Regency: Courtship And Candlelight. Deborah Simmons

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СКАЧАТЬ Kate told her crossly, wishing even her nearest and dearest would stop falling back on the ridiculous cliché that redheads always had temperaments to match their fiery colouring.

      ‘Having watched you grow from a babe in arms into an intelligent, beautiful and often exasperating young woman, Katherine Alstone, I do believe I know your true nature far better than you do yourself,’ Eiliane said slowly, as if she’d just discovered the key to a conundrum that had long been puzzling her.

      ‘Then you’ll also know how much I don’t want to be engulfed by a grand passion, or become pale and interesting as I pine uselessly for a man who might well pass me by without a second glance,’ Kate defended herself uncomfortably.

      ‘I suppose we might find a gentleman who’s either too preoccupied with another woman, or too blind or daft to be knocked all of a heap by your youth, beauty and usually shining intelligence and wit, if we searched the whole kingdom for him diligently enough, my love, but very few men will ever pass you by without a glance, I can assure you,’ Eiliane said with a knowing smile. ‘And love won’t kill you, you know, Kate. I’ve endured it twice now and found it quite breathtakingly wonderful both times. Indeed, I consider myself exceptionally blessed to find it twice, even if I am rather a superannuated wife for poor Pemberley to lay claim to.’

      ‘Nonsense, he was lucky indeed to win you and well he knows it,’ Kate responded hotly, ready to argue black was white in order to see someone she loved as much as Eiliane happy again. ‘It’s just that I can’t bear the idea of depending on someone else for my happiness, Eiliane, not that I don’t believe in the possibility of love for anyone else.’

      ‘Which is ridiculous if you’ll only think about it a little harder, Kate. Indeed, it’s totally illogical if we’re going to go about this in the cool way you seem to favour.’

      ‘I know, but I can’t seem to change my mind, even with so many examples of wedded bliss in front of me to form a corrective,’ she told Eiliane ruefully.

      ‘I blame myself,’ her friend replied gloomily, ‘I should have insisted on wrenching the two of you from your grandfather’s custody as soon as your sister Miranda turned up on my doorstep one morning with such woe and misery in her poor sad eyes that I knew he wasn’t fit to look after a couple of kittens, let alone three vulnerable and lively young girls.’

      ‘Don’t do that to yourself, love, for none of it was your fault and how could you have removed us from Wychwood without kidnapping us? Once someone eventually noticed we were gone there would have been a fearsome uproar and my aunt would have insisted we return to even less freedom than we had to start with. Don’t ever blame yourself for any of what happened when we were children, dearest Eiliane. And if not for you, we would never have been sent to school, so just think what we would have missed in dear Charlotte Wells, as we all thought she was then.’

      ‘Aye, that’s true, Charlotte is a darling girl and exactly the right wife for my new son, for all Ben wouldn’t thank me for naming him so, since he’s far too big and self-sufficient to stand in the least need of even an unofficial stepmother, but Charlotte couldn’t make up for the neglect of your entire family, Kate. You have such a vast capacity for love, my dear, it seems an appalling waste that it might be lost or misplaced in some insipid and bloodless marriage when you could have so much more if you let yourself believe you could safely fall in love.’

      If all three Alstone sisters had been born plain as porridge and wall-eyed, they’d still be beautiful to the Marchioness of Pemberley, and only the finest gentlemen in the land good enough for any one of them, Kate thought, affection overcoming exasperation as she acknowledged to herself how lucky they all were to have her. Eiliane was wrong, though, and if Kate wasn’t to die an old maid, then she’d have to find a man she could respect in order to have the children she longed for, and what point was there in regretting what might have been?

       Chapter Two

      Her bridges could fairly be considered irrevocably burnt so far as Edmund, Viscount Shuttleworth, was concerned and Kate would have to look elsewhere for a convenient husband. Which was just as well, she reassured herself, considering she’d always sensed a huge capacity for passion and melodrama in herself and curbed it as sternly as she could, lest it lead her into some terrible tangle of love and fury and wanting that would damage all concerned beyond mending.

      ‘I intend to make a list and, when I’m sure my choice of husband is quite suitable, I’ll just have to find some way of making sure that gentleman agrees with me,’ she asserted stalwartly, not quite able to meet Eiliane’s eyes as her scheme sounded cold and rather depressing even to her when she said it out loud.

      ‘Why wait?’ Eiliane prompted sardonically, obviously at the end of her patience with such an implacably self-deluded idiot. ‘If you’re so very determined to go against your very nature, and God help the poor man you settle upon if you are, then why not begin straight away? Tonight’s entertainment should make an ideal opportunity for you to start such a search—considering that most of the débutantes haven’t yet arrived and those who have are still too overawed to offer you much competition. Why, you will almost have the field to yourself, my dear, apart from all the other not-so-young ladies who’ve been out too long and are desperate to catch a suitable husband, of course.’

      ‘I’m only one and twenty,’ Kate protested feebly, unable to keep a still tongue in her head in the face of what she knew perfectly well was deliberate provocation.

      Eiliane gave an airy wave of her exquisite fan. ‘No longer a sparkling young débutante, nor yet quite a faded quiz at her last prayers. How some of those vibrant young girls just out of their schoolrooms will pity you,’ she went on relentlessly, seeming determined to provoke Kate into an argument that would disprove her claim to be chilly and passionless. ‘To be so sought after initially, then left unwed three years on argues either that you’re ridiculously finicky and far too high in the instep, or that the gentlemen have stopped asking you.’

      ‘Then why do they still do so in such numbers, I wonder?’ Kate defended herself absently, her eyes once again on Lord Shuttleworth as he seemed almost as if he’d felt her gaze on him and decided to allow her a closer look.

      ‘Because the unattainable is always so very alluring,’ Lady Pemberley replied, a little too seriously for Kate’s taste, ‘and I don’t want you to become a target for the less scrupulous rakes of the ton, my love. Better if only you’d accepted Shuttleworth years ago rather than take that primrose path to misery, I suppose. At least marriage to him would put the predators off until you presented him with a couple of heirs. Not that he’d make anyone a complacent husband,’ she ended with a warning nod at the fascinating masculine figure they’d both been watching.

      ‘Please don’t turn all intense and Celtic on me just now, Eiliane dear,’ Kate said absently, most of her attention on the nobleman forging a path towards them. She wondered fleetingly if he still felt more for her than he’d have her and the rest of the world believe—which only went to show what happened when she listened to her friend’s ridiculous ideas about love.

      ‘No, my love,’ Lady Pemberley replied meekly and Kate shot her a rueful, exasperated glance, before going back to surreptitiously watching his lordship.

      If only Shuttleworth had still been inclined to fall at her feet and beg her to marry him, they could be wed by the end of the Season and then nobody would be able to lecture her on the subject of love matches ever again. Except this older, grimmer Edmund Worth looked very unlikely to agree to an affectionate alliance with her, based as it would have to be on mutual interests and polite friendship instead of the flash and burn of love he’d once promised her. It seemed impossible СКАЧАТЬ