As if he grasped Blake’s reference, Percy stretched his neck, pranced along the perch of his cage, and began singing a dirty ditty. Blake put his fingers between his teeth and whistled sharply. Fitz covered his ears, but overwhelmed, the bird settled down to a mutter.
“Your father must realize that you will take Miss Carrington’s money and buy colors,” Fitz reminded him, pouring a finger more of brandy in each of their glasses.
“My father is notorious for adding stipulations to contracts. He’ll wrap the settlement in chains that prevent me from doing what I want,” Blake predicted gloomily. “But I won’t know the terms until I make an offer, and Miss Carrington accepts. I’m hoping I can find alternatives.”
“I wish I could offer to help, but all London knows the state of my finances. If Miss Carrington is as conniving as you say, she won’t be too grief-stricken when you march off.” Fitz offered up a nut kernel to the parrot. Percy pecked it neatly from his fingers.
“Why does the creature bite
me
when I feed it?” Blake glared down at the parrot’s half-bare gray head. It really was a pathetic-looking excuse for a bird. He couldn’t imagine what Miss Carrington saw in it.
“Because you don’t like him. Very smart creature. Is the lady equally intelligent?”
“She hasn’t bitten me yet.” Blake returned to pacing.
Fitz snorted at the faint praise but wisely refrained from interrupting.
“I didn’t come here to beg from you,” Blake continued. “You’ve been an enormous help already. I just . . .” He frowned and tried to work out exactly what he did expect of his friend.
“You want to know if the leg shackles are worth it,” Fitz finished for him. “I envisioned a golden chain on my pecker before I took vows. But our case is different. I admired Abby greatly even before we talked of marriage. You scarcely know Miss Carrington. I’ve met her only the once, when we visited Lady Bell a few months back. She seems a pleasant sort.”
“She shot me in the foot and stole an obscene parrot! That hardly qualifies as pleasant. And she’s a bloody Carrington! That alone should be reason for caution.” Blake glared at the offensive creature, which promptly flapped its wings and muttered, “Friggin’ bloody ’ell.”
Fitz chuckled. “I do believe he’s captured your mood, Montague. Look at it this way—she rescued a helpless creature from an idiot. She can’t be all bad.”
“Society has rules for a reason,” Blake complained. “One simply cannot steal another man’s property because he isn’t taking good care of it!”
“Perhaps we should,” Fitz replied. “Perhaps the rules need changing. Isn’t that what you want to do with our rules of war?”
“Rules of war aren’t written in law books.” But Blake knew what he meant. The rules of love and society weren’t in law books, either. Could he set the rules to please himself?
“You’ve attempted every other method to get what you want.” Fitz stayed with the point. “I’ve tried recommending you to the Home Office, but the Danecroft title impresses only the ignorant, and I have no connection elsewhere.”
“It wouldn’t matter if you did. Castlereagh has already rejected me. The prime minister is too ill to care if Canning and Castlereagh tear out each other’s throats, and nothing gets done while they argue their differences. Admiral Nelson was correct when he called the ministry antiquated. The Foreign Office has encrypted documents left unopened since the colonial war!”
Blake spun on his heel and glared at his friend. “I wager you do not even realize the Post Office can send foreign letters to the Deciphering Branch to be opened without the recipient’s knowledge. They’re bloody well decoding some poor sap’s foreign love notes, while they ignore the war situation. No one up there knows or cares what’s happening beyond their own personal vendettas!”
Fitz shrugged. “Then it’s a good thing you prefer war to civil service. At least shooting the enemy is more honorable than shooting government servants.”
“I prefer dying honorably to being thrown by a horse,” Blake muttered. “I cannot fathom how that burr got in the saddle blanket. I’m not in the habit of riding through woods where I might have picked one up. My horse would never have thrown me otherwise. My mother will have me locked in a room for fear her silly superstition is coming true.”
Abby, the Countess of Danecroft, chose that moment to enter bearing a tray of assorted cheeses. She set the tray down on the library table and brushed a kiss on Fitz’s head. “The children give you their good nights and hope you will ride with them in the morning.”
She turned in Blake’s direction. “And I know you will not ask my opinion, Mr. Montague, but if Lady Bell approves of Miss Carrington, then she must be a person of good character. Lady Bell does nothing without a thorough investigation.”
The adorable little countess departed without expecting a reply.
There
was the reason marriage would not suit him, Blake remembered. Women nested. They wanted houses and babies and gentle words and all those things that held utterly no interest for him. He required physical and intellectual stimulation, not cheese and children.
Fitz raised an eyebrow and smirked while Blake stewed over the decision he must make.
Two evenings after Ogilvie’s house party had broken up, Isabell Hoyt, Lady Belden, stepped from her carriage in front of the London townhome of Lord Alvanley, one of the
ton
’s more sociable peers.
In front of her, Lord Quentin Hoyt was just handing his beaver hat to a footman. “Good evening, Isabell. You are looking delightful, as usual.”
Isabell would swear the wretch had waited in the shadows for her carriage to pull up just so he could precede her into the house.
“And you are looking your usual smug self, Quentin,” she acknowledged, taking his offered arm. “Tell me, does your father ever mean to take his seat in the Lords, or will he simply leave you to twist arms for him?”
“My, we are in a congenial humor this evening.” He clasped his gloved hand over hers and led her up the stairs to their host’s music room, making it seem as if they had arrived together. Isabell’s superior position in the
ton
elevated Lord Quentin’s simply by association.
Isabell would object, except she saw no reason to care what the gossip mill ground out. She had the wealth to buy half the people in the room, and they knew it. She smiled and made her curtsies as they progressed through the aisles looking for seats. “I did not think I had to be congenial with you, my lord. You claim we are family, so I merely treat you as such.”
“That must mean you are growing more comfortable with my presence. Excellent. So, tell me, have you discovered where your protégée has hidden the parrot?”
“The parrot?” Startled, she made the mistake of glancing up at him.
Quentin was a very large, impressive man. His dark eyes twinkled, which meant he knew something she didn’t, and she had the urge to smack him and tell him to quit playing games. At the same time, he stirred in her a long suppressed flirtatiousness—one that she failed to stifle.
“Ah, I take it Ladybyrd did not bring the creature home or you would have certainly noticed. Very clever of her,” he commended.
Isabell scowled and took a seat next to a stout matron who would snore throughout the performance. Perhaps Hoyt would take the hint and find a more suitable seat so she need not resist temptation all evening. “Jocelyn’s mother is a cousin on my late husband’s maternal side. She was a Byrd before she married. Jocelyn’s brother works with birds. Jocelyn may be called Byrd-Carrington, but she is a perfectly normal young woman. I have no idea why people insist on giving her that dreadful appellation.”
“Do you deny she has established a bird haven in your garden?”
“We had an infestation of worms eating the roses. The birds keep the insects away. A few birdbaths and feeders are beneficial.”
Undeterred, Quentin settled into the chair next to her, folding his arms across his formidable chest. “And I’m certain it was a lesson in education when in her youth she threw a tantrum until her father purchased the lovebirds from the Morrisons, and it was at her brother’s behest that she wouldn’t leave the Langsdales’ front room until they gave her the macaw to be rid of her.”
“She was a child!” Isabell straightened her skirts and looked properly toward the musicians taking their places at the front of the room. “She was an unhappy child with a reclusive mother, a jackass of an older brother, and a busy, politically active father who had little regard for family except for how he could use them. Her older sisters had married and left home, and she went unsupervised too often. She has a gentle, caring nature and loves animals.”
“She stole the duke’s parrot.” Quentin, too, watched the musicians.
“Even if the parrot has gone missing, it originally belonged to her brother. And it was your beastly friend Montague who almost compromised her in the stable. Dueling! I vow, all of you should be sent to war. Why don’t
you
buy his colors?”
“Because he’s a friend, and I don’t wish to see so valuable a mind lost to the senselessness of combat. Besides, his own officers are likely to murder him for preferring his sense of justice to their orders. The right woman could make him see the error of his ways and keep him home. He has a great deal to offer our country, just not on the battlefield.”
“Balderdash. Montague’s parents hold him on a tight string, and he’s spoiling for a fight. So, let him fight on the Continent instead of instigating senseless duels.”
“Blake is handy with his fists and with pistols,” Quentin acknowledged. “But his mind is valuable to England. He and Ladybyrd could do worse than each other.”
Lady Bell finally turned, if only to scowl even more fiercely at him. “He would take her money, buy colors, and get himself killed. You would make her a widow?”
“I thought you were enjoying widowhood,” he said in mock surprise, raising his eyebrows. “Was I wrong?”
“No, but she is young and has done nothing to deserve a loveless life.” The musicians struck the first chords, and she stared straight ahead, not acknowledging her own experience with a loveless life. “Jocelyn needs a family of her own besides her brother and his pets. Montague would most likely shoot the pets and get himself killed, leaving her with nothing at all.”
Quentin leaned over and whispered in her ear, “Want to make a wager on that?”
His whisper produced a tingle in her earlobe, irritating her further. “I am giving my husband’s female relations the inheritance he was too curmudgeonly to supply, but I am not providing an income for another of your impoverished friends. Just because Fitz turned over a new leaf doesn’t mean Montague has the sense to do the same.”
“Want to bet?” he taunted again.
A Mozart refrain poured through the room, and the audience quieted. Almost.
“Maybe you should provide your friends with dowries so they needn’t look to my protégées,” Isabell countered in an angry whisper that caused the stout matron beside her to frown.
“I earned my wealth. You didn’t,” Quentin retorted. “You inherited what belonged to my family. Fair is fair.”
She’d known that retaliation for her inheriting the marquess’s wealth had been his intention all along, the conniving rat. It was a good thing she’d learned her lesson after the last time one of his penniless cronies had claimed one of her charges. Admittedly, the match had turned out rather well, but there were no guarantees Quentin’s other idle friends would inherit earldoms, as Danecroft unexpectedly had.
The dowry she had provided Jocelyn under the guise of an “inheritance” would not be so easily gained by Blake Montague if she had anything to say about it.
“I’ll wager your new pair of bays that if Montague overcomes Jocelyn’s good sense and they marry, he will not be joining Wellesley in the spring on my money,” Isabell said complacently. Hoyt’s matched bays were the envy of all London. He would despise losing them.
“And you will give my sister Margaret a Season as you did Sally if Miss Carrington gives him all that he wants before spring,” he whispered boldly. “And you must give
me
a kiss.”
Isabell narrowed her eyes and glared at the bold oaf. “If you think to humiliate me, you will lose. I accept your ridiculous wager.”
She refused to think that it would almost be worth losing the wager to taste a man’s kiss again, especially this man’s. That was her foolish sentimental nature speaking. She would not succumb to it again.
8
Three days after the house party in Kent, Jocelyn sat in her hostess’s parlor, dispiritedly watching the last of her callers depart. She truly did not wish to trust her precious funds through marriage to any of those callow youths.
“Do you have an interest in any of the other young men you’ve met this past Season?” Lady Bell asked, echoing Jocelyn’s thoughts. “It would be better to quietly choose one than be pressured into marrying Montague.”
“None are quite as interesting as Mr. Montague,” Jocelyn admitted, although she hated to. She had spent every minute of these last few days comparing the gentlemen of her acquaintance with the irritable soldier and, despite her reservations, she found everyone else lacking.
“I’d not thought it possible for a gentleman to be both dashing and intelligent,” Jocelyn mused aloud. Also contrary and dangerous, but no one was perfect.
Lady Bell sipped her tea. “Lord Quentin is both. I suspect Mr. Atherton is also, but he’s a rake of the worst sort. I can name any number of dashing, intelligent men, but they are all flawed in one way or another.”
Jocelyn did not think dignified Lord Quentin or indolent Mr. Atherton were dashing. They were admittedly fine-looking men, but she had little interest in pretty features or smooth manners. She wasn’t at all certain what interested her about Montague except that he hadn’t killed her for shooting his toe, hadn’t returned Percy to Mr. Ogilvie—and he had a house in Chelsea and meant to march off to war.