Much Ado About You

“I do not,” Imogen said, sticking in hairpins so fiercely that Tess felt like a pincushion. “Draven does not love this woman. He could not love a bluestocking. So there must be something behind their engagement, and that something is likely to be Lady Clarice.”

But an hour later, Imogen was not quite so certain.

Gillian Pythian-Adams was no weedy-looking bluestocking, lanky, pale, and clutching a leather-bound copy of Shakespeare. She was not wearing pince-nez, and she didn’t wear her hair raked into a tight bun, the way any self-respecting cultured woman did. Instead copper-colored curls peeked from under her bonnet, and green eyes surveyed the world with aplomb. And even a bit of humor.

Imogen felt the thump of her heart as it tumbled to the bottom of her boots. Any man would be happy to gaze at Miss Pythian-Adams all day long, even if she engaged to read him poetry. Even if it was historical poetry.

“How do you do, Miss Imogen?” Miss Pythian-Adams was saying. It should be outlawed for such an educated woman to have a dimple. Let alone be allowed to wear a lilac pelisse that made Imogen faint with envy.

“It’s a pleasure to meet you,” Imogen replied from between stiff lips. No wonder Draven had never done more than kiss her—a stupid, badly dressed Scottish lass with the temerity to worship him. He probably considered kissing her akin to visiting the sick: a charitable action.

“I’m so excited about visiting the ruins,” Miss Pythian-Adams said. Even her voice was pleasing: not too low, not too high. “And it is a true pleasure to find that there are four young ladies with whom to be friends in this vicinity.”

Imogen met Tess’s eyes over Miss Pythian-Adams’s shoulder (she was, perhaps, a wee bit short by Essex standards but really, that would be the only negative thing one could say).

“I’m sorry, darling,” Tess mouthed.

Imogen smiled in a lopsided kind of way. She was so shocked that she didn’t even feel like crying.

“Lady Clarice told us that your sketches have been published in The Ladies’ Magazine,” Tess said, walking about and putting her arm around Imogen’s waist. “We were all terribly envious. You must have a wonderful gift for sketching.”

“In fact, no,” Miss Pythian-Adams said. Then she smiled, a little embarrassed smile. “I gather Lady Clarice neglected to say that my father is on the Board of Directors of the journal in question?”

She was modest as well. Likeable, even. Imogen felt as if her heart was about to break.

“Will Lord Maitland be joining us today?” Tess asked Miss Pythian-Adams.

“I expect not,” she replied briskly. “You probably don’t realize this, having just met Lord Maitland, but he has such a ruthless obsession with his stables that—”

But at that moment Maitland himself strode into the room and came straight over to them.

Tess watched carefully. Imogen lit up like a Roman candle at his approach (so much for subtlety). Miss Pythian-Adams allowed him to kiss her hand, but displayed no particular sign of exhilaration. Maitland showed no sign of preference for one lady over another; in fact Tess would venture to say that he kissed her own hand with precisely as much enthusiasm as he kissed that of his promised wife.

Finally, they all clambered into carriages and headed off in the direction of the ruins. The Essex sisters ended up in a carriage with their guardian.

The sky was a ravishing pale blue, and it promised to grow quite hot. Tess watched a faint wisp of a cloud evaporate. “I want you to promise to keep your bonnet on,” she said to Josie, who had the tendency to throw her bonnet to the winds and toast her face.

Josie looked around at her sisters. “We look like a flock of buzzards!” she said with a gurgle of laughter.

“Only the best sort of buzzards wear bonnets,” Rafe said. He had a little silver flagon of something that Tess regarded with some disapproval.

Still, she couldn’t help smiling at him. “That was your clue to flatter us, Your Grace, rather than confirm our dreary appearance. May I assume that you are not exactly used to handing out compliments like a Lothario?”

“Don’t call me Your Grace,” he growled. “And I’ve never made myself into a noodle for a lady, if that’s what you’re asking.”

“Why not?” Josie asked, with interest. “You’re not so old yet.” There was a hint of doubt in her voice.

“Josie!” Tess admonished, and turned to Rafe. “I do apologize for Josie’s brazen question. We are used to talking amongst ourselves in the most impertinent fashion.”

“I like it,” Rafe said, obviously unperturbed. “I may not be so old yet, Miss Josephine, but I feel old. And thank goodness, to this point I haven’t met the woman who could turn me into a jackanapes.”

“If you’re not turned into a noodle by Annabel or Tess,” Josie said with utter conviction, “then I’m afraid you’re doomed to remain unmarried.”

“I shall resign myself,” Rafe said, with obvious cheer.

“You’re a grave disappointment to me,” Annabel told him.

“First my mother, now you,” Rafe said, with a patently counterfeit sigh.

“I suspect that you are an old hand at avoiding the attentions of women,” Tess said, watching her guardian smile at Annabel. Just so would a brother smile at his beloved younger sister who was showing the first signs of beauty.

“I do believe that I am considered elusive by London matrons,” Rafe agreed amiably. “And I can’t say that I have the faintest wish to change that circumstance.”

The coach rumbled to a halt. “Here we are,” he said, tucking his flagon into his inside coat pocket. “Let us arise and be cultivated.” The irony in his voice was as pointed as the north wind.

“For that,” Annabel said with a giggle, “I shall demand that Miss Pythian-Adams tell us everything she knows of the Roman Empire!”

The ruins were located in the midst of a pasture that had been cut for hay. Mr. Jessop, the farmer who owned the land, ushered them through the gate himself, pointing into the distance at a grassy mound.

“The ruins lie off that direction,” he said. He cast a dubious look at Lady Clarice and Miss Pythian-Adams, both of whom were wearing exquisite little slippers. “The hay is drying nicely, so it won’t run to mud. But I don’t know as what it will do to your shoes, misses.”

Tess’s kid boots were old and far from ladylike, made as they were to last, but even so, the hay was terribly prickly on one’s ankles. Mr. Jessop strode ahead with Rafe, waving his hands as he talked about his old father who had the land before him and “them holes in the ground” and “them Romans” and “them Londoners.” A breeze kept stealing his voice and blowing it across the pasture, so Tess only heard snatches of his diatribe against “them Londoners,” which seemed to encompass a historical society that wished to dig his field. “’Tis my field,” Mr. Jessop said over and over again, with perfect logic.

Somewhat to Tess’s annoyance, Miss Pythian-Adams was steering clear of her fiancé and her future mother-in-law, and had chosen instead to walk at Tess’s side. Tess would have liked to have a consolatory talk with Imogen—she had noticed that Miss Pythian-Adams had ankles that weren’t as neat as they might have been, and she was anxious to point out that salient fact—but she had no chance. The woman stuck to her like glue.