The Bolingbroke Chit: A Regency Romance (9 page)

By all measures, Lady Agatha was a prize on the marriage mart, and the fact that she didn’t exploit her superior circumstance to attract a husband made her a most curious creature. If anything, she had done the opposite of pressing her advantage, acting with deliberate offense to keep all suitors away. Even fortune hunters seemed sufficiently cowed by her unpleasant disposition to not make the attempt.

Addleson could not imagine what she stood to gain with her unusual behavior, other than a life of loneliness and regret—a strange choice for a woman in the first flush of youth. One dwindled into spinsterhood; one did not vigorously pursue it. Her perverse decision indicated she had an alternative plan for settling her future, one that did not include hearth and home.

It was an outrageous theory, to be sure, but a logical one as well, given the evidence, and Addleson, who rarely showed interest in women toward whom he had no romantical intentions, discovered an odd compulsion to confirm it. Lady Agatha meant nothing to him—his acquaintance with her parents barely extended beyond nodding—yet he suddenly felt a desire to know everything about her.

Naturally, it was the mystery she presented that intrigued him, not the chit herself, and as soon as he unraveled the riddle, he would cease to find her of interest. He knew this because that was the pattern that had repeated endlessly throughout his whole life: Something held his attention only as long as he didn’t understand it. Once he figured out the mechanism by which a device or person functioned, how its springs and toothed gears worked together to produce a result, he was no longer interested in its operation. This penchant for boredom was why he had decided to take up his seat in the House of Lords. Even with his high intelligence, the machinations of Parliament, with its backroom deals and political maneuvering, seemed beyond his deciphering. It was, he hoped, too massive a behemoth to grasp in its entirety.

Lady Agatha, alas, wasn’t nearly as large. She was, despite her rude glares and steady gaze, a mere slip of a girl, and he didn’t doubt he would understand her movements easily enough.

It was, he noted with surprise, an oddly disheartening thought, and incapable of explaining the gloomy feeling that overtook him as he left Lord Bolingbroke’s residence, he decided to seek out the simple pleasure of the gaming table, rather than follow his original plan of visiting his latest paramour. Silvie was a riddle he’d deciphered almost upon introduction, and although he found her avarice evenly balanced by her wit, he had begun to tire of her coquetry. A demand for an emerald necklace was a demand for an emerald necklace, regardless of how charmingly the requirement was stated.

Yes, he thought, as he gave his driver the direction of the Elder Davis, it was time to give his mistress her
congé.
He would, of course, comply with her request for an emerald necklace as a parting gift and would even include a matching bracelet and earrings. He would have Stern take care of it first thing in the morning.

Addleson’s mouth twisted in a wry smile as he wondered if Silvie should thank Mr. Petrie or curse him, for it was certainly his seemingly endless lecture on sundry North American plants that had made him so decisive. He usually approached the end of an affair with more tact and discretion, gradually severing the connection, but he knew the emerald set would go a long way in soothing ruffled feathers.

With the immediate future neatly settled, the viscount expected his mood to improve, but it did not and he arrived at the gaming hell determined to use his memory skills to beat his fellows at cards. Mr. Petrie had a lot to answer for indeed. The imminent penury of the Elder Davis’s patrons was surely all his fault.

Damn the sunset hyssop!

Chapter Four

The problem, Agatha
realized, with spending four seasons alienating everyone who tried to establish a connection with you was that when you wanted to find out information about a particular gentleman, you had nobody to ask.

There was always her mother, of course, but such a route necessitated posing the question without appearing interested in the answer, for anything else would inflame the sliver of hope that burned in Lady Bolingbroke’s heart despite her daughter’s best efforts to extinguish it entirely. Although her mother had been too distracted to properly address her Addleson query at the theater, she would recognize a follow-up for what it was—sustained interest—and most likely send an engagement notice to the
Times.

Agatha could not run the risk.

Instead, she waited until all the guests from her father’s soiree had taken their leave, including Mr. Petrie, who had accepted Lord Waldegrave’s invitation to continue their conversation over port at Brooks’s, and casually remarked on the success of the evening.

“Such a delightful turnout,” she observed as she followed Lord Bolingbroke into his study, where a collation of cold meats had been served at his request. Supper had been provided at the affair, but he had been too busy with his hosting duties to eat properly. Now he was decidedly hungry.

Truman, who had laid the silverware, offered Agatha a plate, but she politely demurred, preferring a cup of tea, which was instantly provided.

“Yes,” agreed Bolingbroke. “’Twas a delightful turnout, which was entirely gratifying, as Mr. Petrie is not well known in this country. Gruber”—his lordship’s full-time gardener and sometime advisor—“brought him to my attention, for which I’m grateful. The society has never invited an American to speak before, and I’m glad I was able to persuade the membership of Petrie’s worthiness. I believe his talk is going to concern sunset hyssop, which is, if my memory serves me correctly, a topic Townshend has written about extensively. I am surprised Townshend did not come tonight, for he knows more about the flora of North America than the entire membership combined.”

Before her father could make further comments about society members who had failed to attend, she tried to bring the conversation back to those who had. “Petrie must have some admirers, for even Lord Addleson, who is not known for his fondness of horticultural matters, attended.”

Striving for the perfect note of carefully modulated disinterest, Agatha succeeded too well in her aim because her father agreed and quickly changed the subject.

“He came with his cousin Edward Abingdon. They are frequently together,” Bolingbroke explained as he broke off a piece of bread. “The truly astonishing guest was Philby Cromer, who is a member of the Society for the Advancement of Horticultural Knowledge, which, as you know, is decidedly misguided in its approach to advancement and science. I would not expect a member of that institution to attend such an event, for its fellows are resolutely unenlightened, embracing their ignorance with both hands.”

Lord Bolingbroke continued in the same vein for several minutes more, detailing his disgust with the Society for the Advancement of Horticultural Knowledge and mocking everything about it, from its arbitrary membership rules (“One blackball and a fellow is out—no debate, no appeal!”) to its poorly located offices in Cheapside (“As if they are setting up a law practice to prosecute flowers!”).

Although the particulars of the tirade were new to Agatha, the outrage was not, for her father frequently disparaged the rival organization. As far as she could tell, the differences between the two groups were so minor as to not exist at all, for were both not devoted to the study and care of plants? But even though the finer points eluded her, she knew better than to dismiss them. Where she saw seventeen different shades of primrose, her father saw yellow.

While waiting for Lord Bolingbroke’s ire to run its course, Agatha sipped her tea and called to mind the expression on Addleson’s face as he looked down at the frayed carpet—a mix of startled, disgruntled and annoyed. He had worn a glare of such intensity, she had half expected him to demand an apology from the offending scrap of rug.

It was such a small thing to be bothered by, like misaligned buttons on a waistcoat or an untied boot, but the event clearly pricked his vanity, and when he raised his head to discover her gaze upon him, she wasn’t at all surprised to see the flustered expression on his face. What she was surprised by was how quickly he recovered his dignity, for nary a second later he was striding toward her with broad, determined steps meant to intimidate her. He stopped mere inches from where she stood, and Agatha was honest enough to admit that he had succeeded. Up close, his scowl firmly in place, his shoulders intimidatingly broad, he was quite daunting, and rather than succumb to the unsettling feeling with a discreet step backward, she embraced it with a bold step forward.

Naturally, she couldn’t resist teasing him about his stumble. Without intending to, the viscount had revealed the remarkably trivial matter to be a sore point, and she prided herself on spotting and exploiting sore points. The comment also gave her an opportunity to seize the upper hand, for the advantage had been Addleson’s all evening. He had been correct about the encounter with Mr. Petrie: She had been unable to come up with an appropriately cutting reply and walked away in silence as a last resort.

Her inability to think of a more assertive response was all Addleson’s fault. Of course she knew how to handle a preening idiot such as Petrie. The man was staying in her house and had been trying to espouse scientific theories in her general direction for three days now. She successfully routed them all, save for a talk on the highly developed root system of the sunset hyssop. She didn’t care a fig about the advantages of shallow roots, but the spiny tentacles of the roots themselves, with their intricate, lacelike pattern, appealed to her, and she grabbed the flower without asking permission, promptly disappearing with it into her studio.

No, the reason Agatha couldn’t think of a properly dismissive remark to issue to Petrie was the viscount’s barely concealed amusement. Delighted by the whole exchange, he stood by gleefully as the naturalist compared her unfavorably to a household pet. He had orchestrated the whole thing, dragging her into the conversation under false pretenses—she, an aficionado of the dune!—in order to humiliate her with Petrie’s offensive notions about womanhood.

She had been too furious to think properly, her anger made worse by the fact she was still reeling from the perplexing moment earlier when Addleson’s gaze had met hers. What a extraordinarily disconcerting experience that was, to find herself incapable of looking away, to feel as if the room had suddenly fallen silent and everything ceased to move, even the clocks.

The interval ended as abruptly as it began, and Agatha, striving to hide her embarrassment behind a veil of amused indifference, raised one of her eyebrows at Addleson.

Recalling the incident now, she attributed the unsettling moment to the fact that the viscount had caught her staring. Such a thing had never happened to her before, despite the many hours she’d spent examining the
beau monde
with single-minded focus. Her status as Lady Agony—a young lady unwilling to endear herself to others, readily mocked for her lack of social graces—made members of the
ton
oblivious to her attentions. It was as if she were capable of not being seen, a special ability only she had, and she relished the possession of it, for it allowed her the time and the opportunity to get the details right, to fix a scene in her mind so she could re-create it hours later on paper.

But she had not been invisible to Addleson. He had seen her looking at him and returned her stare with equal brazenness.

It was little wonder she could not formulate a sufficient reply to Petrie, with the naturalist comparing her to a dog and the viscount gloating silently and her mind churning with the implications of her sudden visibility. That she could walk away without stumbling herself was accomplishment enough.

Agatha took another sip of her tea, which was cool now, as Lord Bolingbroke congratulated himself on not barring the door to Cromer. “For that is exactly what the Society for the Advancement of Horticultural Knowledge would do to a member of the British Horticultural Society, should one of our numbers so forget himself as to attend a gathering of theirs.”

“Of course,” she said, nodding enthusiastically at his gracious condescension.

“It goes without saying,” he added, “that such an event would never occur, for there is nothing that the absurd travesty of an organization could offer that would interest any members of our illustrious institution. In theory, however, it is easy to predict how they would behave.”

Agatha knew her father could predict an endless variety of rude behaviors for the other group and sought to change the subject before he grew too deeply connected to the endeavor.

“Mr. Petrie instructed me on sand dunes,” she announced apropos of nothing.

If her father thought the non sequitur was unusual, he made no mention of it as he poured himself another glass of claret. “A subject on which he is an expert. His knowledge is vast and impressive, and you would do well to listen to any topic on which he cared to offer instruction. We are very fortunate to have him as a guest on this, his maiden journey to England.”

Knowing very well the state of her fortune, Agatha chose not to dwell on her father’s comment and instead observed that Addleson had been the luckiest recipient of their visitor’s vast and impressive knowledge.

At the second mention of the viscount in a single conversation, her mother would have had the banns posted and the guest list drawn up. Her father, however, noticed nothing amiss. Unlike his wife, Bolingbroke had more things on his mind than the marital status of his lone progeny. Without question, he was fond of Agatha and hoped to see her comfortably settled with a family of her own, but it made no difference to him if that happy event happened that year or in several years. Sometimes his wife insisted on discussing the matter with him, and ever the thoughtful husband, he always agreed to listen to her concerns, though, to be accurate, he never actually agreed to consider them. Rather, he pondered issues of greater importance, such as which orchid to submit to the horticultural society’s annual exhibition, while Lady Bolingbroke chattered away about Agatha’s unencouraging prospects.