Lady Louisa's Christmas Knight (3 page)

Eve's gaze traveled across the ballroom, to where Sir Joseph was in conversation with the plump, pale Lady Horton. The woman's two eldest daughters flanked him—penned him in like a pair of curious heifers would corner a new bull calf.

“I like a man who isn't silly,” Eve said. “I like a man who will be able to provide for me and mine; I like that he's a papa—though he'll want sons to pass along all that wealth to—and a pair of broad shoulders on a fellow doesn't exactly offend, either.”

Jenny's blond brows rose. “From you, Eve, that's a ringing endorsement. Were he not a mere knight, I'd be passing your notice along to Mama.”

“It doesn't matter that he's a mere knight,” Eve said, though her rebuke was mild. “Is the libation any good?”

Louisa wrinkled her nose. “Too sweet. Some people must use the holidays to inform all and sundry of their wealth.”

“You're cross tonight,” Jenny said. “I know something to cheer you up.”

Eve's lips quirked, and the look that passed between Louisa's sisters was conspiratorial and mischievous. Eve and Jenny shared more than blond beauty, though Jenny was willowy and Eve was a smaller, curvier package. Louisa's remaining unmarried sisters both had a sort of gentleness to them, a warmth of spirit toward all in their ambit that Louisa lacked.

And envied, truth be known.

“I can use cheering up,” Louisa said, picking up the thread of the conversion. “My evening starts out promenading with Sir Joseph, and my dance card is empty thereafter. Sindal will no doubt take pity on me, but he fairly heaves one off the dance floor in an effort to return to dear Sophie's side.”

“Deene would dance with us were he not in mourning,” Eve observed.

“But he
is
in mourning.” Which was a shame. The Marquis of Deene was tall enough, a fine-looking fellow, and more family friend than anything else, which meant for Louisa's purposes he was safe.

“Lord Lionel Honiton is not in mourning,” Jenny said, “and he's just now coming down the steps.”

Hence the knowing sororal glances. Louisa did not look up as she set aside her glass of too-sweet, lukewarm wine punch. “He declined to ride today. I wasn't sure he was coming.”

Nor had she missed him, though that hardly need be said.

“Too busy choosing his attire for the evening,” Eve replied. “I swear he outshines the ladies.”

Lord Lionel was all golden good looks, with brown eyes that put Louisa in mind of Her Grace's spaniel. When Louisa glanced over Eve's shoulder to take in his lordship's progress down the stairs, she saw he had as usual troubled over his turnout.

A handsome man who knew how to wear lace was a beautiful creature, regardless of his other attributes. Lionel sported just a touch here and there—his throat, his cuffs—but it was golden blond lace, which complemented his fair coloring and his blue-and-gold ensemble marvelously. His cravat pin would be something perfect—sapphire or topaz set in gold, perhaps—and the sleeve buttons at his cuffs would match it.

“Louisa's saving her supper waltz for Lord Lace,” Eve murmured. “I declare that man wears more gold for a hunt ball than I have in my entire jewelry case.”

“He maintains standards,” Louisa said. Town standards, even Carlton House standards—assuming the jewelry was real, which Louisa doubted. “And he dances well enough.”

Louisa knew of what she spoke, for she'd had the pleasure more than once. When one danced with Lord Lionel, there was a sense of the entire room pausing to watch. That he seemed to know it was only to be expected.

She considered that he chose her as a dance partner because she was, first and foremost, of suitable rank—a duke's daughter could dance with a marquis's son—and because her dark coloring set off his golden male beauty. Then too, she was a good dancer.

“He's coming this way,” Jenny said, peering into her still-full glass. “I'd say he's about to speak for your supper waltz, Lou, and before he's done much more than greet the hostess.”

“Good evening, my ladies.”

Louisa stifled a groan of relief at the growled salutation. “Sir Joseph, good evening.” Her sisters offered their curtsies, and Jenny—bless her—launched into the civilities.

“Marvelously mild weather today for the holiday hunt, wasn't it?”

Sir Joseph, severely resplendent in dark formal attire, appeared to consider Jenny. “One wonders if Reynard shares that opinion. He probably starts praying for nasty winter weather no later than April of each year.”

“In spring,” Louisa said, “he and his vixen are likely concerned with family matters.”

Sir Joseph's lips twitched while Eve and Jenny both managed to look pained. Family matters—
what
had she implied? Louisa stared at the cinnamon bits floating on her awful drink.

“Perhaps he is,” Sir Joseph said. “Perhaps he thinks of going up to Town early so he might confer with his tailors before the Season advances. Rather than discuss the sartorial habits of the fox, Lady Louisa, might I remind you that you've promised me your promenade? The orchestra is tuning up, though I shall certainly understand if today's exertions left you too fatigued to allow me the privilege.”

He was giving her a way to decline their dance. Behind Jenny, Lord Lionel had paused in his progress across the room to speak with Isobel Horton. The girl had refined the simper to an art and was clinging to his arm like a barnacle. He gave Isobel his undivided attention, those brown eyes of his turned on the woman as if she were the light of his existence.

What would it take to inspire Sir Joseph to look at a woman like that?

“Louisa rarely passes by an opportunity to stand up,” Jenny said. There was an urgent note in her voice, as if Louisa had missed a conversational cue.

“Jenny's right.” Louisa shifted her gaze from Lord Lionel's peacock splendor to Sir Joseph's sober face. “The more I'm on my feet, the less I'm left trying to make small talk, which as you've no doubt surmised, is not one of my gifts.”

“Nor mine.” He winged his elbow at her. That's all. As overtures went, it had a certain compelling simplicity.

While Lord Lionel scribbled on Isobel Horton's dance card, Louisa took Sir Joseph's arm. She assumed her place at his side among the other couples preparing to stroll their way through the opening of the evening, and was assailed by a troubling thought: Was Sir Joseph partnering her because he thought
she
was in need of rescuing? Was this charity on his part?

The possibility was not as lowering as it should have been. Louisa instead found it… intriguing.

She could not marry, not while the threat of scandal hung over her like a blighted sprig of mistletoe, but she ought to be allowed to stroll the perimeter of a ballroom on the arm of a handsome man, shouldn't she?

“I can recite poetry to you,” Sir Joseph said when Louisa had walked with him halfway down one side of the room. “Poetry would preserve us from silence and yet require no thought on anybody's part.”

Poetry?
Louisa's heart tripped. “Are you teasing me?”

“Oh, perhaps. You could nod occasionally or beat me on the arm with your fan, and no one would know we're ducking the obligation to converse. I have a friend who's partial to the Shakespeare sonnets.” He paused while Louisa cast around for something—anything—to say, but he spared her by launching into a quiet, almost contemplative recitation: “‘That time of year thou mayst in me behold, when yellow leaves, or none, or few do hang on boughs which shake against the cold…'”

Across the room, Isobel Horton smacked Lord Lionel's arm with her closed fan.

Louisa
adored
that sonnet, which Sir Joseph had begun with just the right balance of regret and warmth. “Why don't you instead tell me why you're hunting a spouse, Sir Joseph?”

He grimaced. Her question was graceless, but there was no calling it back. “Hunting? Striding about in my gaiters, my blunderbuss primed and ready to take down some unsuspecting little dove in midflight? I suppose the image is not inaccurate. I require a wife for two reasons.”

He
required
a wife. Women longed for a husband, they dreamed of children to love. They were not permitted to
require
a husband. Brave he might be, and possessed of marvelous taste in poems, but Louisa wanted to smack Sir Joseph, and not with her fan.

“Two reasons. Please explicate.”

They were forced to a halt by the couple before them, who appeared too busy flirting to manage even forward steps in time to the music.

“First, I am responsible for two girl children, and the influence of an adult female in the maternal role is desirable on their behalves.”

In the part of her brain that reveled in language, that regarded every spoken sentence as aural architecture, Louisa noticed that Sir Joseph managed to allude to being a parent without acknowledging any relationship. He did not say, “My daughters need a mother,” nor did he say, “I am in want of a wife to mother my children.”

He fashioned a job description, though an accurate one under the circumstances.

“The second reason?”

He glanced around. He waited until the lovebirds ahead were moving along, proceeding as a three-legged unit, heads bent so close as to ensure talk. Louisa wanted to smack them, as well, perhaps with the butt end of Sir Joseph's blunderbuss.

“There is a title.”

She forgot the lovebirds and nearly forgot Lord Lionel halfway across the room, suffering the press of Miss Horton's udder against his arm.

“I beg your pardon?”

“There is a title.” He sounded weary as he spoke, his voice barely above a whisper. “The barony has been in abeyance for more than two hundred years, and God willing, it will remain in abeyance.”

Abeyance. Abeyance could keep a title dangling just out of reach on a family tree for centuries. Abeyance befell the old baronies, when the holder of the title left only female descendants, who increased and multiplied and were fruitful, making it impossible to choose to whom the title ought to descend, because various heirs had equal claim on it.

“You do not sound pleased about this.” He sounded horrified, in fact.

“I am in fervent hopes a fourth cousin, Sixtus's descendant of the same name, the only other contender, will shortly be in expectation of a happy event with his young wife. Each year, I await his Christmas correspondence, hoping a new little cousin of the male persuasion will have arrived in the preceding year.”

“You don't want a title?”

They stopped perilously close to a dangling spray of mistletoe, and he… shuddered. The broad-shouldered, plainspoken man who'd been knighted for bravery shuddered. “Consider, Lady Louisa, that our regent is nigh profligate handing out titles. What if he took a notion to elevate the title above a barony? What if he recalled that my knighthood was earned in combat? What if his great capacity for sentiment should affect his generous heart, and… a knighthood is bad enough. A barony would be nigh intolerable, and anything worse than that enough to send a sane man to Bedlam.”

Perhaps Sir Joseph's courage was not limitless. Louisa's certainly wasn't. “You would be Lord Somebody, Sir Joseph. You'd sit in the Lords, you'd have your pick of the debutantes.”

She managed to stop herself from pointing out that even his hog farming would be overlooked. Farming was not trade; it was solidly agricultural. Bacon, ham, lard, and leather being necessities, every title in the land probably raised some swine.

Louisa also did not ask the man what he thought of dukes—or dukes' daughters—if baronies were nigh intolerable. “You must marry in part because of this title.”

Sir Joseph huffed out a sigh then moved them away from the Mistletoe of Damocles. “I did not say I
must
marry. I am not averse to the notion because of the girls, and then there is this remote, distant, though not quite theoretical business of a title. Titles come with responsibilities, and my cousin is not young.”

A duke's daughter grasped his point: he'd need an heir. A title should not languish for two hundred years in abeyance, only to fall into the Crown's greedy clutches through escheat immediately thereafter.

“Perhaps this year, your cousin's union will be fruitful.”

“One offers prayers to that effect, though this is his third union.”

The couple before them was whispering, heads bent so close the young man might have stolen a kiss with less impropriety.

“Sir Joseph, I find I'm thirsty. Would you be offended if we abandoned the promenade and sought some refreshment?”

He said nothing. He fairly yanked her out of the line of other couples and headed for the table where more poor quality, not-quite-warm, gaggingly sweet wine awaited them both. She went along with him and pretended to sip her drink, though the evening stretched before her as an interminable exercise in appeasing seasonal social obligations and evading strategically hung boughs of mistletoe.

Meanwhile, across the room, Miss Horton pressed, Lord Lionel laughed, and the orchestra played on.

***

“The secret to a short and successful courtship is to pick a desperate woman.”

Lord Lionel Honiton's cronies laughed predictably at this sally from one among their number. Lionel took a sip of good brandy—Petersham was hosting, and he was still too new to Town to understand that those who drank his brandy and fondled his housemaids were not necessarily his friends.

“You miss the mark,” Lionel drawled to the wit lounging in a cushioned chair near the hearth. “A desperate girl is the secret to a short courtship ending in marriage, I'll grant you, but better still if
her
parents
are desperate, in which case the settlements will see the thing done
successfully
.”

A round of right-hos, hear-hears, and what-whats followed, along with another circulation of the brandy decanter.

“And then”—the wit held up his glass as if to toast—“there's the wedding night.”

More hooting and stomping, because the hour was growing late, and the decanter was seeing a great deal of action. These same fellows would cheerfully call one another out over a slur to a woman's honor before dinner. Four hours later, they were degenerating into the overgrown schoolboys they were, ready to hump anything in skirts and to cheer one another on in the same cause.

While the assemblage began to debate just how many Seasons it took to create desperation in a decent young woman, much less in her parents, Lord Lionel topped up his glass.

“You'll regret that in the morning,” said a voice to his right.

Lionel held the glass in both palms, letting the heat of his hands warm the liquid. “I will do no such thing. You are far too sober, Harrison, if you think I'll even be abroad during anything approaching morning.”

Harrison was visually appealing, lounging against the mantel, a lean, dark contrast to Lionel's own Nordic coloring. He was also serious to a fault, which allowed Lionel to appear the wit by contrast. All in all, a useful association—for Lionel.

“You'll be abroad in daylight.” Harrison's tone was mocking, condescending even.

“Perhaps I'll be making my way home in the morning, as the term technically applies past the witching hour, but as for the broad light of day”—Lionel paused for another sip—“heaven spare me.”

“You'll be about because Lady Carstairs's Christmas breakfast is tomorrow, and very likely, all three Windham sisters will be on hand. You've been currying the favor of that trio all year.”

“Have I?” Lionel yawned, scratched in the general area of his… upper thighs, and peered at his drink. “Three of them, you say?”

Harrison's dark eyes narrowed.

Elijah Harrison was a hanger-on. He painted portraits, which meant he wasn't even a gentleman, though he was somebody or other's heir, so he was titled and tolerated. Then too, the Regent fancied himself quite the patron of the arts, and Harrison enjoyed a certain cachet with the Carlton House set.

“Moreland has three unmarried daughters,” Harrison said. “All pretty, all well dowered, and you're just trying to decide which one will be the least work.”

If Harrison's tone had been accusatory, Lionel might have been alarmed, but Harrison spoke as if merely stating facts, and boring facts at that.

Boring,
accurate
facts.

“You're trying to decide which one is vain enough to insist on having her portrait painted,” Lionel replied. “Or you might be thinking of approaching His Grace about doing all three, as it were.”

He let the innuendo hang delicately above his spoken words.

“I have never found it attractive in a man to pursue a woman publicly, while privately maligning her. Smacks of… desperation.” Harrison eyed the glass in Lionel's hand. “Desperation and dishonor. I bid you good night, my lord.”

He wafted off, all elegant good looks and sly innuendo, making Lionel long to lift a foot and plant it in the encroaching bastard's backside. He resisted this urge not because Harrison was right—Lionel
was
growing desperate and had seldom regarded honor as more than a convenient disguise for bad motives—but he was also intent on having some fun with one of Petersham's plump, giggling upstairs maids. A public row with a nobody of a painter would queer the chances of that altogether.

***

Sir Joseph dawdled for two days. In those two days, he visited regularly with Lady Opie, scribbled off several notes to his London house steward, rode out with his land steward, called on his tenants—again—and otherwise put off a journey he did not want to make.

But had to. His peculiar discussion with Louisa Windham had stuck in Joseph's mind like the proverbial burr under his saddle. Until he'd spoken the words aloud to her—he required a wife—the need hadn't been exactly pressing, though it had been nagging. Now, like a sore tooth, it seemed never to leave his awareness.

“When will you be back?”

Amanda, scrambling around on his lap, made the last word into a whine of at least five syllables. “Baa-aaa-aaa-aaa-cck?”

“Yes, Papa.” Fleur clutched his riding jacket in grubby little mitts and started scaling his left knee. “
When
will you be back?”

“I do not recall inviting either of you to roost upon my person.” Though there they were, each plunked down on her territory of choice, and each smelling of soap, lavender, and something else—mischief perhaps.

“You always go away,” Amanda opined. “But if you didn't go away, you'd never come see us at all anymore.”

Fleur chimed right in with the chorus. “You
used
to tuck us in.”

“You used to be infants. Quiet little things who neither slid down banisters nor begged a man for ponies the livelong day.”

Amanda turned big brown eyes on him. “You could bring us ponies for Christmas. We've been ever so good.”

“We have,” Fleur concurred. “Nurse hasn't needed her salts since Monday!”

“Allow me to point out that it's Tuesday morning.” Joseph gently stopped Fleur from putting her thumb in her mouth. “Don't get your hopes up that I'll bring you ponies for Christmas. You're both too young, and winter is no time to learn to ride.”

Fleur's chin jutted in an unbecoming manner. “If we were boys, we'd have ponies by now.”

Amanda nodded vigorously, dark curls bouncing. “Fleur is right. If we were boys, you'd listen to our lessons.”

“If you were boys, you could inherit a damned title.”

The words were out, muttered, but far too inappropriate for tender ears to have missed a single syllable.

“Papa said
damn
.” Fleur slapped her hand over her mouth as if to hold back her giggles. “
Damn
is a bad word. We're not supposed to say
damn
, or
damn
it, or God
damn
it to hell, or—”

“Cease.” Joseph wrapped an arm around her to put his much-larger hand over her mouth. He was outnumbered, though, and Amanda started up immediately.

“Or bloody
damn
or
damn
and blast. If we were boys, you'd
teach
us how to swear and even belch, and we'd know how to far—”

He ended up with two little girls wiggling off his lap, their giggles cascading behind them as they scampered a few feet away.

“Enough, the both of you.” He rose to his full height and scowled down at them. “This is no way to earn anything but a lump of coal in your stocking. When I return from Town, I'll expect perfect deportment from each of you, glowing reports from the maids and Miss Hodges both, and no more of this riot and insurrection.”