Page 63 of Lady Dramatic
“Mrs. Right,” Winsome had said when she gone in, “Serenity was just telling us that Lord Thorpe was very admiring of her bee costume.”
“Oh, aye?” she’d said, noncommittally. She could not understand it. Had the duke allowed Lord Thorpe to continue his wooing? She could not understand what the duke’s plan was. She knew him well enough to know that he would not give over one of his precious daughters to a scoundrel, so why was he allowing this to go on? He would not countenance a philanderer, he’d never been one himself and looked askance at that sort of thing.
As she turned that question over in her mind, Thomas had come in and it was understood that Bishop Porteus was at their doors.
Now she scrambled to pick up the books she’d dropped and acquire an expression of bored disinterest. Or mild surprise. Or gladness. Or righteousness. Or piousness. Anything but guilty,pretending to have dealings with the devil, and being a person who might meddle with a lord’s carriage.
*
“There was alsofound,” Quinn said, as he and Roland sat in the library, “a bag of tools in the garden by the wall. Wrenches of every description and a saw.”
“What could have been the purpose of it, though?” Roland asked. “Was it housebreakers who thought they’d need the stable staff away, but then they’d somehow lost their nerve?”
Quinn shrugged. “Something frightened them off. I was thinking it might have been your brother up to something?”
“Up to what, though?” Roland asked. “If he wanted something he could have walked through the front doors.”
“I cannot say and I imagine it will remain a mystery. I will have a guard hired for the back of the house in case they return.”
“And nothing has been found meddled with? Nothing has been stolen?”
Baxter says not even a harness is missing,” Quinn said. “He also had some choice words for whoever was at the bottom of this. He and the boys had quite the evening searching the Wapping high street in three hackneys for the terrible carriage accident.”
“I will write to our neighbors and inform the nightwatchman on the square. Perhaps we are not the only house targeted. Though, it seems farfetched that this could have been some gang of housebreakers. Whoever it was went to the trouble of seeing that the stables were emptied of people but what were they proposing to do about the staff in the house?”
Quinn nodded. “Also, very odd that the step stool was left behind. Are they very short sorts of criminals? LordLuddington’s butler claims that stool does not belong to his household.”
“And why did they come that way in the first place?” Roland asked. “They must have entered the square by road somewhere. Why go down the wrong mews and then climb over a wall?”
Quinn snorted. “Perhaps they are both short and stupid.”
“I hope they are not stupid enough to return.”
They fell silent for some minutes. Then Quinn said, “Very sorry about the weather not cooperating this morning, by the by. Hopefully, your dog walking venture will be back on for the morrow. Are you inching ever closer to a proposal?”
“I am. I had thought possibly this morning, if I could find the right moment.”
“So I gather all your doubts are at an end?”
“No, they are not. I am determined that she must know the truth. I am not the reserved marquess she has come to know. She deserves to know the truth, and then she came make a decision based on the facts.”
Quinn sighed. “The facts are you are an upstanding gentleman with a care for your fellow man. And fellow creatures. I do not see how she can be opposed to it.”
Roland did not answer, as his friend and butler was always downplaying his affliction. The real facts were, he sometimes rode out to a lonely green at dawn to shout out his feelings and he could be taken down in an instant over the sight of a suffering animal. That really was the worst of it and there were so many opportunities for disaster on an estate. A litter of pups and the smallest did not survive. A horse to be put down. A stalwart and loyal hunting dog of the pack growing too old to keep up and retired, watching longingly as his brothers set off. All of those things very ridiculously stopped him in his tracks.
Children would likely be a thousand times worse. Those were the facts. He did not, at this point in his life, expect muchimprovement in those facts. The question was, would Lady Serenity find she did not care for those facts? Did she look for a stern and unfeeling marquess who was not buffeted by suffering? For if she was, he was the wrong marquess.
If nature would cooperate, he would find out on the morrow, sometime after eleven o’clock while they walked the square’s gardens. If it were to go against him, he would retreat to the estate. If that were to be the outcome, he knew well enough that he could not bear to be in view of the street that had once seen Lady Serenity Nicolet glorying in a snowfall. If that were to be the case, he might never return to the Grosvenor Square house, as it would contain too many painful memories.
And there he went again. Such thoughts as those were far too dramatic for a marquess!
*
Serenity looked towardher father. They’d all risen, but for him, as the bishop was led in. She and her sisters curtsied, as did Mrs. Right, who was looking very suddenly pale. Their aunt, Lady Marchfield, had hurried in behind the bishop and wore a look of supreme satisfaction.
Charlie, looking wide-eyed, said, “The Right Reverend Porteus, Bishop of London, Member of the Privy Council, and…and…”
“Dean of the Chapel Royal,” Lady Marchfield heatedly whispered.
