Then Comes Seduction

him. He is said to be one of the best.”

“Not one of the best, young man,” Clarence said. “The very best.”

“Clarence is too modest, Miss Dubois,” Jasper said, “to tell you how good he is at fencing. I take it you are still as good at it as you used to be, Clarence?”

“Well-” Clarence said.

Jasper clapped a hand on his shoulder again.

“Now don’t be modest,” he said. He grinned about him. A large crowd was listening now, including-at some distance-a wide-eyed Katherine. “Remember the afternoon when you routed me in every single bout? And at the time you had only just started learning. I would say it was a good thing the rapiers were tipped or I would have looked like a fountain of blood. Sorry, ladies, that is not a pleasant image, is it?”

“Oh, do tell us about it, Lord Montford,” Miss Fletcher begged. “I love to watch two gentlemen fencing. There is no more manly sight.”

“I simply could not get past Clarence’s guard,” Jasper said. “Yet he could get past mine with ease every time. It was really quite lowering for me-but a grand display by Clarence. I daresay he was his fencing master’s star pupil.”

“Well,” Clarence said, “he did say I was the best he had ever had, but he had been teaching for only five years or so at that time. Perhaps later he discovered someone who was better.”

“I most certainly doubt it,” Jasper said with a sigh.

“Devil take it,” Merton said, exchanging a pointed look with Jasper, “if we had known Sir Clarence was coming, Monty, fencing could have been added as a sport for today. Is it too late?”

“I have no rapiers in the house,” Jasper said. “You do not have any with you by any chance, Clarence, do you?”

“I do not,” Clarence said, sounding rather as if he had almost swallowed his tongue. “Unfortunately,” he added.

“Very fortunately for me,” Jasper said with a laugh. “Of course, you were just as good with an oar.”

“One can hardly fence with oars, Jasper,” Clarence said, and looked about him, smiling at the laughter his words provoked.

“It would have to be something more creative than simple fencing,” Jasper said. “Not a jousting match with oars while standing in the boats-that would put too severe a strain on my lamentably poor sense of balance. Although having to keep one’s balance would add spice to such a jousting match, would it not? What is a little more solid than boats but not quite as solid as the ground?”

The head groom-the only person whom Jasper had taken into his confidence-spoke up on cue.

“There are these planks, my lord,” he said, pointing to them. “The ones we set across the mud pit so that we could get right over it to add more water. They are eight inches wide.”

“You are suggesting, Barker,” Jasper said, aghast, “that Sir Clarence and I stand on one of those planks each-over the mud-jousting with oars? When I am wearing a white shirt?”

“It is a mad-” Clarence began, equally aghast.

“And against a star fencer?” Jasper added.

“I will wager, Monty,” Merton said, looking very deliberately at him, “that you cannot win a bout but will be tipped ignominiously into the mud.”

“Now wait a minute,” Jasper said, holding up a hand. “This is foolish. I wish I had not said anything about Clarence’s fencing skills. Much as I find any wager hard to resist, this one-”

“I will wager against you too, Jasper,” Uncle Stanley said, looking at him with narrowed eyes.

And suddenly there was a chorus of voices, all urging this impromptu jousting bout between Lord Montford and Sir Clarence Forester. The two wrestlers who were returning from the lake ready for the final bout were almost forgotten.

Jasper held up a hand.

“Now wait a minute here,” he said again. “For very pride’s sake I will feel forced to take on the challenge and suffer a proper dunking in the mud for my pains. But perhaps Clarence is more sensible. Indeed, I am sure he is. And perhaps he does not allow pride to cloud his judgment as much as I do. Perhaps he will not mind if half the guests here believe he must have lost the skills he used to have. What do you say, Clarence? Do say no, old chap.”

“If any nephew of mine proves to be such a sniveling coward,” a thoroughly irritated voice said from the crowd, “I swear I will disown him.”

Seth Wrayburn!

“Uncle Seth!” Lady Forester said. “Can you not see what is happening here? Do you not see that Jasper is deliberately-”

“Silence, woman,” Wrayburn said. “Clarence? What is it to be?”

Clarence attempted nonchalance, but Jasper could see that the hands he clasped behind his back were trembling.

“If Jasper insists upon taking a mud bath and humiliating himself before all his houseguests and neighbors,” he said, “then there is nothing I can do to stop him, is there?”

“Clarence,” his mother wailed.

He threw her a drowning look, but she was powerless to save him.

Clarence had had his mother with him on the occasion of that ridiculous fencing match, when he was ten and Jasper was thirteen. Jasper, who had never had a fencing lesson in his life or ever even watched the sport, had lunged at him a number of times and would have speared his spine via his stomach each time if the rapiers had not been capped. But each time the hit was declared to be an illegal one. There were more rules in fencing, it had appeared, than there were stars in the sky. Clarence, in the meanwhile, had pranced about him like a damned flat-footed ballerina, and every time his waving rapier had whistled within a few inches of a contemptuous Jasper, his mother had declared it a hit and a wondrously skilled one at that-as well as being squarely within the rules, of course.

Everyone’s attention turned to the wrestling, which was a worthy final and lasted all of ten minutes before Lenny Manning tipped Willy Tufts over his shoulder and headfirst into the mud to score a three-to-two victory.

The crowd went wild, Katherine presented Lenny with the ten-guinea first prize, laughing as she held her skirts well clear of him while she did so, and Lenny tossed the coins to his sweetheart before dashing off to the lake to wash and into the boathouse to don dry clothes. He would be the hero of the village for weeks to come, Jasper did not doubt.

The tug-of-war was to have been next as a grand finale to the fete. But no one had forgotten the jousting bout, and Barker stepped forward as soon as Lenny had disappeared to set the two specially cut planks across the mud-there had been no need to add more water to the mud, of course, because water flowed there from the lake. A few other men helped him to position them a suitable distance apart and to make sure that their ends were set firmly into the ground on either side.

There was a swell of excited anticipation.

Jasper removed his coat and his boots. Katherine had come to stand in front of him. She was looking steadily at him.

“Hold my coat, if you will, my love,” he said. “It would be a pity to ruin it. I would not need to remove either it or my boots, of course, if I could only be confident of not landing in the mud. Clarence need feel no misgivings, alas, though he may want to be overcautious anyway. Those boots would never be the same, would they, if he went in.”

“If he removes them,” Merton said, “he will be telling us that he is not so confident after all and I might change my wager. But I think my money is safe.”

“I have every confidence in the world,” Clarence said, and the silly idiot walked to the edge of the mud hole dressed in all his Bond Street finery.

Barker was fetching two oars.

“Whoever can knock the other off the plank and into the mud is the winner, then?” Jasper asked of no one in