One Thing Leads to a Lover (Love and Let Spy #2) - Susanna Craig Page 0,3
sweep into the room, wearing a morning gown of pale blue and clutching a gauzy shawl around her shoulders. Thanks to her maid’s artful arrangement, her hair still looked more blonde than gray. “What have I told you about barging in on your mama? You and your brother are young gentlemen, and a gentleman never interrupts a lady’s much-needed repose.”
“Oh, pshaw, Grandmama.” Philip dismissed the notion out of hand, though Amanda rather suspected he hadn’t the faintest notion of what repose might be. “Mama likes a bit of noise now and then, don’t you?” he demanded, turning toward her.
Yes, she wanted to cry out. Yes. During the months of her late husband’s illness, and for the period of mourning afterward, she had been cocooned within a muffled world of sickness and grief. Even now, her mother was still trying to wrap Amanda in cotton wool. She was almost as tired of the quiet inside Bartlett House as she was of watching her step whenever she dared to leave it.
But she was prevented from replying by the nearer approach of her elder son, Jamie, the eleven-year-old Earl of Kingston. A shadow of worry hung on his slight build and sallow complexion. “Is something troubling you, Mama?” He spoke low, his voice almost inaudible beneath the clamor of Philip regaling his grandmama with his fencing triumphs.
Amanda could not keep herself from brushing the cowlick of dark hair away from his eyes, though he was growing old enough to be annoyed by the gesture. “Why do you ask, my dear?”
“You were saying ‘oh, bother’ when we came in. Has something happened?” Even before his father’s illness, Jamie had been the sort of boy who always feared the worst.
“You’re coming, ain’t you, Mama?” Philip interjected. “I want you to watch me whoop him again.”
“Don’t say ain’t, Philip,” his grandmother corrected.
“Or whoop,” added Amanda. “And don’t worry, Jamie.” She turned back toward her elder son even as she gathered the wrapping paper, the twine, and the book, along with the invitations on which it had been resting, and stuffed the lot into the escritoire’s shallow center drawer. “I’m not troubled by anything. And neither should you be.”
“I’d wait,” Philip insisted, “until you’ve seen him fence. What’s to become of him when he’s old enough to be called out?”
“Gracious, Philip.” Amanda avoided her mother’s eye as she swallowed a laugh. “Why ever do you imagine anyone would challenge your brother to a duel?”
Philip considered for a moment before replying airily, “Oh, the usual things, I s’pose. Card sharping or trouble with a petticoat or—”
“That’s quite enough from you, young man,” their grandmama said, steering Philip from the room. With a shrug, Jamie followed. From the threshold, Amanda glanced back toward her desk. The matter of the book would have to wait until later.
Much later.
The next hour was given over to a display of fencing in the drawing room, with Philip crowing over every hit. Contrary to his brother’s taunts, Jamie was not altogether hopeless, though Mr. Jacobs appeared more interested in striking poses than in teaching the boys much of anything. Amanda weighed whether to mention it to Lord Dulsworthy. Luncheon followed: “You never eat the creamed turnips, dear,” Mama observed with exaggerated solicitousness. “I can’t understand why, when I ask Mrs. Trout to prepare them especially for you.” Afterward the boys declared it the ideal time to observe the bees at work in the spring flowers, though by three o’clock it would not have been an exaggeration to call the sunshine hot.
The slightest headache had begun to form behind her eyes even before they returned to the house to find George, Lord Dulsworthy, in the entry hall arguing with a stranger.
Well, no. Arguing implied a degree of passion that George would have found shockingly inappropriate under any circumstance. Murmuring reprovingly, then, his remarks directed mostly to Lewis rather than to the stranger, who stood apart from the fray.
After the brightness of the garden, the house was dim, and she had to blink away the spots before her eyes in order to bring the gentleman—tall, lean, brown-haired—into focus.
Or perhaps not a gentleman?
“—letting a tradesman in through the front door?” Lord Dulsworthy was scolding the footman.
If the cut and fashion of the stranger’s clothes had been insufficient proof of his lowly status, he carried a small, paper-wrapped package.
And yet there was something in his bearing that made her wonder whether George had been quite accurate in his assessment of the man.