“Insofar as I am about to formally betroth myself to a man whose brain would make a grain of sand loom large, I must wish to be a duchess,” Olivia pointed out.
“The marquess’s brain is irrelevant,” Mrs. Lytton said, frowning, and then instantly soothing her brow with her fingertips, in case a wrinkle had sprung up. “You will someday be a duchess. I never thought about brains when I married your father. The very consideration is unladylike.”
“I feel quite certain that Father evinced a normal intelligence,” Olivia said. She was sitting very still so that her ludicrously unnatural ringlets wouldn’t tangle.
“Mr. Lytton paid me a call. We danced. I never considered the question of his wits. You think too much, Olivia!”
“Which may not be a drawback, given that any woman who marries Rupert will have to do the thinking for two.”
“My heart is palpitating,” Mrs. Lytton said, with a little gasp. “Even my toes are qualmish. What if the duke changes his mind? You . . . you are not all that you could be. If only you could stop trying to be witty, Olivia. I assure you that your jests are not funny.”
“I don’t try, Mama,” Olivia said, starting to feel a little angry, even though she’d promised herself that she wouldn’t wrangle. “I simply don’t always agree with you. I see things differently.”
“You indulge in coarse wit, no matter how you wish to phrase it.”
“Then Rupert and I will make quite a pair,” Olivia said, just stopping herself from snapping. “Dim-witted and coarse-witted.”
“That’s just the sort of thing I’m talking about!” her mother accused. “It’s unnatural to jest at a moment like this, when a marquess is about to plight his troth to you.”
Olivia was calm. She knew perfectly well that Rupert’s father would arrive, at the appointed hour, and bearing whatever papers were necessary to effect the betrothal. The bridegroom’s presence hardly seemed relevant.
The Duke of Canterwick was a hardheaded man who had no interest in finding his son a compatible spouse; instead, he was looking for a nursemaid. A fertile nursemaid. He didn’t need money, and the dowry her parents had scraped together—which was more than respectable for a girl of her rank—was of no importance.
It was her hips and her brains that had prompted the duke to go through with his promise, as he’d told her coolly on the day she’d turned fifteen. Her parents had thrown a garden party for their daughters, and to everyone’s enormous surprise, His Grace had joined them. Rupert had not accompanied him because he’d been only eleven years old at the time, and barely out of short pants.
“My son is a buffle-headed idiot,” the duke had said to Olivia, staring at her so hard that his eyes bulged a bit.
Since her opinion accorded with the duke’s, Olivia had deemed it best to say nothing.
“And you know it,” he had said, with distinct satisfaction. “You’re the one, my girl. You’ve got the brains, and you’ve got the hips.”
She must have twitched, because he’d said, “Hips mean children. My wife was rail-thin, and look what happened to me. There are two things I want in my daughter-in-law, and one is hips and the other is brains. I don’t mind telling you that if you didn’t have those two assets, I’d toss over my promise to your father and look about until I found the right woman. But you’re the one.”
Olivia had nodded, and since then she had never doubted that she would marry Rupert someday. His Grace, the Duke of Canterwick, was not a man who permitted mere technicalities—such as Rupert’s or her feelings—to stand in the way of a decision.
As the years passed and the duke didn’t bring his son to the altar, even as her parents grew more and more nervous, Olivia still didn’t worry. Rupert was a buffle-headed fool and he wasn’t going to change.
Her hips weren’t going to change, either.
When a carriage bearing the ducal crest was finally observed to have turned into Clarges Street, her father took up a position at Olivia’s right shoulder, while her mother sat beside her, her profile to the door, and twitched her skirts into place.
The duke entered the room without allowing their butler to announce him. In fact, the Duke of Canterwick was not the sort of man who would ever allow another man—other than royalty—to precede him. He looked like what he was, a man given to labeling ninety-nine percent of the world’s population insolent upstarts.
A particularly observant person—such as Olivia—might have noticed that in reality the duke’s nose entered the room first. He had a magnificent proboscis in the front, a doorknocker of a nose. But he made it work. Olivia rather thought that it was the way he held his head high and his chin forward.
He looked as if his presence was the only thing that made other people visible, though even she had to admit that this particular notion was more than unusually far-fetched on her part. “ ‘A lady does not stoop to fanciful notions,’ ” her mother would have said, quoting, naturally, The Maggoty Mirror.
Alas, fanciful notions were all that seemed to run through Olivia’s head, even as she curtsied with consummate grace and gave the duke a smile nicely calibrated between awe and respect.
Rupert, on the other hand, got a smile pitched between familiarity and respect (the latter entirely feigned).
“There you are!” Rupert said, with his usual enthusiasm.
Olivia curtsied again, and held out her hand. Since he reached only to her shoulder, Rupert didn’t have to bend far to kiss her glove. It was unfortunate that he had inherited his father’s nose but not the duke’s dominating personality; his nose just seemed to force one to pay more attention to his mouth. Which invariably hung open, his lower teeth visible in a glistening pout.
She was never happier to wear gloves than when receiving Rupert’s salutations. He invariably left a wet spot on the back of her hand.
“There you are,” he repeated, straightening with a huge smile on his face. “There you are, there you are!” Rupert was given to statements that meant nothing at all.
In fact, as Olivia agreed with his statement—indeed, here she was!—she puzzled over the differences between Rupert and his father.
The Duke of Canterwick was very intelligent. What’s more, he was ruthless. It was Olivia’s considered opinion that most people allowed feelings to get in the way of logic. Canterwick didn’t.
Given that level of clear thinking, it was rather odd that his son was not only patently disadvantaged when it came to thought, but also given to excesses of emotion. Rupert made people think uneasily that he was about to burst into song—or worse, into tears. You definitely thought twice about mentioning a recent funeral—even for an elderly great-aunt—if Rupert was assigned to sit beside you at a meal.
“And here’s Lucy!” he said, even more enthusiastically. Lucy was a very small, rather battered-looking dog whom Rupert had found abandoned in an alley a year or so before.
Lucy looked up at Olivia with an adoring expression, her thin, rather rat-like tail whipping from side to side like a metronome set to molto allegro.
“No meat pies today,” Olivia whispered, leaning down to pull up one of Lucy’s long ears.
Lucy had the best manners of them all. She licked Olivia’s hand even given that disappointment, and then trotted after Rupert.