needn’t look put out by the idea. There are worse ways to spend the season than being chased after by a golden-haired viscount, you know. And only consider, while he’s pursuing you, I shall no doubt have the constant company of Lord Mattingly.” Jane paused, before confessing, “I had the most awful tendre for him the year of my come out.”
“Lord Mattingly?” Maggie gave her friend a quizzical smile. “You never mentioned that before.”
“Considering that the highlight of my first season was Lady Barbara Latimer christening me ‘Spindleshanks’ and all the rest of the young ladies, and most of the young gentlemen, gleefully taking up the moniker, it has seemed to me that those few months of my life are best forgotten.” Jane’s own smile became rueful. “Besides, it’s a dreadfully depressing story. Lord Mattingly was a dark and dashing Corinthian, and I was then much as I am now. Too tall, too plain, with nothing to recommend me but my brains. And you know how gentlemen feel about ladies with brains.”
Before Maggie could make a reply, the door to the drawing room creaked open and a rustle of twilled silk announced the entrance of Jane’s aunt Harriet.
A small woman with snowy white hair and a wrinkled face that put one in mind of a bleached walnut, she shuffled into the room with the aid of her ebony cane. “There you are, my dears,” she said in a warbling voice.
“How was your nap, Aunt?” Jane asked.
“What’s that?” Aunt Harriet slowly lowered herself into a wing chair. “My cap?” She touched a blue-veined hand to the delicately beribboned bit of lace tied over her thinning locks.
“Your rest!” Jane said a little more loudly.
“Yes. Quite right. It is the best of all my caps.” Aunt Harriet leaned her head against the velvet-upholstered wing of her chair. “I shall close my eyes for just a moment until tea. You must rouse me when the tray comes, Elizabeth.”
Maggie cast a bewildered look at Jane.
“Elizabeth is my mother,” Jane whispered, stifling a grin. “Did I not tell you my aunt Harriet would be the best chaperone in the world?”
At promptly four o’clock, before the drawing room clock had even finished chiming the hour, St. Clare arrived in Green Street driving a dashing black curricle drawn by a pair of glossy, temperamental-looking match-bays. Maggie had been watching for him, and as he pulled up in front of the Trumbles’ townhouse, she hurried down the front steps to meet him.
At the sight of her, St. Clare ordered his tiger to go to the horses’ heads and jumped down from his curricle. “Miss Honeywell,” he said solemnly, making his bow.
“Lord St. Clare.”
He surveyed her fitted blue kerseymere pelisse and matching bonnet with an appreciative eye. “You look very well.”
“As do you.” And it was true. St. Clare’s figure was marvelously displayed, from the crown of his beaver hat to the mirror shine of his Hessians, and all the powerfully muscled, expertly tailored acreage in between.
He gave a sudden, slightly sheepish, grin. “I’d intended to come to the door and call for you properly.”
“Had you?” She was a little chagrined. Why had she run out to meet him so impetuously? So eagerly?
It was just the sort of thing she was used to do when Nicholas would call at the front entrance of Beasley Park, begging her company on a drive into town in the gig. “I’ve been charged with delivering these preserves to the vicarage,” he would say. “Pray come with me, Maggie, and lend me a bit of countenance.”
At the memory, Maggie felt the same sense of bewilderment and uncertainty that she’d felt when she read St. Clare’s note. “Well, it doesn’t matter, in any case. My chaperone, Miss Trumble’s aunt Harriet, is fast asleep and you’ve already made the acquaintance of Miss Trumble herself. So there’s really no need to go inside. Unless…you don’t feel as if you must, do you?”
“No,” he answered after a moment. “As you say, there’s really no need.”
Maggie walked ahead of him to the curricle’s step and waited. When he stopped beside her and didn’t immediately offer his hand, she looked up at him inquiringly. And she had to look up, up, up, for he was infuriatingly tall. How had she not noticed before how diminutive she was when compared to him? She scarcely reached his shoulder!
As if to illustrate their vast difference in size, he didn’t simply hand her up into the curricle as any other gentleman might do. Instead, he