The woman put the average gunnery sergeant to shame with her harangues.
“You are not ideal husband material, Tony.” Percy spoke as gently as he could. “The ladies like some constancy for the first few years of marriage. They like to show off their trophy and drag a new husband about on calls. You’ve got the place in Hampshire, and you’d be expected to tend your acres for much of the year.”
Tony was silent until they reached the head of the stairs. “You’re saying I’d have to leave my bed before noon. Save the drinking until after supper, show up for parade inspection, the same as in Canada. Scout the terrain, deal with the locals.”
Put like that, civilian life didn’t sound like much of an adjustment.
“A wife would take umbrage at the opera singers. She’d expect pin money and babies.”
“Babies aren’t so bad.”
Tony sounded wistful, though he was right: babies were dear and about as easy to love as a human being could be. A man with two adorable nieces could admit such a thing easily—to himself. On the one hand, if Tony married and produced babies—male babies in particular—then Percy could sail back to the regiment despite Her Grace’s harangues and blustering.
And yet, on the other hand, to leave Tony behind in the clutches of a duchess-in-training, no older brother to seek consolation and counsel with, Her Grace looming over the marriage with a calendar in one hand and a receiving blanket in the other…
The Marquess of Pembroke was a decent fellow, but he hadn’t been able to hide from his younger brothers what the duchess’s interference had done to an otherwise civil and sanguine union.
“You’ll not be marrying anybody just yet, Tony Windham. As a duke’s son, you’re a prime catch. At least look over the possibilities at some length and think of your chorus girl.”
“Right-o, dear, sweet, little… the Italian—whatever her name is.”
“The one with the devouring mouth.”
A room to oneself was a mixed blessing at a gathering like Lady Morrisette’s. On the one hand, Esther had a little privacy in those rare moments when she wasn’t stepping and fetching for her betters, and particularly for Lady Morrisette.
On the other hand, a lady with a room to herself had to guard doubly against the gentlemen who “accidentally” stumbled into her chambers late at night. She also had no one with whom to discuss the day’s small revelations, such as how hard it had been not to watch Lord Percival Windham as he showed one lady after another how to hold her bow and let fly her arrows.
While Esther had lost the archery contest only by deliberately aiming her last shots wide of the bull’s-eye, Charlotte’s accuracy with a barbed comment was not to be underestimated, regardless of how desperately she’d needed Lord Percy’s assistance with her bow.
Esther flipped back the covers and eased from the bed—the cot. She’d had a choice of sleeping with Lady Pott’s maid in a stuffy little dressing room, or taking this glorified closet under the eaves. The closet had appealed, though on a warm night, it was nigh stifling, and on a cool night it would be frigid.
“I need a posset.”
Closets did not sport bellpulls, so Esther slid her feet into slippers, belted a plain dressing gown over her nightgown, and headed down the maid’s stairs to the kitchen.
A tired scullery maid frowned only slightly at Esther’s request before preparing a cup of hot, spiced, spiked milk.
“There ye be, mum. Will there be anything else?”
Esther took a sip of her posset. “My thanks, it’s very good. Does that door lead to the kitchen garden?”
“It do, and from thence to the scent garden and the cutting garden. The formal garden lies beyond that, and then the knot gardens and the folly.” The maid shot a longing glance at the stool by the hearth, as if even giving these directions made a girl’s feet ache.
Ache worse. After eighteen hours on her feet, the maid was no doubt even more tired than Esther.
“I’ll take my posset to the garden.”
“The guests don’t generally use the kitchen garden, mum.”
“All the better.”
This earned Esther a small, understanding smile. The girl sought her stool, and Esther sought the cooler air of the garden by moonlight—the garden where she’d be safe from wandering guests of either gender.
Kitchen gardens bore a particular scent, a fresh, green, culinary fragrance that tickled Esther’s nose as she found a bench along the far wall. Percival Windham’s comment the day before about the moon being full came to mind, because the garden was limned in silvery light, the moon beaming down in all its beneficent glory.
“So you couldn’t sleep either?”
Esther’s first clue regarding the garden’s other occupant was moonlight gleaming on his unpowdered hair.
“My lord.” She started to rise, only to see Percival Windham’s teeth flash in the shadows.
“Oh, must you?” He approached her bench, gaze trained on the cup in her hand. “Might I join you? I fear the farther reaches of the garden are full of predators stalking large game.”
He sounded tired and not the least flirtatious. Esther pulled her skirts aside when what she ought to be doing was returning to the stuffy, mildewed confines of her garret.
She took a sip of her posset and waited.
“How do you do it, Miss Himmelfarb?”
“My lord?”
He sighed and stretched long legs out before him, crossing his feet at the ankles and leaning back against the wall behind them. Moonlight caught the silver of his shoe buckles and the gold of the ring on his left little finger.
“How do you endure these infernal gatherings? They are exhausting of a man’s fortitude if not his energy. If one more young lady presses a feminine part of her anatomy against my person, I am going to start howling like a wolf and wearing my wig backward.”
His lordship sounded so put upon, Esther found it difficult not to smile. “May I ask you a question, your lordship?”
“Lord Percy, if you must stand on ceremony—or sit upon it, as the case may be.”
“Do you take snuff?”
He peered over at her in the moonlight. “I do not. It’s a deucedly filthy habit. Nor do I use smoking tobacco. I’m convinced my father’s frequent agues of the lungs are related to his fondness for the pipe. If you were to ask to borrow my snuffbox, you’d find it holds lemon drops.”
He reached over and plucked Esther’s cup from her grasp, raising it up. “May I?”
What was she to say to that? “You may.”
He helped himself to a sip of her posset, and the idea of it, of this handsome lordling drinking so casually from her cup, was peculiar indeed.
“Are you flirting with me, my lord?”
He set the cup down between them, his lips quirking. “If you have to ask, Miss Himmelfarb, then I’m making a poor job of it, aren’t I?”
He hadn’t said no. “May I ask you another question?”
His lordship closed his eyes and leaned his head back. “I’d rather it be a flirtatious sort of question now that you raise the subject. You’re very pretty, you know, and I’ve lately concluded the entire purpose of this gathering is to develop one’s stamina as a flirt. Like field maneuvers, I suppose.” He cracked open one eye. “I apologize if I’m being rude. That’s a truth potion you’ve slipped me.”
He settled back against the wall, shifting broad shoulders as if to get more comfortable. With his eyes closed, Percival Windham by moonlight was…
Handsome. Still, yet, more… deucedly handsome, to use his word. Lord Percival was the spare, but he had “duke” stamped all over him. The height, the self-possession, the charm…
“So you’re not averse to another question, my lord?”
“If we’re to be drinking companions, Miss Himmelfarb, then the ‘my lording’ has to cease. Mind you, I am not flirting with you.”
