195 of The Ladies Least Likely
The young lady’s eyes darted back to his face with a look of horror, and Ren gritted his teeth. What did he care if every woman here scorned him? Harriette was trying to give him away to another. She didn’t want him herself. No other knowledge was able to enter his head around that.
The young lady gave him a brief curtsey as Harriette made introductions. In a pretty silk robe the color of milky tea, with demure rosettes marching down lines of broad stripes, the Stanhope girl looked like a plain little wren next to Harriette’s exotic scarlet finch. Her chaperone made some polite noises, and the ladies with them acknowledged Ren with the courtesy due an earl and their host. None of them turned to chat with Harriette, which struck him as odd, if they were acquainted.
The chaperone asked whether he had visited Sir William and Lady Catherine Hamilton in Naples.
Ren gulped. This was what he most hated about such gatherings: the questions that required answers. He could avoid dancing, but not the direct address.
“I sss-stayed some time with them at the Villa Angelica in Pu-Portici.”
Oh, miserable, miserable; he sounded like a stuttering fool. He focused on Harriette, who was watching him with rapt attention, so he did not have to see the distaste on the faces of the others. “In fact I had the honor of accompanying Sir W—” He concentrated. Harriette didn’t hurry him. “—Sir William on one of his visits to M-Mount Etna.”Ignore the others. Focus on Harriette.“He is preparing his observations about volcanoes for publications, I believe.” He faced the chaperone as if he had been speaking to her all along.
“How interesting,” the chaperone murmured, sounding bored, though Ren had broken a sweat putting so many sentences together for strangers. She stared at his leg as if she doubted his ability to move anywhere, much less clamber across uneven surfaces, and he felt a wave of fury at her scorn. Couldn’t sheseehow hard he was trying?
As if she sensed his emotion, Harriette lightly squeezed his arm. “I’ve studied the engravings Sir William has published of his substantial collection of antique vases.” She smiled at Ren as if he were the most fascinating man in the room. “But I would particularly like to see his collection of paintings.”
The other women met this effort with silence. It was not quite the cut direct; they simply pretended that she was not there.
This diverted Ren from his own agonies. Why would these ladies spurn Harriette? But she didn’t seem affected; indeed she didn’t seem to realize anything was wrong.
“I will take you to the Palazzo Sessa sometime,” he promised her. “Sir William will be delighted to show you his collection. Wadies.” He nodded at them, smarting at his final slip, and drew away. He let himself entertain for a moment, as consolation, the thought of travel abroad with Harriette. Harriette with artisticcrumbling ruins behind her or the dramatic profile of a volcano. Harriette drenched in the golden sun of southern Italy.
Across the room, his mother paused in fawning upon the Duchess of Devonshire to give Ren a fulminating stare. He gripped Harriette tightly as she pulled him along to the next group. “Bess Hervey is the brunette,” she whispered. “Young, but considered uncommonly handsome.”
Handsome women made Ren’s throat tighten and his tongue swell in his mouth. He concentrated on walking evenly as Harriette floated to another knot of gorgeously dressed women and made introductions. It was the same with the Hervey girl and her contingent. They met Ren with cautious courtesy and did not engage with his companion, though the Hervey girl watched Harriette out of the corner of her eye as if keeping an eye on a half-feral pet. The others clustered around Ren.
“Do you ride, your lordship?” asked one young thing, whose name he had forgotten immediately.
“A little,” he said. In truth, he felt much at his ease on horseback, where his clubfoot didn’t matter.
“Renwick cuts an excellent figure atop a horse,” said Harriette, who had never seen him ride. “Ren, you ought to take them riding sometime.”
“I’d much prefer driving in the park.” Another girl peeped at him above her fan. “I’m sure you have a very dashing vehicle?”
Ren’s neck itched beneath his neckcloth. Was she flirting with him? Women did not flirt with him. These girls moved too much, all flutter and rustling and the waving of fans and curls and whatever they had pinned in their wigs. Beside him, Harriette stood completely still, like a steady column of flame, throwing a most distracting heat.
“I have a gig,” Ren meant to say, but just then one girl bent to one of the others and whispered to her behind her fan, pointing her stare at Harriette. The second gaped, giggled, and thenslapped a hand over her mouth. Harriette pretended not to hear, nor to see that she was the object of their gossip, but Ren felt all the air leave his body.
“I have a g-g-g-g-g—” He tried to gasp out the word and couldn’t. Shame suffused him, but worse, when he turned to seek help from Harriette, he stepped on the train of Miss Hervey’s gown. An irate glare swept over her face, swiftly mastered, but Ren botched the apology, too.
“M-m-m-miss Herv—I—b-b” His airway closed, his mouth proving as disobedient as his leg. Raw humiliation burned across his brow.
“Why, there is Lady Bessington!” Harriette trilled. “You’ll excuse us, won’t you? I’ve been hoping to make Renwick known to her. She is a great patron of the arts.” She beamed at the group, extracting Ren from the scene of his shame.
“As ifyou’veever had a respectable patron,” one of the girls remarked under her breath as they moved on. Ren, shocked, tried to look over his shoulder to find the source of this contemptuous remark, but Harriette pulled him away.
Instead of throwing him to the next stage of the gauntlet, though, she paused in a small space between the jostle of decorated, powdered, and perfumed bodies. Ren took a deep breath, dragging air into his lungs, and tried to focus on something calming. The glimmer of the candles in the chandeliers draped from the tall, plastered ceiling. The floating melodies of the string quartet positioned between a bay of soaring sashed windows. The tap of heeled slippers on the wooden floor as couples danced.
Harriette. Where other women smelled like hair powder and musty fabric and floral cologne doused over native odors, Harriette smelled of clean air, turpentine, and chalk.
“Fancy a reprieve?” she asked.
He searched her expression for signs of pity, contempt, or superiority, and found none. She watched him with a curious intensity, tracing each feature with her eyes as if she were thinking of light and lines and composition, painting him already in her head.
“I fancy leaving here altogether. Do you think we could? Run away?”
How he’d love to take her back to his dressing room, or better yet his bedchamber. Order his man to bring up food from the kitchens and a bottle or two of red wine, and pass the whole night talking with Harriette, hearing everything she had done with herself for eleven years.
Harriette near his bed was too much a temptation. Could he stand to be near her, burn like this, and know she was not moved in the same way?
