stride away was strong, but as always, with his own inclinations, Charles forced it down.
He was doing this for his mother and the family name. No other reason could have induced him to accept an arranged marriage to a stranger, so the least he could do was smile while he was about it.
A smile carefully constructed across his face, he said, “Of course, Mama. Very excited.”
Lady Audley placed a hand on his arm. “I know, but you will have to wait, you impatient boy! Now, it is almost midnight, and I estimate the carriage ride home is at least half an hour. Charles, if I leave now, you can find your own way home?”
Charles could not help but laugh. “Mama, I am over five and twenty – closer to thirty than twenty! If I cannot hail a cab, I can stay at the club. Really, you must not treat me like –”
“A yes would have sufficed, Charles,” interrupted Lady Audley. Removing her hand from his arm, she tapped him with her fan. “Now, be careful. There are goodness knows how many robbers and thieves out there – remember the Duke of Mercia’s sister! Goodnight, Lord Westray.”
Lady Audley swept away in a myriad of skirts and silks, and Charles’ shoulders slumped. Well, at least he did not have to concern himself with entertaining his mother for the rest of the evening.
“Your mother is…” Westray began, respect in every word but a smile on his face, and eventually, it became a laugh. “God’s teeth, man, you really are twelve years old to her, aren’t you?”
Charles stiffened. He considered himself a fairly easy-going man, especially to his friends, and Westray was one in that number. But his mother was not a topic for external mockery.
“Perhaps,” he said curtly. “But that was the age my sister, Mary, was.”
No more needed to be said. Westray had known Mary, albeit briefly, and he knew what a terrible loss her passing had been to the family.
“My apologies, old man,” he said immediately, a look of genuine contrition on his face. “You know I would never – finest woman in town, your mother.”
Charles’s hands had unconsciously balled into fists, but he allowed the hackles on his back to lower and his hands to relax.
“I know you meant no harm,” he said gruffly. “But for my mother, that was when…when everything went wrong. You think there cannot be anything worse than losing a child, but in a way, it was the beginning of the end for her. My father died not long after, broken heart, and my uncle –my mother’s brother – was lost at sea a week later. Three of the four most precious people to her, lost in three months.”
He could feel his jaw clenching as it always did when he was grieving, or frustrated, and angry. That year had begun with cheer and happiness with Uncle Howard back on land and his sister laughing as she performed on the pianoforte for the first time in public.
By Easter, that room had been emptied of all he loved, save his mother.
“I am so sorry,” Westray murmured, and Charles knew he was genuine. “I did not mean to offend. Damnit, Orrinshire, you know me better than that.”
“I know, do not worry, old thing. No offense was meant, and none was taken,” Charles said heavily. “But now it is just the two of us, and Mama and I are perhaps closer than most mothers and sons at my age. If Mary had lived…well. Everything would have been different.”
Silence fell between the two friends, but it was a silence of comfort and understanding. Westray was an orphan himself, Charles remembered. Parents lost at sea when he was a child. He had never known the closeness of a mother, the protection of a father. Who was to say that he, Charles, was the one to be most pitied?
“I saw, isn’t that your friend…Petunia, or something?”
Charles looked up, and a smile broke across his face. Priscilla, and once again, she had decided to raid her jewelry box. She was an absolute delight in a sea of Miss Nothings—an elegant, sloping gown in a yellow that was almost golden. There was more gold thread embroidered in that silk than in the Regent’s crown, he was sure of that, and a plume of gold feathers billowed from her hair.
Something lurched in his stomach, and his breathing faltered.
“Priscilla,” he whispered.
As though able to catch her own name from across a crowded room, she turned, and her