fallen onto your head, I could blame it on a concussion,” Morris said. “Anything else happen when I wasn’t looking? Surgeon drilled a hole in your skull, perchance?”
“I like a lively girl,” Ashmont said.
This was absolutely true. If he’d had any qualms about marrying a young lady he knew almost nothing about and whose existence he’d forgotten until this day, these had dwindled to nil under her ungentle attentions.
“She got thrown out of a carriage,” he went on. “Did she lie there, moaning and groaning and waiting for help? No. First thing she does, she sits up and knocks me over with her hat. Then, I’m lying on the ground, only wanting to be let be for a minute or two, so I don’t cast up my accounts. She throws a bucket of water on me and makes me do this and that and march a mile with her, while she fusses over her tiger. I ask her to marry me and she throws a teapot at me.”
Morris closed his eyes. “Yes. Charming.”
“Then, I make a lunatic move, and try to lay hands on her—and she knocks me back over a gallery rail and leaves me dangling.”
Ashmont laughed at the recollection. Whatever else Miss Pomfret did, she wouldn’t run away.
He’d bungled this. Should’ve known better. Would’ve known better, maybe, had he not endured the harrowing night before and the meeting at dawn. Remembering that still made him queasy.
He turned his mind elsewhere.
“Remember when you asked didn’t I know her?” he said. “I did, but it was a long time ago. I was still at school. It was during the long holiday.”
Morris’s despairing expression sharpened into interest. He sensed a story in the offing, one more to add to his vast mental library.
“That was where you and Blackwood and Ripley met, I know,” he said. “Eton.”
The three dukes’ sons had instantly become fast friends. So much in common.
“This was early in the autumn, shortly before we were to return to school,” Ashmont said. “Camberley Place. I was fourteen.”
Morris set down the cutlery and settled back to listen.
Ashmont saw it clearly in his mind’s eye, the way he recalled most of his time at Ripley’s uncle’s home in Surrey. Not having much of a home to go back to, Ashmont was thrilled to be invited once more for a long holiday visit.
He was the Earl of Selston then, Ripley was the Earl of Kilham, and Blackwood was the Marquess of Rossmore. These courtesy titles eventually ended up among all the other lesser titles they inherited with their dukedoms—Ashmont first, then Blackwood, then Ripley—all while they were still at school.
Near the end of his visit Lady Charles organized a party for her numerous young relatives and their friends. Mainly the boys went their way and the girls went theirs. But at one point, he and his two friends heard shouting and laughter coming from the area set up for the girls’ relay races.
Curious, the three friends sauntered over, to find Godfrey Wills and his company of arse-kissers teasing a little redheaded girl. The elfin creature seemed vaguely familiar, although Ashmont couldn’t place her.
“Stick insect, can’t you go faster?” Wills screeched. Then it was, “Faster, faster, Freckle Stick!”
The girl was thin, and no beauty, but hardly freckled, as far as Ashmont could see. Still, Wills’s cronies took up the taunt, shouting, “Run, run, Freckle Stick!” and the like, and laughing fit to bust a gut at how witty they were.
“Bullying little bastard,” Ashmont said. “I’d like to take a stick to him.”
“You don’t know Cassandra Pomfret,” Ripley said. “Wait.”
They waited.
Even after the races, Wills wouldn’t stop plaguing her. In the manner of a stick insect he crept after her while his friends egged him on.
It wasn’t fair, picking on a girl, and Ashmont was practically dancing with impatience to take Wills apart, when at last she came to a place where the crowd of children was thickest. She stopped suddenly and turned to face Wills. He grinned, expecting her to beg him to stop, the way smaller children did when he bullied them.
She put her hands, palms down, under her chin, fluttered her eyelashes, and said, pitching her voice high and loud, “Oh, Godfrey, you’re always following me. I know you can’t help loving me, and I’m truly sorry. But alas, I cannot return your love.”
It was so unexpected and so apt, Ashmont let out a whoop. An instant later, others did, too.
Wills’s face turned bright pink.
Then Ashmont couldn’t resist. “Oh, Godfrey,” he called,