It is among family that one is first taught to love. The husband hunter may wish to reflect on the lessons she has learned from observing the degree of consideration and forbearance the members of her own family show in their relations with one another. As her acquaintance with an attractive gentleman grows, she will want to observe closely whether his solicitude for her comfort and pleasure is matched by an equal consideration of his sister, his mother, and even his aunt.
—The Husband Hunter’s Guide to London
Charles studied his sister across the breakfast table in the blue morning room. In the country she had enjoyed her food unselfconsciously, always willing to accept treats from their cook, Mrs. Mullen. Active and energetic, she’d never had the sylphlike figure aspired to by London ladies. She had a robust natural prettiness of dark chestnut hair, large light brown eyes, and smooth rosy cheeks. This morning she sat listlessly pulling apart a piece of toast. He had yet to see her take a bite. As he considered it, he recognized the pattern he’d been seeing in her in London with bursts of energy followed by slumps. He did not know how to account for it.
She’d been most at home among the Luxboroughs, playing their ghost game. He had promised to take her to see them off to the country this morning. He hoped that the quarrel with Jowers or the Luxboroughs’ leaving might be the cause of her low spirits and not, as he feared, some secret burden she was unwilling to share for fear of his censure.
He put aside the intelligence report he was reading. After a good bit of analysis, he and Perry had decided that the marchioness had probably been in Paris after the Brussels campaign, and Charles had narrowed his search for her true identity to a group of young women, the daughters of three high-ranking Russian officers who had been in Paris during the occupation after Waterloo. At the fetes and balls and gatherings of the victors, these five women would have mingled with officers from every army of the alliance. And now those women would be the age of the marchioness. He was on the verge of exposing her, but before he did he needed to know the truth about the letter addressed to their old neighbor.
“Octavia, do you still wish to see the Luxboroughs off this morning?”
She glanced up, letting a piece of toast slip from her fingers. “Oh, sorry. I’m poor company this morning, aren’t I?”
He looked pointedly at the pile of toast bits on her plate. “Are you planning to feed the birds in the park?”
She smiled a wan smile. “Just not hungry. What was your question?”
He repeated it.
“Oh, of course.” She picked up the toast again. “Why do you think their games seem livelier than ours?” she asked. “Is it because there are more of them while we are just two? Or is it because they have Miss Swanley? She makes everything cheerful, doesn’t she?”
Octavia was right, he realized. Harriet Swanley, however reserved she was about her own situation, fostered merriment in her charges. In their company her eyes flashed with quick comprehension of a joke. She seemed to understand them all and to have mastered the art of letting them go without letting them come to harm. He, on the other hand, had kept his sister safe by keeping her at Wynford Hall, and now saw only where her eagerness for the notice of the world and ignorance of London might lead to her embarrassment or injury.
He cleared his throat. “Octavia, I must ask you a serious question.”
“Serious?”
“Quite. Have you corresponded with Gresham from London?”
“Gresham?” She said blankly. “I have forgot that name. You think anything could induce me to write to a man who—”
“Who what?” Charles asked, striving for an even tone. It was the first direct hint Octavia had given that anything was amiss between her and her childhood companion.
“Never mind. Have you been looking at my post?” Her eyes flashed. “I’m sure I’ve had no occasion to write to anyone except as politeness requires.”
“I have not touched your post.”
“What then?”
He hesitated, looking at the abandoned eggs on his plate, searching for the right words.
“Have you been spying on me?” she asked. Her eyes declared her outrage. “Surely, I may write to a cousin, to Miss Swanley or the dear marchioness.”
“I’ve not spied on you. Quite by accident I saw a letter addressed to Gresham in a hand so very much like your own that my duty as a brother compels me to put the question to you.”
“Your duty? I am a duty to you? That’s why you fobbed me off on Miss Swanley, isn’t it? So you could go about London in your ridiculous waistcoats flirting with women like the marchioness without the burden of a troublesome sister.”
“You know you are not a burden and much more than a duty, but I...” He could not mistake the wounded look in her eyes, but its cause eluded him. “I must protect you. I will always protect you.”
“But not trust me, apparently. You didn’t want me to come to London. You never invited me before. Now I understand why. Thank you, Charles, for making it so clear to me how I am regarded in your eyes.”
“I thought you safer and happier at home. You enjoy country ways. You and Gresham—”
Octavia stood abruptly. “You are selfish and old and...you don’t understand anything.” She left the room. The door closed sharply, rattling his coffee cup in its saucer.
* * * *
Charles was grateful for the confusion of the Luxboroughs’ departure. Removing a family of seven, their servants, and at least a fraction of their possessions from London to a country home in Hampshire nearly ninety miles away required a coordinated effort on the part of the lady of the house and her staff. Under low pewter clouds, two large coaches, their doors open, steps down, waited to receive passengers while three footmen milled about disposing of cases and boxes under the direction of the Luxborough butler. A groom walked the horses of Lord Luxborough’s sporting vehicle, and in the noise of orders and farewells, horses and one barking dog, no one noticed the silence between Charles and Octavia.
The dog was not helping the proceedings. Cat was the first to see Charles and bounded his way, nearly knocking over a footman straining to secure a box to the roof of the second carriage.
“Jasper,” cried Lady Luxborough, turning from Harriet Swanley, “see to your dog.”
“I can’t hold him, Mama,” the boy replied. Cat sat expectantly at Charles’s feet, a large stick in his mouth, a hopeful look in the deep brown eyes. “Drop it,” Charles said.
Lady Luxborough shot him a grateful glance. “Jasper, put that dog in the yellow room until we are absolutely ready to leave,” she ordered.
“Yes, Mama. Come on, Cat.” The boy led the dog into the house.
Charles turned to see that Octavia had joined her friends on the steps and was studiously avoiding him. Miss Swanley appeared equally oblivious of his arrival, standing in the midst of the commotion, receiving last-minute instructions from Lady Luxborough.
Lady Luxborough, a tall, stately beauty with an air of affectionate command and a keen eye for the flurry of movement around her, appeared to be offering motherly advice to her governess. Charles guessed from the look in Harriet’s eyes that the advice was being met with some resistance until Lady Luxborough said something that made Miss Swanley laugh.
He had come to appreciate the warmth of that playful ripple of sound. Playing the ghost game she’d invented, he had heard it often. He had not thought her free to share a laugh with her employer. He now saw a bond of affection between them. He had been thinking Miss Swanley an unhappy outsider in the Luxborough clan. He knew that in asking her to dance he was asking her to step out of the role she’d played among them for so long. Perhaps it was only his vanity, the vanity of an eligible gentleman, that whispered she was attracted to him.
The leisurely bustle of leave-taking changed in an instant when Lord Luxborough strode from the house with Ned and Jasper in his wake. Luxborough, in his caped greatcoat, whip in hand, paused to greet Charles, gave an assessing glance to the state of preparations, and caught his wife’s eye.
She turned to him at once. Some unspoken understanding passed between them.
“You wanted a timely departure, wife?” Luxborough asked, signaling his groom.
A lift of his wife’s fair brows was the answer.
“Jasper,” his lordship cried, “with me.” Without another word, he turned to mount his curricle.
Jasper let out a loud whoop and tossed his hat in the air, which brought a severe maternal frown. The boy recovered his hat and stood before his mother, who straightened his collar. Under her gaze he promised, “I’ll obey Papa to the letter.”
A moment longer that gaze held him before his mother nodded her dismissal, and the boy scrambled up beside his father. Luxborough set his horses in motion.
Ned turned to his mother with a laugh. “See you in Reading, mother,” he said.
“Are you off, then?” she asked her oldest child.
“You’d best be off, too,” he said as a second groom brought his horse forward. “You want to be ahead of the snow.” He kissed her cheek, nodded to Charles, and mounted his horse.
Laughing, Lady Luxborough pressed a list of instructions in Harriet’s hands, gave those hands a quick squeeze, and summoned her daughters. Pris came at once; Anne and Camille gave Octavia parting embraces and followed along.
Lady Luxborough called to Octavia, “Do enjoy your ball, Miss Davenham. The girls will want to hear your account of it when they return, and do not forget that we give a Twelfth Night party, to which you and your brother are invited.”
At the carriage door, she turned to Charles. “Wynford, can you assist us?”
He stepped forward to hand the ladies into the coach. As she entered, Lady Luxborough said for his ears alone, “If you do not dance with that stubborn girl at Lady Hardwicke’s ball, Wynford, I shall wash my hands of you.”
“I intend to, ma’am,” he said. A footman stepped forward to fold up the steps and close the door.
As the first coach pulled away, two maids and his lordship’s valet climbed into the second coach and a footman sprang up on the box beside the coachman, and it too rattled off, leaving Octavia, Charles, and Harriet standing on the paving stones looking after them. The shift from the noise and animation of the family group to the silence of the empty street was pronounced. He remembered Harriet Swanley saying that for her Christmas was a scene in a lighted window observed from the street. He thought he understood.
Miss Swanley’s questioning gaze met his over Octavia’s head. Something in her eyes lifted his spirits. She was not indifferent. He mouthed the words “not speaking to me.”
Miss Swanley turned to Octavia. “Octavia, will you join me for some chocolate this morning? Your brother can collect you later if you like.”
“Thank you, Miss Swanley.” Octavia turned away with stiff dignity and without a backward glance.
Charles bowed and took his leave. Octavia was safe for the moment, and he had hours of work to do. Later, after he had sifted through pages of intelligence reports for clues to the marchioness’s true identity, he would seek Miss Swanley and confess the way he had mishandled the conversation with his sister. If he had briefly had the upper hand in this game they played, he had somehow lost the advantage. He meant to regain it before the Hardwicke ball.