The eclectic, almost haphazard mix of people didn’t always put her guests completely at their ease, but the mistress of the house found that a bit of social friction made for a much more interesting assembly. Her husband had, on more than one occasion, expressed concern about the jumble of humanity his wife liked to bring together under their roof.
“Oh, rot,” said Lady Loughlin. “Are our friends so fragile that we risk their well-being simply by putting them in a room with people who don’t see the world quite as they do?”
“It’s not their well-being I fear for,” said Lord Loughlin with equanimity. “Only their comfort.” Although he was loath to admit it to his wife, he also enjoyed the sparks that flew when like met unlike, and he lodged his mild protest more for form’s sake than out of any genuine anxiety.
When her guests didn’t seem able to arrange themselves in a satisfactory way, Lady Loughlin intervened, and on this occasion that was exactly what she did. It started with the Sheffields, who were always a problem. Although Mrs. Sheffield was exactly the kind of woman Lady Loughlin disliked most, her husband was genial and sociable—as well as being one of her father’s oldest business associates. The combination of Mr. Sheffield’s trade associations and Mrs. Sheffield’s manners tended to keep other guests at bay.
But Paulette Loughlin wouldn’t have it so, and she scooped up three other guests as they were leaving the buffet with full plates and deposited them on chairs next to the sofa the Sheffields were already occupying.
“I don’t believe you are acquainted with the Carlisles,” she said to Mr. and Mrs. Sheffield. “They’re our neighbors in London, and this is the first time they’ve been down to Hampshire with us.” The two couples nodded to one another as Lady Loughlin went on.
“And this,” she said, holding the arm of the third guest she’d commandeered, a round-faced, cheery-looking man who appeared to have already had several glasses of Lord Loughlin’s excellent burgundy, “is Alphonse Gerard, but everyone calls him Gerry.”
“Hullo!” said Gerard with more enthusiasm than the situation seemed to warrant. “I’m pleased to know all of you.” He sat down and immediately went to work on a very large veal chop.
The Sheffields and the Carlisles began exchanging the usual pleasantries, inquiring about the nature of the others’ connection to their hosts, and their lives when they weren’t visiting Penfield. This led to a discussion of Penfield itself, which the Carlisles were seeing for the first time that day, having arrived only a few hours before dinner.
As they were talking of the house’s beautiful exterior, its modern improvements, its convenient layout, Mrs. Sheffield saw Bruce Barnes heading toward the buffet. Lady Loughlin made a point of having him eat with the family and the family guests, and not with the servants, but the sight of him doing so surprised Mrs. Sheffield enough to make her break off almost in midsentence.
“That’s Bruce Barnes,” she said generally to the company. And added, after a pause, “I wonder that he eats with the guests.”
“I shouldn’t wonder in the slightest,” said Alphonse Gerard through a mouthful of veal, put out by Mrs. Sheffield’s obvious disapproval. “The man’s a genius.”
“But he’s a gardener,” protested Mrs. Sheffield.
“Certainly he knows how to tend plants,” responded Gerry. “And I know how to saddle my horse. Does that make me a groom?”
“Of course it doesn’t. But if you earned your bread by saddling other people’s horses, you would indeed be a groom.” Mrs. Sheffield was rather pleased with her own quickness on the subject.
“Fiddlesticks,” expostulated Gerry. “Barnes doesn’t earn his bread tending plants any more than I earn mine by saddling horses. He earns his bread designing the most astonishing gardens in England, and I’m more honored than otherwise to share a meal with him.”
At that moment, Barnes’s entrance into the room stopped their conversation. He took a seat in the corner farthest from them, on a chair grouped with several others around a low table. He didn’t betray the slightest discomfort at being alone, but then, he wasn’t alone for long. As if to confirm Alphonse Gerard’s view of the man, three other guests entered the room and made straight for the empty chairs around Bruce Barnes. Two of the three were Robert Loughlin’s cousins the O’Maras, and the third was one of the most beautiful girls in England.
She was tall. She would have been too tall had her perfect proportions not turned her height into an asset. She had dark, rich hair pulled up and back, but with gently curling tendrils escaping at her nape and temples. Her shoulders were perfectly straight across, strong and broad enough to support the perfect body that hung from them. Her brimming bustline tapered to a waist so neat and narrow that it led every man she met to wonder whether his two hands could span it. Her eyes were wide-set and so dark a brown as to be almost black, and their color was set off by that of her lips, which were an arresting sepia-tinted red with a soft matte shine. If she had a flaw, it was that her face and figure were too perfect, without the interest of any blemish or asymmetry.
“Who’s the girl?” Gerry asked his dining companions, staring at her openmouthed, his disagreement with Mrs. Sheffield instantly forgotten.
“That’s Alexandra Niven,” said Mr. Sheffield, whose appreciation of the girl’s radiance matched Gerry’s own, although his expression of it was necessarily more muted. “She’s the ward of Lord Bellingford, who was due to come with her but was laid up with gout, so she’s here with her companion, Miss Mumford.”
“A beautiful young girl with a gouty guardian and a companion named Mumford?” said Gerry with a laugh. “It sounds like something out of Dickens. No doubt this Mumford is a dried-up old crone.”
“On the contrary,” said Henry Sheffield, who knew the details of the story from Lord Loughlin. “She’s not yet thirty and attractive in her own right. But she’s had to make her way in the world and worked as Miss Niven’s governess since the girl was eleven or twelve. But when the girl got too old for a governess she couldn’t bear to see Miss Mumford go and asked her to stay on as companion.”
“And where is she now, this companion?”
“She has an acute sense of her own position and generally remains in the background. She prefers that Miss Niven go out in society unfettered.”
“By Jove, this is shaping up to be an interesting visit!” said Gerard, with a sideways glance at Mr. Sheffield. It was the kind of glance that ordinarily wouldn’t elude the watchful propriety of Mrs. Sheffield, but she missed it entirely, absorbed as she was in the drama of Alexandra Niven talking with Bruce Barnes.
“Henry,” she said, elbowing him in the ribs. “Will you look at how that gardener is talking to that girl?”
Mr. Sheffield knew from long experience that the nuances of how people talked to one another and how people looked at one another, so clear to his wife, were opaque to him. Where he saw only a man and a woman conversing, his wife saw impropriety and even scandal.
“They seem just to be talking, my dear,” he said to his wife.
“Talking!” exclaimed that lady. “He’s looking at her exactly the way he was looking at the Vernon girl this morning.”
On hearing this, Alphonse Gerard turned toward Mrs. Sheffield. “Lady Georgiana Vernon?” he asked. “Here?”
She answered in the affirmative, and told Gerard of their tour of the grounds. “He spoke to Georgiana the same way he’s speaking to Miss Niven over there,” she said indignantly. “He leans in too close, and he speaks very softly. And then he touches her arm—see! Just like that!”
Gerard did see, but was more inclined to admire the man’s technique than to share Mrs. Sheffield’s disgust. “And what is wrong with an unmarried man talking softy and touching the arm of an unmarried girl?” he asked. “Are young people to court by shouting at one another from across the room?”
Mrs. Sheffield’s already sour expression turned sourer still. “You know perfectly well that there are ways of doing things that are proper, and ways that are not. And making love to two girls in the space of a few hours is most certainly not.”
“It’s a rum kind of lovemaking if it includes the O’Maras,” said Gerry, drawing her attention to the fact that the conversation clearly included them.
Mrs. Sheffield was saved from having to answer by the entrance of Georgiana herself, who had appeared in the doorway and was clearly trying to decide which group to join. She had been there long enough to see what Mrs. Sheffield had seen and Mr. Sheffield hadn’t—that Bruce Barnes was indeed, after his fashion, making love to Alexandra Niven. The sight had given rise to a very unpleasant constriction in her gut. She had spent the better part of the afternoon thinking about Barnes, and had by no means decided what she wanted to do about him. But the idea of him with another woman hadn’t entered her thoughts. Being confronted with that idea, in the flesh, made her realize the depth of the impression the man had made on her.
But it also gave her pause. When she’d stood with him in the peacock pavilion, she’d felt as though he had singled her out, that he thought the two of them had a special connection. Seeing what looked like an attempt to single out another young woman—and in the same day!—made Georgiana think this was simply how he treated young women, and it made her think less of him.
Her first instinct was to take refuge at the Sheffields’ table, but she quelled it and walked resolutely to the other side of the room.
She put on a confident smile and made her voice sprightly. “May I join you?” she asked the foursome.
“Oh, please do,” said Alexandra Niven, with a touching ingenuousness. “You are Lady Georgiana Vernon, are you not?”
“I am,” said Georgiana, slightly taken aback by the enthusiasm of a girl she had already started to think of as a rival.
“Lady Loughlin told me I should meet you here, and I have so looked forward to it,” said the girl. “My name is Alexandra Niven.”
Lady Georgiana recovered herself. “Lady Loughlin has also talked to me of you,” she said, “and I, too, am glad that we should know each other.”
Georgiana nodded her greeting to the O’Maras and, as casually as she could, to Barnes, and sat down next to Miss Niven. No one at the table was aware that their little drama was being minutely observed by the people across the room, who had ceased their own conversation to better hear what the two girls would say to each other, and to Barnes.
They were at first disappointed.
“Do you play tennis, Lady Georgiana?” asked the dark-haired beauty.
“I do, and I imagine you do as well, since Lady Loughlin always takes pains to make sure I have a worthy opponent.”
“I do play, but I’m not sure how worthy an opponent I’ll be. I have heard, though, that there is a wonderful new court on the grounds.” Miss Niven turned to the gardener. “Mr. Barnes has agreed to show it to me, and give me a tour of what he has done, have you not, Mr. Barnes?”
Across the room, Mrs. Sheffield’s eyebrows shot up, and she gave her husband a knowing look. Gerry laughed softly. “By Jove, it’s as good as a play!”
Barnes looked steadily at Miss Niven, and then at Lady Georgiana. He neither blushed nor blinked. “I have, and if the weather is fine we can go directly after breakfast,” he said.
“Make sure you see the peacock pavilion,” Lady Georgiana said pointedly. “It’s certainly one of the highlights.”
From there, the conversation at both tables turned general, and Barnes and the young ladies spoke of the house, the grounds, and the masquerade. Before they went up to bed, the two girls made an appointment to play tennis the following afternoon.
Only Henry Sheffield and Alphonse Gerard were left downstairs when Robert Loughlin, who’d been dining in the adjoining parlor, came in and sat down with them.
“Hello, gentlemen,” he said, “I see you’ve divested yourself of all the ladies.”
“That we have,” said Gerard, “but I wouldn’t be quick to divest myself of either Lady Georgiana or Miss Niven, were I ever so fortunate as to invest myself of them in the first place.”
Mr. Sheffield was willing to overlook the omission of his wife from the list of women not to be divested of. “They are fine girls, certainly.”
“That gardener of yours seems to have a magical hold on pretty young girls,” said Gerry, never one to beat about the bush. “What’s his secret?”
Lord Loughlin laughed. He’d noticed the way the women in his household responded to Barnes. “Damned if I know,” he told his friend. “It must be some primal attraction to men who work the land. You know, a kind of salt-of-the-earth mystique.”
He turned and pulled the cord that rang for the servants. It was barely a minute before the parlor maid, a slightly coarse-looking girl some years past thirty, came in and curtsied.
“Will you ask Dodson to bring us some port, please, Rose,” said Loughlin. “There’s a ’seventy-seven in the cellar that I opened just the other night.”
“Yes, sir,” said Rose, and left to find the butler.
“Salt of the earth, fiddlesticks,” said Gerry with disgust, picking up the conversation where they had left it. “It’s raw animal magnetism. He’s big and he’s strong and he’s handsome, and they can’t get enough of it. They’re like bitches in heat. I was hoping to have a go at one of those girls myself, but I’ll be lucky if either one of them gives me the time of day.”
“Well, you may not be big or strong or handsome,” said Lord Loughlin, laughing, “nor are you young. But you are awfully rich.”
“That won’t take me very far with girls who are rich themselves,” scoffed Gerard.
“Georgiana is, certainly, but Miss Niven, I’m told, is sorely in want of a fortune.”
“But I thought Bellingford was as rich as Croesus. Surely he’ll provide for her.”
Lord Loughlin lowered his voice. “I’m told he suffered very heavy losses speculating in American railroads.”
“He did, at that,” said Mr. Sheffield, joining the conversation now that it had left the mysterious subject of women and moved to the firmer footing of finance. “I almost bought some of the same shares myself, but there was something about the offering that didn’t seem quite right.”