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      ‘What will you do?’ Hebe was still not reassured.

      ‘I am under orders from Mama to come up to town and embark upon a life of reckless dissipation.’ He twisted round to smile at Hebe. ‘I’d already taken rooms at Albany as a pied-à-terre, but they aren’t fitted out yet, which is why I had hoped you’d take me in.’

      ‘Dissipation? But why?’

      ‘She says he will soon hear all about it and order me back home to be lectured. At which point he will decide that the best thing for me is to rusticate on the estate for a while.’

      Hebe laughed. ‘How clever of your mama! Of course, if he thinks you don’t want to do it and would rather be in London, then helping with the estate will be just the thing to punish the prodigal, and after a few weeks he’ll be so used to it, and will enjoy having you there so much, that you will get exactly the result you want.’

      ‘Has it ever occurred to you that your mother is a better strategist than your father?’ Alex enquired.

      ‘Frequently. She always outflanks him and the poor man can never understand how she has done it.’ He shifted his position and one hand flattened a sheet of paper, which crackled. ‘Sorry, I appear to be crushing the letter you were reading.’

      ‘Oh, goodness!’ Hebe exclaimed, taking the crumpled pages. ‘I had quite forgotten in the excitement of Giles arriving. It is from Aunt Emily,’ she explained to the two men. ‘She sent a footman with it this morning, just after you had left, Alex. It is the most incredible thing. She says she is to send Joanna to stay with her great-aunt in Bath because she is in disgrace.’

      ‘I will go into the library.’ Giles started to get up. ‘You will want to discuss this in private.’

      ‘No, stay, please. You are one of the family, Giles, and besides, you are staying here and will have to know what is going on.’ She started to re-read. ‘And it is not as though it is anything actually, er, indelicate.’

      ‘What, not an elopement with the apothecary or the unfortunate results of an amorous encounter with the footman?’ Alex enquired, earning a look of burning reproach from his wife.

      ‘I still think I had better leave,’ Giles persisted. ‘I can go to an hotel until my rooms are ready at Albany. Your aunt will want to call and discuss the problem, that is obvious, and she will not feel at ease if she knows I am staying here.’

      ‘Nonsense, Giles. We need you to help us get to the bottom of this puzzle. Aunt Emily says it all began at the Duchess of Bridlington’s ball. Joanna got drunk on champagne, flirted outrageously and then went on to commit just about every act in the list of things she could do to be labelled fast. And, to cap it all, she is wilfully refusing an offer from a highly eligible nobleman—discreetly unnamed.’

      ‘Joanna? Drunk on champagne?’ Alex looked incredulous. ‘That girl is a pattern-book of respectability and correct behaviour.’

      ‘The Duchess of Bridlington’s ball?’ Giles sat down again. ‘Oh, lord.’ His friends looked at him incredulously. ‘Don’t look at me like that! I haven’t been seducing the girl! But I think I may have started her off on the wine—’ He broke off, his eyes unfocussed, looking back into the past. ‘You know, she had had a bad shock of some kind: that’s why I gave her a couple of glasses of champagne.’

      He had forgotten about his encounters with Joanna in the face of his estrangement with his father, but, looking back in the light of Mrs Fulgrave’s letter, things began to make sense. ‘At the ball I found her sitting outside one of the retiring rooms looking shocked,’ he began.

      ‘You mean someone might have said something risqué or unkind to her?’ Hebe ventured.

      ‘No, not that kind of shock.’ He remembered the blank look in those wide hazel eyes and suddenly realised what it reminded him of. ‘Alex, you know the effect their first battle had on some of the very young, very idealistic officers who came out to the Peninsula without any experience? The ones who thought that war was all glory and chivalry, bugles blowing and flags flying?’

      ‘And found it was blood and mud and slaughter. Men dying in something that resembled a butcher’s shambles, chaos and noise—’ Alex broke off and Hebe could see they were both somewhere else, somewhere she could never follow. ‘Yes, I remember. What are you saying?’

      ‘Joanna had the same look in her eyes as those lads had after their first battle, as though an ideal had disintegrated before her and her world was in ruins. She was white, her hands were shaking. I asked her what was wrong, but she would not tell me. I assumed it was a man. We talked of neutral subjects for a while. After two glasses of champagne she was well enough to waltz, which helped, I think. Movement often does in cases of shock—’ He broke off, remembering the supple, yielding figure in his arms, those wide hazel eyes that seemed to look trustingly into his soul, his instinct to find and hurt the man who had so obviously hurt her.

      They discussed the matter a little more, speculating on the spurned suitor to no purpose and, after a while, left Hebe to rest.

      Giles went up to his usual room. While Alex’s valet unpacked for him he paced restlessly, fighting the urge to drive straight back home to see how his father was. To distract himself from his cantankerous parent, he thought about Joanna Fulgrave. To his surprise he found he was dwelling pleasurably on the memory. He frowned, trying to convince himself that he was merely intrigued by what had turned a previously biddable débutante into a fast young lady. But there was more than that, something that lay behind the desperate hurt in those lovely eyes, something which seemed to speak directly to him.

      He shifted in the comfortable wing chair where he had finally come to rest. His body was responding to thoughts of Miss Fulgrave in a quite inappropriate way.

      It was two months since he had parted from his Portuguese mistress. There were, of course, the ladies of negotiable virtue who flourished in town. They had not featured on his mother’s list of dissipated activities that she had suggested to him. ‘Cards, dearest, drink—I know you have a hard head for both, so they are safe. Be seen in all the most notorious places. Perhaps buy a racehorse? Flirt, of course, but no young débutantes, that goes without saying… Do you know any fast matrons?’

      ‘Only you, Mama,’ he had retorted, smiling into her amused grey eyes.

      After an hour, Hebe, thoroughly bored with resting, summoned both men back to her salon, announcing that she had not the slightest idea what she could do to assist her aunt.

      ‘Send Giles to listen sympathetically,’ Alex was suggesting idly when there was the sound of the knocker. ‘Who can that be?’

      Starling appeared in the doorway. ‘Mrs Fulgrave, my lady.’ He flattened himself against the door frame as Emily Fulgrave almost ran into the room, ‘Oh, Hebe, my dear, Alex… Oh!’ Both her niece and the Earl regarded her with consternation from the chaise where Alex was sitting beside Hebe who, he had insisted, was to stay lying down for at least another hour. Mrs Fulgrave burst into tears.

      It took quite five minutes and a dose of sal volatile before she could command herself again. Giles, his escape cut off by a flurry of hastily summoned maid-servants and general feminine bustle, retreated to the far side of the room, hoping that his presence would not be marked. Hysterical matrons, he felt, were even less his style than fast ones.

      Finally Hebe managed to ask what was wrong. Her aunt regarded her СКАЧАТЬ