‘So, Georgie, had your eye out for any aspiring wives for us?’
George raised one brow and stared St Audley down as he took a seat beside her.
‘You should know, Dauntry,’ the viscount continued, ‘that George here picks out all our wives. Or at least is called upon to give tacit approval before we’re allowed to publish the banns.’
‘Audley.’ She gave her friend a stern, meaningful look, eager to defuse whatever confrontation he had in mind. ‘I’m not such a managing female as all that. You’re thinking of Lady Morpeth. She’s always swanning about with some little dab of a girl under her wing.’
George took another bite of the excellent meat pie that had been served up by the Turk’s Head and shook her head at her friend while she chewed and swallowed. Honestly. What was going on with Audley? He’d been shadowing her all day, and the hostility, cloaked in patently false friendliness, which was directed at Dauntry surprised her. She’d never seen the viscount behave like this. He’d even stood outside the door of the room the landlord had provided so she could wash her face. Clearly on guard.
‘I tell one man that the chit he’s just been dancing with is dumber than his spaniel, and I’m a managing matchmaker. Need I remind you that he did ask me what I thought of her? Just you wait,’ she added darkly. ‘When you fasten your attention on some hapless female, you’ll be panting after me to tell you all about her. You know that women know all sorts of things about each other that you could never hope to hear about. Just as you all know things about men that women never hear about.’
‘What sorts of things?’ Dauntry asked, his voice low, intent. George glanced over at him, a little flutter of awareness causing her stomach to turn over. She inhaled sharply and ignored it, even as her lips tingled with the memory of his.
Once. She repeated the word over and over in her head like a charm. Never more than once. And perhaps even that was too much a risk here.
‘Like that poor Mortley is in the basket again,’ she said, ‘though he’s trying to keep it quiet. Hoping the Peabody chit will come up to scratch before she gets wind of it. Or that Lawkes has had yet another chère amie decamp, leaving him with a scathing note attached, one hears, to a bawling brat. I think that makes three—brats, I mean—’
She was interrupted by Audley’s roar of laughter.
‘Where do you get your information?’ the viscount demanded. ‘And I think Dauntry was really fishing for you to let us in on some of the secrets of your sex.’
‘Oh…’ George smiled, trying to decide which bits of gossip to share. ‘You mean like that for all her prim and saintly ways, Miss Lydia Cross was caught in a compromising position with stupid but determined Ned Heath. Or that the notorious Mrs Sheldon is taking an extended trip abroad, not because she’s desolated by her husband’s death, but because she’s pregnant by her footman. Or Lord Jonathan Smythe, or the Prince of Wales. Which one is anyone’s guess.’
‘Unfair, I say,’ the Earl of Morpeth began as he wandered back from the tap, a fresh mug of home brew in his hand.
‘Unfair?’ George cocked her head, amused. ‘Unfair that I’m giving up my own sex, or that I’m doing so without you present?’
‘Both, quite frankly,’ the earl answered. ‘It’s unseemly for you to reveal the feminine mysteries to such unworthy persons as these,’ he added with mock severity, waving his hand at the younger men, flicking Brimstone with a bit of foam as he did so. Gabriel wiped his cheek with this sleeve and reached for his own glass menacingly.
George wrinkled her nose up at the earl, who tut-tutted in what George recognized as a fair imitation of his lady wife. He swallowed his pint in a single gulp, shoved his hat on, crushing the elegant arrangement of curls that made up his wig, and held out one hand imperiously.
‘If you’re finished enlightening the infantry, we should be on our way.’ He cocked his head towards the window. ‘It looks like rain.’
Back outside, George couldn’t but agree. Dark clouds were roiling on the horizon, coming on fast like the ranks of an approaching army. They even had their own drum and fife. A flash illuminated the sky in the far distance. Thunder rumbled. Away in the barn a dog barked, shrill and slightly hysterical.
In moments, everyone was mounted and cantering back towards the Court. Wind battered them, ripping hats from their heads, whipping George’s hair into a tangled mass of knots. Occasional spatters of rain accosted them, enough to make the road dangerous, to numb fingers and toes, to occasionally penetrate the bower of the arching oaks which lined the three-mile drive to the house. As they rode beneath the trees, man and beast’s breath fogging with each exhalation, George began to feel larger and more frequent drops.
Lightning crackled overhead, illuminating the cloud-induced gloom in a startling flash. A thunderclap exploded overhead. Behind her someone else’s horse whinnied in protest. George flexed her frozen hands and blew the sodden feather that adorned her hat out of her eyes.
Dauntry was close on her right, spattered in mud, his coat already discoloured at the shoulders, red turning the deeper colour of dried blood as the rain soaked slowly downward.
As they clattered into the open stable yard, the heavens opened in an icy deluge. She shook her head, throwing wet hair back, her teeth beginning to chatter as the heavy rain soaked her to the skin. The yard was awash in running grooms, their shouts mingling with the sharp ring of metal shoes on stone and the deafening boom of thunder that George could feel vibrate through her whole body.
A groom took
