at Joanna with concern. “For that little incident?”
“Caroline!” Joanna said, trying not to laugh at how lovesick her friend was to look past such a thing. “This is your world far more than it is mine. Think how you would feel if anyone else had poured a bowl of soup all over you. What would you expect?”
“You’re right,” she said morosely, the corners of her perfectly shaped lips drooping uncharacteristically, for Caroline was a woman who loved to laugh. “I shall have to have a talk with my father. As for Eli—”
Joanna looked over at her friend with one raised eyebrow. “I have an idea.”
“You do?”
“I do,” she said, her lips beginning to curl at the thought. “Lord Elijah loves a practical joke, does he not? Well, then, let’s show him one.”
Elijah had always been of the opinion that one of his redeeming qualities was the ability to admit when he was wrong.
And he had been wrong to call out the noticeable attention between his sister and the footman.
But he had spoken before he even realized what he was doing. He had seen the man staring at her so openly, so admiringly, which hadn’t particularly bothered him — until he saw Caroline’s return expression. Then he hadn’t been able to keep his mouth shut.
He knew his sister wouldn’t be pleased, but at the very least, he talked his father into reconsidering the man’s firing until after Christmas. It hadn’t made up for his mistake, but it was something.
“You don’t really think that Caroline is carrying on with a footman,” his father said in response to Elijah’s request, a sentiment to which his mother only laughed at as the three of them were seated in his father’s study following dinner. They didn’t have much time — they would have to return to the party soon — but Elijah had asked for a moment alone.
“Of course she would never,” his mother said, waving heavily ringed fingers in the air. “Caroline knows her place. She does spend far too much time with the Merryton girl, but at least she has some noble blood running through her veins.”
“She does?” Elijah asked, much more interested in the conversation now that it had shifted.
“Yes, dear,” his mother said, folding her hands in her lap. “Her father was the second son of the Viscount of Edgewater.”
“What happened to him?” Elijah asked, wondering if he had ever asked about the story before, or whether it was one of his fleeting memories.
“You don’t know?” his mother eyed him with her sharp, blue-eyed gaze, and he shook his head slowly.
“No, I don’t think so.”
“After his wife — Miss Merryton’s mother, a woman far below him who he never should have married in the first place — left him for a pirate of all things, he basically ignored the girl. Her grandmother finally took her in. Her father still paid for her education and such, but when Miss Merryton was seventeen, he died penniless and the title passed on to a cousin of some sort. Joanna learned the work of her grandmother.”
His mother said the words with a shudder as though even mentioning it was going to cause her to catch some kind of affliction.
His father rolled his eyes. His own mother had spent her life working until she had met his father and become a marchioness. While he had known a life of relative luxury, he was not impervious to the lives of those a class below him.
“What seems to be the problem?”
Baxter walked in now, Lady Baxter — Ophelia — behind him. If Elijah hadn’t known better, he would have thought they were a copy of his parents, but twenty years younger.
“It’s taken care of,” he said abruptly, not wanting Baxter involved, but of course, his brother couldn’t help himself. He never had been able to.
“Is it about the footman business?” he said with a snort. “I hope you told him to pack his bags.”
“Although his spill was partially Elijah’s fault,” Ophelia said, wrinkling her long, thin nose. “Are you going to have him pack his bags too?”
Elijah sat back and crossed his arms over his chest. He knew his sister-in-law was trying to make a joke, but he couldn’t say he was overly pleased by it.
Even though she was right.
“The footman can stay for now,” his father said with a sigh, as though he would prefer this entire business had not been brought before him. “I suppose it is Christmas, after all.”
“Yes, it is.”
Elijah didn’t even turn to