Page 28 of Not Just Any Earl
“He never asked anyone, the blackguard, and you were right to scold him for it. But never mind Lord Boggs and Lord Cross. Gentlemen are tiresome creatures, are they not?” Lady Fosberry peered out the window as the carriage turned and made its way up the drive toward the house. “Now, Juliet, I advise you to retire to your bedchamber and rest this afternoon, before Lady Emory’s ball this evening,”
“Yes, my lady,” Juliet said, meekly enough.
The carriage came to a stop and the driver appeared at the door and handed Lady Fosberry out. Emmeline slid across the bench to follow her, but before she could accept the coachman’s hand, Juliet wrapped her fingers around Emmeline’s wrist. “A word, Emmeline?”
Emmeline fell back against the seat, her heart suddenly racing at the uncharacteristically serious expression on her sister’s face.
Juliet waited until Lady Fosberry was out of sight before she turned to Emmeline, then she paused, as if choosing her words carefully. Finally, she asked, “Is there something you wish to tell me, Emmeline?”
Something? There were a hundred things, each more worrying than the last. Emmeline’s kiss with Lord Melrose, the unexpected emotions that had overwhelmed her since that kiss, the dozens of lies she’d told, and those she had yet to tell—lies that threatened to trap her as surely as a fly in a spider’s web, as lies always did.
Emmeline’s mouth opened, all of these confessions rushing to her lips, but only one word emerged. “No?”
Juliet gazed at her for a long time while Emmeline squirmed under that penetrating stare. “Are you quite sure?”
“Er…yes?”
“Because it occurs to me you were wearing a lavender gown the night of Lady Fosberry’s—”
“No, I wasn’t. It was amethyst.”
“Amethyst,” Juliet repeated flatly.
“Yes, and it wasn’t a ball gown at all, but a day dress.”
“I see. You happened to be wearing an amethyst dress on the same evening you mysteriously disappeared from our bedchamber, and Lord Melrose is said to have been cavorting with a young lady in a similar gown at that very same time, and when you returned you were flushed and breathless, and the two things having nothing to do with each other?”
Emmeline swallowed. “I wouldn’t say cavorting, exactly—”
“Now Lord Melrose has just happened to come upon you at Floris, and invited you to visit Lady Finchley’s rose garden, all while he was staring at you the way Tilly stares at sugarplums? You’d have me believe all of this is merely a coincidence?”
Lord Melrose, staring at her? Surely not.
“I…” Emmeline began, then fell silent.
She longed to confide everything to Juliet—to lay her head on Juliet’s shoulder and let the truth spill out of her until she’d exhausted herself, but she held her tongue, even as her throat ached with the effort to keep from blurting out the truth.
If Juliet discovered Emmeline was indeed the Lady in Lavender, it would be the death knell to any possibility of a marriage between Juliet and Lord Melrose, and Emmeline didn’t intend to let that happen.
Emmeline and Phee had been wrong about Lord Melrose’s pattern. He’d proven to be far more adventurous than either of them had anticipated, and Phee’s original reasons for pairing him with Juliet were as sound as they’d ever been.
Emmeline may have managed to make a dreadful mess of things, but a few ill-advised kisses in a dark library didn’t make Juliet and Lord Melrose any less suited to each other than they’d been before.
It wasn’t just that Juliet was uncommonly pretty, and Lord Melrose uncommonly handsome. If matchmaking were simply a matter of pairing the handsomest gentleman with the prettiest lady, there’d be no challenge to it at all. After all, Lady Christine was a fair, delicate beauty, and she was still a poor match for Lord Melrose.
Phee liked to talk about patterns and number sequences, but matchmaking wasn’t just about mathematics. It was human psychology as well, and statistics and philosophy. Even zoology was part of it, when one considered the ways in which human behavior mimicked animal behavior, and anthropology too, given the evolution of norms regarding mating and marriage as civilization advanced.
And of course, there was botany.
Matchmaking was no different than choosing an ideally matched pair of roses, and breeding or grafting them together to create a perfect bloom. Indeed, the two things were so remarkably alike, she wondered why everyone didn’t see it, but then not many people saw things the way she did.
It was about character, temperament, intellect, instinct and…oh, very well, the fact that both Juliet and Lord Melrose were exceedingly beautiful didn’t hurt matters. They were each perfect in their own way, but they’d be even more stunning together than they ever could be apart, just as a perfect hybrid was.
Still, there was one thing that concerned Emmeline about this endeavor, and that was that even attempting a match between them went against every conceivable scientific principle.
An immutable rule of experimentation was that the greatest risks yielded the greatest reward. The most adventurous scientist didn’t shy away from a challenge—not if the reward was great enough—but the wisest among them were cautious with their research and attempted to achieve a balance between risk and reward in their experimentation.
There was no greater reward this season than Lord Melrose, and no greater risk than stealing the Nonesuch from the Incomparable in order to wed him to one of the infamous Templetons, especially with the Lady in Lavender scandal hanging over them like the sword of Damocles.
