The Bolingbroke Chit: A Regency Romance (19 page)

Even before Agatha had entered the Paddletons’ ballroom, she had realized she’d made a gross miscalculation. Lady Bolingbroke, who had been unable to speak of anything else during the carriage ride, made it clear that none of her friends would be able to speak of anything else either. As soon as her mother said Miss Harlow’s name, Agatha had known what was coming. She’d managed to quiet her qualms but not silence them entirely, and there seemed to be a horrible inevitability about the gleeful speculation in which her mother indulged. Agatha’s head began to throb and she tried to beg off with the headache, but Lady Bolingbroke, assuming the usual dislike of social outings, dismissed her complaint and insisted she would be fine once she heard the lively trill of the orchestra.

The opening strains of a quadrille did nothing to improve her anxiety, but discovering that Miss Harlow was not present and would not appear calmed her nerves slightly. Feeling as if she had evaded a well-deserved punishment, she planted herself against the wall and determinedly closed her ears to all gossip. It was not difficult, for she was too enmeshed in her own misery to notice anyone else, and Addleson’s approach passed unperceived until he was standing directly in front of her.

What fresh torture that had been—to be confronted by yet another victim! Consumed by guilt and despair, she had entirely forgotten about the viscount, and it was only when he insisted that they had to talk about his caricature that she remembered she’d injured two people that day. Her shoulders tensed as she prepared for a lengthy and bloated rant against the awful Mr. Holyroodhouse, which, she assumed, would include some outrage, unfounded, to be sure, about the villain’s sartorial inadequacies. Her head still throbbed—oh, how it throbbed—and her entire body ached from the effort of holding itself upright, but she managed to remain on the spot. She stood there, determined to suffer the abuse she knew she had earned.

But no abuse came! Only praise for Mr. Holyroodhouse’s cunning and skill.

At first, she’d interpreted his request for a larger drawing, which had arrived that afternoon from Mrs. Biddle in an envelope marked
URGENT
, as proof of his inanity: Lord Addlewit was too thickheaded to recognize an insult when it was perched atop his shoulders. No doubt he thought the drawing was a tribute to his physical prowess. But when he had stood before her at the ball she had seen the look in his eyes, that bright elusive gleam that she had tried and failed to capture on paper. It was, she had realized with shock, the keen light of understanding.

Viscount Addleson wasn’t a joke because he
was
the joke. The dull-witted dandy who couldn’t see beyond his shirt points was a fiction, a character invented by him for his own amusement. How dull-witted
he
must find
them,
eagerly accepting his inconsequential prattle as the genuine article.

No wonder her drawing did not bother him: It was a lampoon of a lampoon. With her cunning and skill, all she had captured was a shadow, an image cast upon a wall by a clever puppetmaster.

Without question, Agatha’s ego felt the sting. To be revealed as a fool while mocking another for his foolishness was not a pleasant sensation. As a trained observer, she had been schooled in the art of seeing beneath the surface to the underlying structure that gave it shape and she should have realized all was not as it appeared. She had caught a glimmer of the truth while drawing his image but had literally turned it away, settling on a profile because it was easier.

As severe as the blow was to her vanity—and it was particularly disheartening to realize she was obtuse on the day she’d discovered herself to be a dupe—it didn’t bother or discomfort her. She was simply too grateful to learn she hadn’t caused him pain to worry about her deficiencies. She had done enough damage without adding him to the scrap heap.

Still reeling from the truth about Viscount Addlewit, she was further surprised to hear him dismiss the charge against Miss Harlow. She had known him to be smart, yes, but she had not expected him to be shrewd. Acuity of the mind was a rare thing among the
ton,
who would rather adopt the feelings and opinions of their friends than think for themselves—a fact demonstrated by how quickly the implication of her drawing had been picked up and circulated. Mr. Holyroodhouse had said jump and the members of the
beau monde
obligingly hurled themselves into the air. Only the dowager duchess, whose private suspicion of the worst would not stop her from publicly rejecting it, had mounted a defense of the girl.

For the second time in as many minutes, Agatha felt a deep well of gratitude toward the viscount, and in that moment, she liked him better than any other person she had ever met. She realized it was strange to be so amiably disposed to someone she had so recently scorned, but it didn’t feel strange or odd or even the slightest bit peculiar. It felt entirely natural, and when he launched into a ridiculous tirade about the unsuitability of Lord Curtlesby’s gilt buttons, she drew her first easy breath of the evening.

It wasn’t the ruse itself—inane chatter to alleviate her anxiety—that yielded results but his effort in employing it. She could not fathom his concern for her welfare, for what did it matter to the lofty Viscount Addleson if she was distressed, but she recognized his behavior for the act of kindness it was and could do nothing save respond in kind. She was not as skilled in ridiculous banter as he and felt ridiculous herself when she compared the Earl of Thynn’s staid breeches to seventeenth-century garments, a misguided comment that clearly indicated how ill suited she was for the game. Yet Addleson adeptly picked up the ball with all the insouciance of a skilled player and gently lobbed it back to her. The conversation that followed, as silly and as spirited as a children’s game of hide-and-seek in the garden, gratified her so much, she was actually disappointed to see it end.

That was certainly a first for Lady Agony.

Thinking about conversations she wanted to see end recalled her to the present, where Miss Lavinia Harlow—Vinnie—sat before her intent on offering an apology. Agatha could not imagine a graver injustice and, smothering a cry of protest, said stiffly, “An apology isn’t necessary.”

“You are being too kind,” Vinnie said, compounding Agatha’s misery with the gracious compliment. If only the other girl knew how very
un
kind she had been! “But it’s true. As my guest, you deserved to have every courtesy extended to you, and I failed to fulfill that basic social obligation by laughing at your mishap with the hose. I fear you took my…our…laughter as scorn, but I assure you we weren’t laughing at you. To prove it, I brought this.”

Vinnie produced a white cloth from her reticule and held it proudly aloft as if displaying Princess Caroline’s jewels. Her satisfaction with the item hardly seemed appropriate to its presentation, for the cloth was really just a worn bit of fabric streaked with black grime and frayed at the edges, and looking at it Agatha suspected another trick. Miss Harlow could not actually believe the tattered rag was an object worthy of exhibition, let alone admiration. Its condition was so wretched, it seemed unworthy of the Duke of Trent’s trash pile. The cloth should be thrown into the murky waters of the Thames at once, if not sooner.

Smothering a fissure of alarm, Agatha said, “It wasn’t a mishap.”

She’d hoped to disconcert her visitor with the truth, but Vinnie smiled brightly and a dimple peeked out. “I know that. I was just trying to give the incident a little dignity out of respect for you, and I’m delighted to see you don’t need it. So now, this blackened rag,” she announced with authority, “is the cloth I reached for to dry myself after one of my hose prototypes malfunctioned in the presence of the Marquess of Huntly and exploded water all over his dignified person. This was our introduction and he was so crushingly polite, although he denies it and claims he was merely civil, and I was mortified to the tips of my toes, and seeking a distraction, I took this cloth here—this very same filthy, dirty, shockingly soiled cloth—and dried my face with it. I trust you can imagine what happened next: I wiped black smudges onto my cheeks as I stood before the impeccably courteous marquess whose disdain was palpable despite his excellent manners. Or, rather, because of them. I tell you this to explain why we laughed. The story was known to all of us, and there was something irresistibly funny about seeing it happen again, as if the hose itself has a destiny it must fulfill. And I bring this cloth to show you that it could have been much, much worse.”

As Vinnie spoke, Agatha felt something inside her crumble and thought it must be her spine because suddenly it was very difficult to remain upright. Indeed, she felt an overwhelming desire to coil herself into a ball like a small child, and it was only her rigid self-control, honed through years of humiliating episodes with her mother, that kept her shoulders straight.

She’d thought she had known the extent of her wrongdoing prior to this interview, as accusing an innocent young woman of murder was a horrendous offense. But as the duchess’s sister explained her behavior, Agatha realized her sins were far worse than she’d believed, for she understood now that her malice had been motivated by spite. Having paid a call on Vinnie with the express purpose of discovering her guilt, she had left the town house convinced only of her rudeness to a guest, and that, it seemed, was enough to expose her to Mr. Holyroodhouse’s wrath. Her knowledge of the crime had not improved, nor her opinion of its likeliness altered, but rebuffed by Vinnie’s laughter—by everyone’s laughter—and mortified by the realization that Vinnie’s interest in her had been coerced by Lady Bolingbroke, Agatha had struck back with the only weapon in her possession.

It was a devastating realization for Agatha, who had always prided herself on Mr. Holyroodhouse’s detachment. Her paintings were inspired by passion, by an irrepressible need to capture something compelling on canvas, and she threw her heart into every brushstroke. Her drawings for Mrs. Biddle, in contrast, were an exercise in observation, an opportunity to examine the
beau monde
and its foibles with disinterest. Her caricatures, done with a light hand and a raised eyebrow, were never personal. She was merely reproducing the world as it was.

What a foolish conceit—to imagine any representation of the world could be made without prejudice. No human being was wholly impartial, especially she, whose opinions had been formed by years of repression and restriction. All she had wanted to do was paint, and having been denied the pleasure by her parents, she had taken to making snide pictures about their friends and associates. She had mocked the members of her father’s beloved institution by turning them into tulips precisely because he held the organization in such high esteem. Then, of course, there was the apparently not very minor fact of Vinnie herself, the sister of the hated Harlow Hoyden, who did what she wanted regardless of society’s condemnation. Emma’s sister had seemed cut from an entirely different cloth, but by pursuing admission into the all-male society, she had revealed herself to be a hoyden as well.

Agatha’s motives, seen through the clear lens of hindsight, were as plain as day.

Crippled by this revelation, she could hardly think and she absolutely could not bear the sight of the filthy rag, which seemed to represent all that was good and honorable in the world. On the morning after being accused of the single most horrendous crime possible, Miss Harlow had presented herself in Portland Place to apologize. Rather than defend her own position, she had sought to put another’s mind at ease.

Agatha had long known she was selfish, but she had never grasped the extent until now.

The situation was intolerable. No, it was heartrending torment, the likes of which she had not suffered before, and as much as Agatha wanted to fall at Vinnie’s feet and beg her forgiveness, she stiffened her shoulders and said, “I’m sure the smudges were endearing in a street urchin way.”

Vinnie laughed. “Think chimney sweep and you would be closer to the mark. I didn’t even realize until later when Emma pointed out the streaks to me. I assure you, as foolish as you felt, I felt ten times more ridiculous. I would have had the revolting cloth destroyed, but I forgot about it until yesterday. I hope you will accept it as a token of my esteem.”

Agatha would not have credited Miss Harlow with a mischievous sense of humor, and that she revealed herself to have one now, when it was too late for them to be friends, made her inexplicably sad. The sadness was inexplicable because Lady Agony wasn’t on the prowl for friends, and even if she were, she would not rummage through the despised Harlow Hoyden’s family tree for candidates.

Exhausted by the sweeping mix of emotions she’d experienced during the short interview, Agatha nevertheless managed a lively reply. “You are far too generous,” she said, accepting the filthy rag as if it were in fact a cherished jewel of their princess. “I shall treasure it always.”

“I think perhaps it should be displayed in the drawing room,” Vinnie said with unexpected earnestness. “All it wants is a proper frame.”

Agatha shook her head at the preposterous notion. “Absolutely not. It belongs in my bedchamber, where I can look at it every morning upon rising and think,
As bad as things are, they could always be worse.
”

“A salutary lesson for all of us,” Vinnie said with just enough solemnity to remind Agatha of her trespasses.

Appalled by her actions once again, Agatha closed her eyes, as if absorbing a great blow, and when she opened them a moment later, she noted the flush of pink that stained her guest’s cheeks. In a horrifying flash, she realized Vinnie was embarrassed to have embarrassed Agatha by alluding to Vinnie’s embarrassing situation.