Kasey Michaels (27 page)

Bramwell fought the feeling that he was a drowning man who’d just been thrown a handy rope. He remained silent for a few moments, contemplating the ticking clock on the mantel across the room, caught between knowing he’d been insulted in some way—he’d figure out the finer points of that later—and wanting to hop onto the windowsill and crow like a rooster. “I’ll send a notice to the papers tomorrow, Isadora. Due to your father’s continued ill health, our wedding must be postponed until the Little Season, as I know you still wish the ceremony to be here, in London. Will that suffice?”

“Oh, yes, Selbourne, yes!” Isadora exclaimed happily. “This way we can avoid more gossip, and have dear little Miss Winstead settled and gone from everyone’s memories. You’re so good, Selbourne, so kind. And so very understanding.”

“Yes, I am, aren’t I?” he said, then bent down, impulsively kissing Isadora straight on the mouth.

“Selbourne?” Isadora’s lovely blue eyes looked ready to pop out of her skull.

“Forgive me, my dear,” he said, straightening once more. “I found myself so impressed by your tact in the midst of your own concerns, so very touched by your worries for Miss Winstead, that I—well, I just thought I’d see if I could understand why my father put so much store in impulsive acts. Do you mind?”

“Mind? Lud, I don’t know. I never saw you in this light before, Selbourne,” Isadora said, rising to her own feet. “It’s, it’s—”

Bramwell couldn’t resist. “Impulsive, yet enjoyable? Different? Exciting? Perhaps even amusing?”

“No... it’s rather...
disconcerting
, actually,” Isadora informed him slowly, drawing out the words, and frowning as she examined her reaction. “And, as I’ve already said, I’ve never before seen you in this light, Selbourne. Or myself, for that matter,” she ended, looking at him as if she’d just realized that marriage meant becoming not only a duchess, but a bed partner as well. She swallowed hard, so that Bramwell could see the muscles in her throat working convulsively. “Shall we adjourn to the drawing room? I believe the others are probably already waiting for us.”

“Of course, Isadora,” Bramwell said, bowing to her and, with a sweep of his arm, indicating that she should precede him from the room. He smiled at her departing back, feeling very much in charity with his betrothed, but not having the faintest idea as to why, with Sad Samuel awaiting him upstairs, he was smiling as if he suddenly didn’t have a care in the world.

Sophie entered the drawing room a full ten minutes after the last gong had been rung, Giuseppe draped around her shoulders. Ignatius was already in residence near the fireplace, sitting on his perch, preening himself. Mrs. Farraday was in a far corner, nodding over her knitting. Lady Gwendolyn sat in her usual chair, a glass of wine in one hand, her other hand straying dangerously close, covetously close, to the small china rose on the table beside her.

The duke of Selbourne was propping up the mantel with his shoulder, a rather faraway expression in his eyes. Isadora Waverley, looking as usually beautiful but unusually pale this evening, was sitting on the edge of one of the couches, staring, openmouthed, as Sad Samuel Seaton showed her the bulb of garlic he had hung around his neck.

“Supposed to keep away head mucous, stuffiness, and the like,” Sad Samuel was saying. “And it has. Now, I fear, all my troubles are in my chest. But the plaster should take care of that, don’t you think, Miss Waverley?”

Isadora, always the lady, smiled as she brought a scented handkerchief to her nose and breathed deep.

Sophie also smiled, feeling wonderfully content, and more than a little excited at the prospect of a stunning success—and Bramwell’s defeat. The stage was set, as she had asked Bobbit to set it just before she dived into her yellow, watered-silk gown after an afternoon spent hunting down precisely the perfect answer to Sad Samuel Seaton’s unhappiness. The fact that part of that perfect answer had been so rude as to piddle on her new shoes was only of passing concern, and only to Desiree, the cleaning of the shoes being a part of her self-imposed “maidly” duties.

“Oh, forgive me, everybody,” she said as she sailed toward the center of the room. “Have I kept everyone waiting? Mr. Seaton, don’t you look just fine. How very good to see you again!” She dropped into a most graceful curtsy for someone who wore a living shawl, then looked at his right hand, which was wrapped in a cloth bandage. “Goodness! Whatever has happened? Have you cut yourself?”

As conversation starters go, Sophie had stumbled into the mother lode, as her inquiry set Samuel Seaton off on a near orgy of explanation, demonstration, and lamentation—ending with a wide sweep of his left arm that succeeded in knocking over two small portraits that stood on the table behind the couch. “My fault. I’ll get those!” he exclaimed, turning and climbing over the back of the couch before Bramwell could utter more than a desperate “Good God, Samuel,
no
!”

Twenty minutes later, the table righted, the new debris swept up, Sad Samuel’s additional wounds attended to, and as Isadora smiled gamely while holding a cold wet cloth to her abused cheek—Mr. Seaton’s knee having come into fleeting contact with her face as he’d catapulted over the back of the couch—it was decided that dinner could be delayed no longer.

More than an hour later, and with the cook being informed by a desperate duke that they could very nicely live without two of the planned courses—and, for God’s sake, no flaming desserts!—the small party was back in the drawing room.

Sophie looked around the room once more as Lady Gwendolyn struggled to find some topic of conversation that could not eventually be led back to either bodily functions or the imminent threat of plague to the unwary.

Deciding that she had found the perfect time to make a small announcement—a time when no one would be of a mind to delve too deeply into her account of what she was about to tell them—Sophie slapped her hands to her cheeks and gave out with a surprised, “Oh, dear, I forgot!” She called Giuseppe to her side, ordered him to lift his little red hat, and everyone watched as the monkey fished in it for a moment, coming up with Isadora’s garnet brooch.

“My brooch!” Isadora exclaimed, grabbing at the piece of jewelry, so that Giuseppe bared his teeth and screeched, then headed directly for the chair, the mantel and, lastly, the chandelier, the brooch still clutched in his paw. “I thought it was gone forever. Miss Winstead, wherever did you find it? And how will we ever get it back?”

Sophie stood beneath the chandelier and held out her arms, so that Giuseppe, after chattering a refusal or three, could hop safely down to her. “Much as I am ashamed to admit it, Miss Waverley,” she said as she returned the brooch, “Giuseppe is a thief. However, in this case, I believe the fastening on your brooch may be defective, so that you lost the piece somewhere in the house, and Giuseppe merely found it. In any case, I recognized it immediately when he brought it to me. You’re happy to have it back, yes?”

Isadora was ecstatic to have it back, yes. So ecstatic that she didn’t seem angry with Giuseppe, or the least bit prone to question Sophie’s story. Bramwell, however, was another matter, and Sophie shot him a quick look from beneath her lashes. He, in his turn, was looking at his aunt, who was busying herself in turning an emerald ring round and round her finger, a puzzled frown on her face.

“I lost something once,” Sad Samuel said as Isadora slipped the brooch into her reticule. “My coach.”

“Excuse me, Samuel,” Bramwell broke in. “I couldn’t have heard you correctly. Did you say you lost your
coach
?”

Sad Samuel nodded morosely. “I did do that, yes. Took it to Bath when I went there for the waters. Horrid, sulfury stuff, and did my phlegm no good, no good at all, in case any of you are thinking to try the waters for yourselves. Had to post home. I took a chill that first night, damp sheets at the posting inn most like. Never did find the coach. Or the horses. Strange, isn’t it?”

“I don’t know, Mr. Seaton,” Isadora said, always polite, even as she turned to look at Sophie helplessly. “Lud, I imagine such a thing could happen to anyone.”

Sophie did her best to ignore Bramwell’s strangled chuckle as she sucked in her bottom lip and nodded agreement with Sad Samuel’s assessment of the strangeness of having mislaid a coach and four. “And the coachie, Mr. Seaton?” she asked when she could trust her voice. “Did you ever find him?”

“Demned coachie!” Ignatius called out, definitely in Sir Tyler Shipley’s voice, so that Sophie had to hide a cringe at her silly mistake. “
Squawk
! Quick! My flask! Secrets to tell!
Squawk
!
Squawk
! Demned coachie! Secrets to sell! Quick, my flask!
Squawk
!”

“I know that voice!” Sad Samuel exclaimed, hopping to his feet, not without incident, as his quick action had caused a collision between his shin and the leg of the low table placed in front of the couch. He limped over to where Ignatius sat on his perch, obviously about to prompt the parrot into speaking again. “Selbourne, help me out. Who
is
that?”

Sophie swiftly stepped into the breech. “Oh, Mr. Seaton, Ignatius always prattles on like that. The voice you heard was that of my mother’s uncle. Uncle James. Do you really think you knew him? He was a seafaring man before he went into seclusion.” She sighed theatrically. “Poor, darling Uncle James. He contracted some strange tropical illness, in the South Seas, I believe. Last time we saw him, when he gave us Ignatius, his nose had just dropped off. Did you ever hear of such a thing?”

Sad Samuel scuttled back toward the couch so quickly he nearly came to grief, as he tripped over Mrs. Farraday’s knitting bag. “I—I must have been mistaken,” he gulped out, putting fingers to his wrist to monitor his pulse.

Bramwell walked past Sophie’s chair on his way to the drinks table and bent down to whisper in her ear. “Well, that made him happy, all right. Do you know any other parlor tricks, or are you willing to cede victory to me?”

Sophie merely smiled, snapping her fingers so that Giuseppe came to her, once more draping himself around her neck.

“Mr. Seaton?” she ventured after a few moments, once the man seemed to believe he might not be on the verge of expiring from fright. “You will forgive a little boldness and plain speech, I’m sure, as I am country-raised, and don’t hold much patience with pretense and pretty words meant merely to flatter.”

Bramwell, just passing behind her chair again, made a rather rude sound low in his throat.

“I realize you and I have only just recently met,” Sophie continued, undaunted, “but I was taken with you from the first moment.”

“You were?” Sad Samuel squeaked, his eyes going all round and shocked.

“Oh, yes, indeed, sir,” Sophie continued earnestly.

“Why?” Sad Samuel asked.

She smiled sweetly, her shrug, she believed, one of her best. “How can I say this? I suppose I was caught by... by an air of
sadness
about you, Mr. Seaton.”

“Yes,” he said, nodding in agreement. “I’ve not had an easy life, you know. Sickly, and all that. And then there’s this tendency I have to, well, to bump into things. You may have noticed? It’s my nerves, you understand. They’re easily overset. Why, I remember the time—”

“Exactly!” Sophie broke in as Bramwell took up a position directly behind her chair, probably the better to be able to whisper. “Aha! I’ve got you!” into her ear when she, as he supposed, failed miserably in her attempt to make Sad Samuel Seaton happy.

Foolish man. Did he think her a rank amateur?

“And yet, for all of your trials, Mr. Seaton,” she pressed on, “you are truly a most likable man. But, I fear, a lonely one as well. Being lonely is a terrible thing, and can quite easily lead to oversets of the nerves, even to a concentrated concern over one’s health, and even to a certain physical clumsiness, yes? So I thought, and I thought—you don’t mind that I thought and I thought, yes? Because I do so like it when those around me are happy.”

“She does, you know,” Lady Gwendolyn put in loudly from halfway across the room. She hadn’t come within ten feet of Sad Samuel the whole evening long, having already informed Sophie that she might be a charitable soul, but she’d be twigged if she’d turn herself into a martyr to Sad Samuel’s clumsy ways.

“Thank you, Aunt Gwendolyn,” Sophie said, biting at the inside of her cheek so as not to giggle aloud. Then she turned back to Sad Samuel. “As you can see, I hope, I am a fairly happy person. And do you know why?” She waited for him to shake his head in the negative, then said, “It’s because of Giuseppe. And Ignatius. My little animal friends. They have been
such
solace to me in my loneliness after my mother’s death. And they must be cared for, loved in return, so that it is impossible to be too sad or too concerned for oneself, not for long, yes? Aunt Gwendolyn? Will you please ask Desiree to come in now, and show Mr. Seaton what I’ve bought for him?”

“Of course, my dear,” Lady Gwendolyn said, already heading for the double doors that led to the hallway.

“What you’ve
bought
for me?” Sad Samuel said, swiveling in his seat, the better to watch the doorway.