Page 14 of The Runaway Duchess

“Trouble? What sort of trouble?” The corner of her mouth lifted, the bow of her small, perfect smile loosening. Trouble. That was what entertained Muriel Pendrake. Good. He liked a woman who liked a bit of trouble.

“I didn’t sit for my examinations at Oxford. Instead, I entered Varnham’s service and shipped for the Americas. My mother claimed that her hair turned stark white the day I left, same as happened to Thomas More the night before his execution.”

“And to Marie Antoinette, poor darling.” Her hand floated up to adjust the tulle. He blinked away the discomfiting vision of an enormous bunch of plumes sticking up from behind her head.

Muriel wouldn’t wear feathers, surely. She was sensible of the havoc the feather trade wreaked on wild birds.

“My mother prefers Thomas More,” he said. Something stroked his leg. Not Muriel’s foot? Ah. One of the kitchen cats rubbing against him. He held his upper body still and tried to hook the cat behind his calf and push it back, away from Muriel.

“Someone had better prefer Thomas More.” She was looking at him dubiously. “If not Thomas More’s mother, then your mother. No one is ever Thomas More at a fancy-dress ball, and every year there are a dozen Marie Antoinettes.”

He blinked again. She spent her nights in London at fancy-dress balls? Amid all that feathered millinery?

He responded slowly, following the thread. Thomas More.

“My mother loves More’s idea of Utopia,” he said. “I think it’s the part about digging a trench and making your own island.”

“Digging trenches!” She leaned forward, and he smelled otto of roses, the fragrance overpowering the fug of smoke and grease and fire-warmed flesh. “I’d rather join her in scaling cliffs.”

“She enjoys both. Or did.” He and his siblings had been shocked by her gaunt appearance at Christmas. The lilac shadows beneath her eyes. Many days pain had kept her indoors, she who had always been the picture of health, robust, with high color and windblown hair. “My mother is a geologist, a paleontologist, and a fossilist. Self-taught.” His father was far more well-known in scientific circles. On those occasions when Heddie Traymayne had received credit for her specimens, Digory was usually behind the scenes, applying the necessary pressure. Same, too, with her publications, a slow drip of them, making—every handful of years—a small ripple in some geological journal. Neal knew it rankled his mother, to be considered an amateur, a mere enthusiast. It had rankled his father, too. He had always introduced her as Hedra Traymayne, my wife and fellow scientist.

“When she talks about my sisters, she looks like the cat that got the cream.” Surreptitiously, he pushed the cat again and felt the tiny pricks of its claws through his trousers. Too bad he’d removed his gaiters. “Nessa attended Bedford College, and Jenni went to Cambridge, to Girton.”

He couldn’t keep the pride out of his voice. He’d always looked up to his siblings. Along with his parents, they were the giants of his childhood. Perran, serious with his books of anatomy, his forehead tall and white as though it had been starched with learning. Nessa, kind and jolly, never without her umbrella, which she used exclusively for catching insects. She would pop it open, flip it upside down, and position it under a plant, a plant that—if he was lucky—she’d let him shake until beetles rained down. Then there was Jory, a colorful liar, finding fun in everything and everyone, particularly Perran, whom he’d pip in every subject, just for the laugh. And Jenni, the closest to Neal in age, the ringleader of all their games, a mathematical prodigy and a terror at chess, at whist, really anything at all. A glorious terror, his Jenni.

Muriel wore a strange expression.

“Fancy,” she said. “My mother would not be so delighted if her daughter grew into a bluestocking.”

“No?” He propped his chin on his hand and studied her.

“I am an only child.” She lifted her glass, lowered it without drinking. “And marriage was my mother’s one and only goal for me. It would be different if I were a spinster.”

“Of course,” he said, lifting his own glass. She had fulfilled her first two plant-collecting contracts with her husband. But the third—the third she had fulfilled alone. It must have been difficult for her, returning to China by herself.

She furrowed her brow. “I believe there’s a cat under the table.”

“You don’t say.” He reached out an exploratory foot and brushed her skirts. She swept her legs back.

“This is a Worth gown. It shouldn’t be climbed on by cats.”

“Certainly,” he agreed, sighing. After tonight, her gown was going to reek of peat smoke, even if it wasn’t tattered by Greedy Guts or some other feline denizen of Crawthevyn Inn. He pushed his glass a few inches with his fingertips. He’d drained the ale and needed another. “My sisters, by the way, are not spinsters.”

“Did they have a Season?” She seemed to forget the cat in an instant, leaning forward again, curious.

“Good God, no.” He laughed. “A Season? My parents believe in women’s education. And a Season . . .” He shook his head. “It’s a head-emptying program.”

“Is it?” she asked. He heard sudden frost in her voice. Her eyes narrowed. “That must be what’s wrong with my brain, then, not some passing indisposition, but permanent damage I sustained as a debutante. I had a Season. More than one, in fact.”

Now he’d done it. She was in a state of high dudgeon, lips a thin line.

“I wouldn’t ever suggest that your head, or any woman’s head, had actually been emptied.” He looked to the rafters for help. None forthcoming. “It’s that Society is so much rubbish. Granted, the rituals are somewhat interesting, from an ethnological perspective. If you went to a ballroom thinking of it as a human zoo, you might . . .”

Christ, he was the one now digging a trench. He changed tack.

“I did not grow up in Society,” he said. “Or, my father was a member of the Linnean Society, and the Royal Society, and the Royal Botanic Society, a fair number of societies . . .”

He laughed. She did not.