The Secrets of Sir Richard Kenworthy (2 page)

Which left the cellist. Richard felt his eyes settle on her as she drew her bow across the long strings of her instrument. It was extraordinarily difficult to pick out her playing underneath the frenetic sounds of the two violinists, but every now and then a low mournful note would escape the insanity, and Richard could not help but think—

She's quite good
.

He found himself fascinated by her, this small woman trying to hide behind a large cello. She, at least, knew how terrible they were. Her misery was acute, palpable. Every time she reached a pause in the score, she seemed to fold in on herself, as if she could squeeze down to nothingness and disappear with a “pop!”

This was Miss Iris Smythe-Smith, one of the florals. It seemed unfathomable that she might be related to the blissfully oblivious Daisy, who was still swiveling about with her violin.

Iris. It was a strange name for such a wisp of a girl. He'd always thought of irises as the most brilliant of flowers, all deep purples and blues. But this girl was so pale as to be almost colorless. Her hair was just a shade too red to be rightfully called blond, and yet strawberry blond wasn't quite right, either. He couldn't see her eyes from his spot halfway across the room, but with the rest of her coloring, they could not be anything but light.

She was the type of girl one would never notice.

And yet Richard could not take his eyes off her.

It was the concert, he told himself. Where else was he meant to look?

Besides, there was something soothing about keeping his gaze focused on a single, unmoving spot. The music was so jarring, he felt dizzy every time he looked away.

He almost chuckled. Miss Iris Smythe-Smith, she of the shimmering pale hair and too-large-for-her-body cello, had become his savior.

Sir Richard Kenworthy didn't believe in omens, but this one, he'd take.

W
HY WAS THAT
man staring at her?

The musicale was torture enough, and Iris should know—this was the third time she'd been thrust onto the stage and forced to make a fool of herself in front of a carefully curated selection of London's elite. It was always an interesting mix, the Smythe-Smith audience. First you had family, although in all fairness, they had to be divided into two distinct groups—the mothers and everyone else.

The mothers gazed upon the stage with beatific smiles, secure in their belief that their daughters' display of exquisite musical talent made them the envy of all their peers. “So accomplished,” Iris's mother trilled year after year. “So poised.”

So blind,
was Iris's unsaid response.
So deaf
.

As for the rest of the Smythe-Smiths—the men, generally, and most of the women who had already paid their dues on the altar of musical ineptitude—they gritted their teeth and did their best to fill up the seats so as to limit the circle of mortification.

The family was marvelously fecund, however, and one day, Iris prayed, they would reach a size where they had to forbid the mothers from inviting anyone outside of family. “There just aren't enough seats,” she could hear herself saying.

Unfortunately, she could also hear her mother asking her father's man of affairs to inquire about renting a concert hall.

As for the rest of the attendees, quite a few of them came every year. A few, Iris suspected, did so out of kindness. Some surely came only to mock. And then there were the unsuspecting innocents, who clearly lived under rocks. At the bottom of the ocean.

On another planet.

Iris could not
imagine
how they could not have heard about the Smythe-Smith musicale, or more to the point, not been warned about it, but every year there were a few new miserable faces.

Like that man in the fifth row. Why was he staring at her?

She was quite certain she had never seen him before. He had dark hair, the kind that curled when it got too misty out, and his face had a finely sculpted elegance that was quite pleasing. He was handsome, she decided, although not terrifyingly so.

He was probably not titled. Iris's mother had been very thorough in her daughters' social educations. It was difficult to imagine there was an unmarried nobleman under the age of thirty that Iris and her sisters could not recognize by sight.

A baronet, maybe. Or a landed gentleman. He must be well connected because she recognized his companion as the younger son of the Earl of Rudland. They had been introduced on several occasions, not that that meant anything other than the fact that the Hon. Mr. Bevelstoke could ask her to dance if he was so inclined.

Which he wasn't.

Iris took no offense at this, or at least not much. She was rarely engaged for more than half the dances at any given assembly, and she liked having the opportunity to observe society in full swirl. She often wondered if the stars of the ton actually
noticed
what went on around them. If one was always at the eye of the proverbial storm, could one discern the slant of the rain, feel the bite of the wind?

Maybe she
was
a wallflower. There was no shame in that. Especially not if one enjoyed being a wallflower. Why, some of the—

“
Iris
,” someone hissed.

It was her cousin Sarah, leaning over from the pianoforte with an urgent expression on her face.

Oh, blast, she'd missed her entrance. “Sorry,” Iris muttered under her breath, even though no one could possibly hear her. She never missed her entrances. She didn't care that the rest of the players were so mind-numbingly awful that it didn't really matter if she came in on time or not—it was the principle of the matter.

Someone had to try to play properly.

She attended to her cello for the next few pages of the score, doing her best to block out Daisy, who was wandering all over the stage as she played. When Iris reached the next longish break in the cello part, however, she could not keep herself from looking up.

He
was still watching her.

Did she have something on her dress? In her hair? Without thinking, she reached up to brush her coiffure, half expecting to dislodge a twig.

Nothing.

Now she was just angry. He was trying to rattle her. That could be the only explanation. What a rude boor. And an idiot. Did he really think he could irritate her more than her own sister? It would take an accordion-playing minotaur to top Daisy on the scale of bothersome to seventh circle of hell.

“Iris!” Sarah hissed.

“Errrrgh,” Iris growled. She'd missed her entrance again. Although really, who was Sarah to complain? She'd skipped two entire pages in the second movement.

Iris located the correct spot in the score and leapt back in, relieved to note that they were nearing the end of the concerto. All she had to do was play her final notes, curtsy as if she meant it, and attempt to smile through the strained applause.

Then she could plead a headache and go home and shut her door and read a book and ignore Daisy and pretend that she wasn't going to have to do it all over again next year.

Unless, of course, she got married.

It was the only escape. Every unmarried Smythe-Smith (of the female variety) had to play in the quartet when an opening at her chosen instrument arose, and she stayed there until she walked down a church aisle and claimed her groom.

Only one cousin had managed to marry before she was forced onto the stage. It had been a spectacular convergence of luck and cunning. Frederica Smythe-Smith, now Frederica Plum, had been trained on the violin, just like her older sister Eleanor.

But Eleanor had not “taken,” in the words of Iris's mother. In fact, Eleanor had played in the quartet a record seven years before falling head over heels for a kindly curate who had the amazing good sense to love her with equal abandon. Iris rather liked Eleanor, even if she did fancy herself an accomplished musician. (She was not.)

As for Frederica . . . Eleanor's delayed success on the marriage mart meant that the violinist's chair was filled when her younger sister made her debut. And if Frederica just happened to make certain that she found a husband with all possible haste . . .

It was the stuff of legend. To Iris, at least.

Frederica now lived in the south of India, which Iris suspected was somehow related to her orchestral escape. No one in the family had seen her for years, although every now and then a letter found its way to London, bearing news of heat and spice and the occasional elephant.

Iris hated hot weather, and she wasn't particularly fond of spicy food, but as she sat in her cousins' ballroom, trying to pretend that fifty people weren't watching her make a fool of herself, she couldn't help but think that India sounded rather pleasant.

She had no opinion one way or the other on the elephants.

Maybe she could find herself a husband this year. Truth be told, she hadn't really put in much of an effort the two years she'd been out. But it was so hard to make an effort when she was—and there was no denying it—so unnoticeable.

Except—she looked up, then immediately looked down—by that strange man in the fifth row.
Why
was he watching her?

It made no sense. And Iris
hated
—even more than she hated making a fool of herself—things that made no sense.

I
T WAS CLEAR
to Richard that Iris Smythe-Smith planned to flee the concert the moment she was able. She wasn't obvious about it, but he'd been watching her for what seemed like an hour; by this point, he was practically an expert on the expressions and mannerisms of the reluctant cellist.

He was going to have to act quickly.

“Introduce us,” Richard said to Winston, discreetly motioning toward her with his head.

“Really?”

Richard gave a curt nod.

Winston shrugged, obviously surprised by his friend's interest in the colorless Miss Iris Smythe-Smith. But if he was curious, he did not show it past his initial query. Instead he maneuvered through the crowd in his usual smooth manner. The woman in question might have been standing awkwardly by the door, but her eyes were sharp, taking in the room, its inhabitants, and the interactions thereof.

She was timing her escape. Richard was sure of it.

But she was to be thwarted. Winston came to a halt in front of her before she could make her move. “Miss Smythe-Smith,” he said, everything good cheer and amiability. “What a delight to see you again.”

She bobbed a suspicious curtsy. Clearly she did not have the sort of acquaintance with Winston as to warrant such a warm greeting. “Mr. Bevelstoke,” she murmured.

“May I introduce my good friend, Sir Richard Kenworthy?”

Richard bowed. “It is a pleasure to meet you,” he said.

“And you.”

Her eyes were just as light as he'd imagined, although with only the candlelight to illuminate her face, he could not discern their precise color. Gray, perhaps, or blue, framed by eyelashes so fair they might have been invisible if not for their astonishing length.

“My sister sends her regrets,” Winston said.

“Yes, she usually attends, doesn't she?” Miss Smythe-Smith murmured with the merest hint of a smile. “She's very kind.”

“Oh, I don't know that kindness has anything to do with it,” Winston said genially.

Miss Smythe-Smith raised a pale brow and fixed a stare on Winston. “I rather think kindness has everything to do with it.”

Richard was inclined to agree. He could not imagine why else Winston's sister would subject herself to such a performance more than once. And he rather admired Miss Smythe-Smith's acuity on the matter.

“She sent me in her stead,” Winston went on. “She said it would not do for our family to be unrepresented this year.” He glanced over at Richard. “She was most firm about it.”

“Please do offer her my gratitude,” Miss Smythe-Smith said. “If you'll excuse me, though, I must—”

“May I ask you a question?” Richard interrupted.

She froze, having already begun to twist toward the door. She looked at him with some surprise. So did Winston.

“Of course you may,” she murmured, her eyes not nearly as placid as her tone. She was a gently bred young lady and he a baronet. She could offer no other response, and they both knew it.

“How long have you played the cello?” he blurted out. It was the first question that came to mind, and it was only after it had left his lips that he realized it was rather rude. She knew the quartet was terrible, and she knew that he must feel the same way. To inquire about her training was nothing but cruel. But he'd been under pressure. He couldn't let her leave. Not without some conversation, at least.

“I—” She stammered for a moment, and Richard felt himself floundering inside. He hadn't meant to—Oh, bloody hell.

“It was a lovely performance,” Winston said, looking as if he'd like to kick him.

Richard spoke quickly, eager to rehabilitate himself in her eyes. “What I meant was that you seemed somewhat more proficient than your cousins.”

She blinked several times. Bloody hell, now he'd gone and insulted her cousins, but he supposed better them than her.

He plowed on. “I was seated near to your side of the room, and occasionally I could hear the cello apart from the other instruments.”

“I see,” she said slowly, and perhaps somewhat warily. She did not know what to make of his interest, that much was clear.

“You're quite skilled,” he said.

Winston looked at him in disbelief. Richard could well imagine why. It hadn't been easy to discern the notes of the cello through the din, and to the untrained ear, Iris must have seemed just as dreadful as the rest. For Richard to say otherwise must seem the worst sort of false flattery.

Except that Miss Smythe-Smith knew that she was a better musician than her cousins. He'd seen it in her eyes as she reacted to his statement. “We have all studied since we were quite young,” she said.