The Bolingbroke Chit: A Regency Romance (4 page)

Conceding it was hopeless, Agatha abandoned all attempts to follow
The Merchant of Venice
and decided to think of something else—the British Matrimonial Society. While Shylock raged at the Venetian judicial system, Agatha laid out the scene in her head: Miss Harlow would stand in the middle of the lecture hall’s famous rotunda, looking bemused by all the attention, a pretty blush on her cheeks. Her suitors, also known as the esteemed members of the British Horticultural Society, would be gathered around her, their hands held high like schoolboys craving attention. Two or three would be lying on the floor, having tripped over themselves in their rush to court Miss Harlow. A large orchestra would be arrayed along the back wall, opposite the speaker’s podium, and next to it would be a table with a bowl of the notoriously weak lemonade served at Almack’s.

Yes, she thought with silent satisfaction, that would do very well.

The play ended with a standing ovation, which her mother enthusiastically joined despite not having watched a single moment of the performance, and it was universally agreed that they would not stay for the afterpiece. The duchess cited her own fatigue, but it was her sister who in fact looked exhausted.

“Well, that was a treat,” said Lady Bolingbroke as soon as she and Agatha were in their carriage. “I cannot recall the last time I’ve enjoyed myself so much. The duchess and her sister are charming, and the acting was sublime. I do believe I shed a tear at the end.”

Given that
The Merchant of Venice
was a comedy, Agatha could only suppose her mother had cried because she had to leave off watching her neighbors.

Lady Bolingbroke recounted the delights of the evening during the drive home, which was mercifully short. Once inside the Portland Place residence, she requested a light repast to be served in the drawing room, but Agatha excused herself to work on her illustration. She did not say that to her mother, of course, claiming instead to be too tired to eat anything. Her mother would be horrified if she knew the truth and would most likely disown her. She was impatient enough with Agatha’s stubborn insistence on painting with oils, rather than making tasteful watercolor daubs like other accomplished young ladies of marriageable age. That her daughter had a genuine talent for painting was a source of embarrassment for her and seemed of a piece with her inability to appropriately calibrate her laughter. Both indicated a deplorable lack of moderation.

Agatha abided by her mother’s wishes that she not put her portraits on public display and hung them in the privacy of their own home, mostly in her bedroom, with a few in her father’s study. The majority of her work was piled in stacks along the walls of the small downstairs room given over to her studio. She was also under strict orders not to inconvenience the staff in her never-ending hunt for subject matter. She complied with this request as well by seeking out the servants in their natural environment and drawing quick studies that she filled in later at her easel. Only her maid Ellen was able to sit for her and that was because her mother thought it took hours to make Agatha’s coarse hair presentable. In truth, it took mere minutes; the rest of the time was given over to posing and painting.

Having made these concessions to her parent, Agatha had to have some outlet for her passion. It wasn’t enough to paint in obscurity and display her portraits in secret. She craved—nay, hungered—for her work to be seen and admired and discussed. If drawing caricatures for Mrs. Biddle’s shop in St. James’s Street was the best she could do, so be it.

Lady Agony had been thwarted enough in her twenty-two years to be grateful for anything she could get.

With this melancholy thought in mind, she donned a smock, lit several candelabras, retrieved a fresh piece of paper and got down to work.

Chapter Two

Although Miss Lavinia
Harlow had never before demonstrated a new invention, she felt quite certain that six servants, three family members and one fiancé were a large enough group for a satisfying exhibition. Her sister, Emma, disagreed and insisted Vinnie wait while she gathered an audience more appropriate to the occasion. To that end, the Duchess of Trent was down in the kitchens assuring Mrs. Chater that neither she nor her staff would suffer any ill consequences if the potatoes currently in need of peeling were a little undercooked at supper.

Emma did not also immediately assure Mrs. Chater and her staff that they would suffer no ill consequences should they decide not to drop everything to admire her sister’s handiwork, and it fell to her husband, Alexander Keswick, Duke of Trent, to make that fact clear.

“But it goes without saying,” his wife insisted.

“No, it does not,” her husband countered.

Twenty minutes later, Emma strode into the conservatory with the entire kitchen staff, Dobbins from the stables and yet another footman in tow, causing her sister to wince.

“There’s no need to make a fuss,” Vinnie said, disconcerted by all the attention. When she’d entered the room an hour before, she had not intended to make an elaborate presentation. Her plan had been simply to test her watering hose to confirm for her own edification that the device actually worked. Confirmation was necessary because the only successful occurrence had happened the day before amid a profusion of tears and looking back now she couldn’t be sure if she or the hose had produced the stream of water.

Ordinarily, Vinnie would not have been working on an important project while sobbing uncontrollably, but her sanity had required she come up with some distraction to keep her mind off her own misery. The previous evening, only minutes before she was to make the speech to the British Horticultural Society that would decide her membership to the organization, she had bared her soul to the Marquess of Huntly, and other than look at her with utter shock, he had not formulated a response. More than a dozen hours later, she had been beside herself with anxiety.

The reason the marquess had not issued a prompt reply—either positive (“I love you, too”) or negative (“I appreciate the sentiment, Miss Harlow, but cannot return it, as I’m appalled and disgusted by you”)—was he had been racketing around the countryside in search of her father to ask for Miss Harlow’s hand in marriage. While he had been seeking the disinterested Mr. Harlow, Vinnie’s heart had been slowly crumbling. By the time Huntly returned to London, she had been thoroughly wrung out by the emotional turmoil of the long day, but his declaration of love, ardently stated and ably demonstrated, revived her to such an extent she hadn’t minded going to the theater with Lady Bolingbroke and her famously standoffish daughter. Naturally, she’d tried to extricate herself from the engagement, for she had an adored fiancé into whose eyes she wanted to happily gaze, but she submitted graciously to her sister’s demands and thoroughly enjoyed the outing. Not even Lady Agony’s sour puss could dull her high spirits.

And now, obligation fulfilled and uncertainty behind her, she was eager to test her invention for a second time. If only Emma would let her.

“There’s every need to make a fuss,” her twin insisted. “The Brill Method Improvised Elasticized Hose is the single most exciting scientific innovation in the history of gardening.”

Vinnie smiled faintly at this elaborate and clearly overblown assertion. “You know nothing about the history of gardening.”

“A matter that can be easily rectified,” Huntly said, his eyes glinting with humor. “Only say the word and Vinnie will provide you with a full accounting of the Archimedes screw pump.”

She had done precisely that to him on their first meeting, which occurred in that very room several weeks before. After almost two years at sea, Huntly had entered the conservatory to reacquaint himself with his friend’s orchid collection and found his person summarily doused by an exploding hose—one of Vinnie’s early prototypes. As surprised as he was by the unexpected soaking, Vinnie stammered a reply so nonsensical, the marquess naturally assumed her attics were to let.

It was a bizarre first meeting, hardly indicative of a great love, and only someone such as Emma, with her perverse notions, would have concluded they were fated to make a match of it.

“It’s not accurate to say I know nothing about the history of gardening,” Emma said. “I know it’s deadly dull and your hose is absolutely thrilling—which is why a large and admiring audience is required.”

Vinnie split a quelling look between her betrothed—teasing her about their dreadful first encounter!—and her sister. Then she raised an eyebrow as she surveyed the crowd. “I trust the audience is suitable now?”

Emma wrinkled her forehead as she considered the question, and her husband, anticipating her response, forestalled her with a raised hand. “Don’t say it, imp.” Then he turned to Vinnie and told her to proceed at her leisure.

Although she hadn’t planned on making a speech, Vinnie felt some explanation of what her observers were about to see was necessary, for what they were about to see was something very underwhelming indeed. Only Emma would gather two dozen people to observe a hose expel a stream of water in a calm and steady fashion.

“Thank you for your interest,” Vinnie said, with a self-conscious and apologetic smile at Mrs. Chater, who surely had more important things to do than stand around the conservatory watching flowers get wet. Despite potatoes to peel and fish to debone, the cook had an attentive look on her face. Everyone did, even the dowager duchess, an intimidating matron of the
ton
who had sternly disapproved of Vinnie’s application to the British Horticultural Society. “As some of you know, especially Tupper, who has had to clean up many of my failed experiments, I’ve devoted considerable time in the past few months to trying to improve the modern watering hose. The problem with the hose is it’s made of leather stitched together. Leather is not a very flexible material, so it tends to burst rather than stretch. My idea was to take the method by which Mr. Samuel Brill, a shoe manufacturer, used India-rubber to increase his shoes’ imperviousness to water to improve the elastication of leather. I have succeeded in that aim, as I intend to demonstrate right now.”

Her brief explanation done—and Vinnie was very proud of herself for being so concise and not veering off onto a tangent about turpentine—she lifted the hose and tested its suppleness. Satisfied, she reached out her hand to turn the device on, her heartbeat elevated from either excitement or uncertainty or both, and just as her fingers made contact with the pump, the dowager’s daughter burst into the room with a wild look on her face.

“There you are, Mama,” Louisa said, her tone exasperated and annoyed as she marched over to the dowager, waving a newspaper in her hand. “I have been looking everywhere for you and I assure you it has been an ordeal. The entire house is deserted. I had to open the front door myself. Do you understand the magnitude of the inconvenience of opening a door for oneself? Are we monkeys? Do we live in a zoo? And what if the prince regent had come to call? Would he have been forced to open the door for himself? Imagine the mortification.”

The dowager knew her daughter’s dramatics too well to dignify this absurdity with a response, but Emma could not resist. “I imagine the prince regent travels with an entourage well schooled in the operation of the door knob.”

Louisa turned to her brother’s troublesome spouse suddenly, as if surprised to see her. Her attention had been focused so intently on her mother when she’d entered the room that she hadn’t noticed anyone else. Now she looked around and saw scullery maids and stable hands in the conservatory. Good lord, was that Mr. Colson, who kept the household accounts?

Although she knew just whom to blame for the unusual gathering, she addressed her next question to her mother, not the hoyden. “What is happening here?”

The dowager smiled. “To be completely honest, I’m not entirely sure, my dear. I believe we are celebrating the engagement of Huntly and Vinnie in the manner in which horticulturally inclined people celebrate engagements.” She glanced at her son for confirmation. “Is that not correct?”

Before Trent could answer, Louisa gasped in horror and her face paled. Although she had the same coloring as her younger brother—rich brown hair, deep brown eyes—marriage to an obstinate man and being mother to two irrepressible children had given her a gaunt appearance ill served by the lack of color. “But that’s horrible. Tell me it’s not true,” she implored the marquess.

Vinnie felt her own color drain as the force of Louisa’s words hit her. She knew she wasn’t the ideal wife for most fashionable gentlemen, as her passion of drainage systems made her worse than a bluestocking—a greenstocking perhaps—but she would defy anyone, Louisa included, to come up with a spouse better suited to Huntly than she.

Even knowing how perfectly matched they were, she felt the sting of Louisa’s disapproval. She hadn’t expected Trent’s sister to delight in the news, but nor had she prepared herself for such fervent objection. Her vehemence was so astonishing, Vinnie could not think of a single thing to say.

Fortunately, she didn’t have to, for a forceful chorus rang out in her defense. Emma’s outrage, of course, was the loudest, but it was joined by Huntly’s anger, the duke’s indignation and the dowager’s horror at having raised a child with such appalling manners. Even the butler Caruthers voiced his censure with a deeply felt, “I say, ma’am.”

Taken aback by the unprovoked attack, Louisa stared at her family as if they were all bedlamites, then whistled sharply to gain their attention. “You misunderstand me. I have no objection to Miss Harlow marrying Huntly. Why in the world would I? I think she’s a dear girl, albeit with an eccentric hobby that is quite outside the bounds of what is the standard. Do I think that hobby is so encroaching it may adversely affect the care of her children? Perhaps. But, I assure you, that’s no business of mine if she chooses to ignore her family.”