The Secret Mistress

St. George’s on Hanover Square for the ceremony and plan the wedding breakfast. He might as well start fitting out his nursery.

“Is this not all absolutely wonderful?” Lady Angeline Dudley said as he drove through the crowd of carriages and horses that made the fashionable afternoon loop in Hyde Park.

Or drove with the crowd would be a more accurate description. It was impossible to move at a faster pace than the slowest of the vehicles ahead of him, and that was very slow indeed. Speed was not the purpose of an afternoon drive in the park, of course. Neither was getting somewhere—hence the circular nature of the drive. One came to be sociable, to mingle with one’s peers, to hear the newest gossip, to pass along something even newer if one was fortunate enough to have heard anything suitably salacious. One came to see who was with whom and, sometimes, who was not with whom.

One came, sometimes, to make a statement. Sometimes one made a statement even when one did not wish to do anything of the kind, when one wished, in fact, to do the absolute opposite.

Sometimes one could wish one’s female relatives in perdition.

“It is your first drive in the park?” he asked.

She had ridden on Rotten Row, of course, at least once, but that was a different matter entirely.

“Oh, yes,” she said. “Neither Tresham nor Rosalie would allow me to come here before I was out, and yesterday Rosalie insisted that I rest. I went to Hookham’s Library, though. Oh, I met Miss Goddard there, and we went to a tearoom together and talked for a whole hour. And the Marquess of Exwich called at Dudley House in the afternoon. He came to offer me marriage, the silly man. Oh, there is … what is his name? He was my third partner last evening. Sir Timothy Bixby, that is it. The lady with him danced once with Ferdinand. I cannot—How do you do?” She had raised her voice.

They stopped for a few moments to exchange pleasantries with Bixby and Miss Coleman.

Exwich, Edward thought. He must be fifty if he was a day. He had been married how many times? Two? Three? And he had how many children? Six? Eight? Eighteen? All girls, apparently.

“Did you accept?” he asked as they drove on.

She looked blankly at him for a moment and then smiled broadly.

“Lord Exwich?” she said. “Oh, no. He wears corsets.”

Which was, apparently, reason enough to refuse his marriage offer. And perhaps it was too.

She had taken tea with Eunice? He still had not called on her himself.

It took them an hour to make the circuit. Virtually everyone there, of course, had also been at Tresham’s ball, so everyone must be greeted and everyone’s health must be inquired after, and everyone must be reminded of what a beautiful day it was in case they had not noticed for themselves.

And everyone looked with open speculation from Edward to Lady Angeline and back again. Two men of his acquaintance actually winked at him.

“You must be ready to return home,” he said at last. “I will—”

“Oh, no.” She turned a dismayed face his way. “It cannot be time to leave already. We have seen scarcely anything of the park.”

Did she not know that one was not meant to? Hyde Park was vast. The fashionable oval was not.

“You would like to drive for a little longer?” he asked.

“Oh, yes, please,” she said. “But can we find a less crowded area?”

“But certainly,” he said, drawing his curricle free of the crowds and turning down a quiet avenue away from the park gates rather than toward them.

In full view of half the ton.

This was becoming a statement with full fanfare.

He might as well send out invitations to the first christening party.

She raised a parasol above her head—it was an apricot color to match her muslin dress—though what function it could possibly serve given the size of her bonnet he did not know.

“Lord Heyward,” she asked him, “are you being coerced into courting me?”

He turned his head to frown down at her.

“Coerced?” he said.

“I suppose it is the wrong word,” she said. “No one could coerce you into doing anything you did not wish to do. But are you being … persuaded, pressured into courting me?”

He had asked her a similar question two evenings ago and she had denied it. Now he understood why. Good Lord, it was not a question he wished to answer.

“You refer to my grandmother and my mother and sisters?” he said. “They are like female relatives everywhere, I suppose. They wish to see me happily settled. They wish to see the succession happily settled. They are eager to pick out all the most eligible young ladies for me, on the assumption that I am quite incapable of doing it for myself.”

“And I am an eligible young lady?” she asked.

“Of course,” he said. “Probably the most eligible.”

Two children were chasing after a ball on the wide lawn to one side of the path. A lady sat on the grass some distance away from them. Apart from them there was no one in sight.

“And if you had the choosing,” she said, “without any necessity of pleasing your relatives, would you choose someone ineligible? Or less eligible?”

Oh, Lord.

“Lady Angeline,” he said, “I consider this a quite inappropriate topic of conversation.”

She twirled her parasol and laughed.

“You would never choose anyone ineligible,” she said. “You are a very proper gentleman. You are devoted to doing your duty. You would never follow your heart rather than your head. You would never do anything impulsive. No one would ever find you up a tree while an angry bull prowled about the trunk below.”

“I am, yes, a dull dog,” he said, hearing with dismay the irritation in his voice. “It is time I took you home.”

“But it is not dull,” she said, “to be proper and dutiful and to act with considered judgment. It is not dull to be a gentleman. And must we go home? When everything about us is so lovely and I am having my first ever ride in a curricle and loving it? How do you like my bonnet?”

She lowered her parasol as he turned to look at it.

“It is one of the thirteen?” he asked.

“Number eight,” she said. “And actually it is fourteen. I counted them yesterday and there was one more than I remembered.”

“I thought,” he said, “that you bought each new bonnet because it was prettier than the one before. Why, then, are you wearing number eight instead of number fourteen?”

She grinned at him.

“I said it for something to say,” she said. “I often do that. I love all my bonnets—