Mary Balogh - A Secret Affair

“I am not sure that will be necessary,” she said. “I have not seen him dance, but I am convinced he performs superlatively well.”

“You are too kind and too trusting, Duchess,” he said. “He is perhaps more cautious. If he is to dance a pas de deux, after all, he must be given an equal chance to try out his prospective partner, to discover if she is as skilled a dancer as he, to discover whether she will suit his style for a whole Season and not very quickly become tedious.”

Hannah opened her fan with her free hand and fluttered it before her face. The music room was still not crowded, but it already felt stuffy and overhot.

“Tedious, Mr. Huxtable,” she said, “is a word not in her vocabulary.”

“Ah,” he said, “but it is in his.”

Hannah might have been offended or outraged or both. Instead, she was feeling very pleased indeed. The word tedious figured largely in her vocabulary—which meant she had just told yet another lie. Barbara would be upset with her if she could hear. Though it was very fortunate indeed that she could hear no part of this conversation. She would expire from shock. Most gentlemen of Hannah’s acquaintance were tedious. They really ought not to set her on a pedestal and worship her. Pedestals could be lonely, barren places, and worship was just plain ridiculous when one was very mortal indeed.

They had turned to walk up the far side of the room.

“Ah,” she said, looking ahead, “there are the Duke and Duchess of Moreland. Shall we go and speak with them?”

The duke was Mr. Huxtable’s cousin, the one who looked like him. They might easily have passed for brothers, in fact.

“It seems,” he murmured as she drew him in their direction, “that we shall.”

The duke and duchess were very polite to her, very chilly to him. Hannah seemed to recall hearing that there was some sort of estrangement between the cousins. But she caught herself in time before censuring them mentally for quarreling when they were family. That would be rather like the pot calling the kettle black, would it not?

She had been right in her earlier assessment. The duke was the more handsome of the two men. His features were more classically perfect, and there was the surprise of his blue eyes when one expected dark. But Mr. Huxtable was, nevertheless, the more attractive of the two—to her, anyway, which was just as well given the fact that the duke was a married man.

“Mr. Huxtable and I are going to be seated now,” Hannah said before the encounter could become too strained. “I am tired after having been on my feet for so long.”

And they all nodded and smiled at one another, and Mr. Huxtable took her to sit in the middle of the fourth row back from the dais.

“It is not a promising sign,” he said, “when a dancer’s feet ache after she has been on them for a mere hour or so.”

“But who,” she said, closing her fan and resting it on his sleeve for a moment, “is talking about dancing? Why have you quarreled with the Duke of Moreland?”

“At the risk of sounding quite ill-mannered, Duchess,” he said, “I am compelled to inform you that it is none of your business.”

She sighed.

“Oh, but it is,” she said. “Or will be. I will absolutely insist upon knowing everything there is to know about you.”

He turned his very dark eyes upon her.

“Assuming,” he said, “that after the audition you will be offered the part?”

She tapped the fan on his sleeve.

“After the audition, Mr. Huxtable,” she said, “you will be begging me to take the part. But you know that already. Just as I know that in your case an audition is absolutely unnecessary. I hope you are a man of great mystery, with more secrets to be revealed than just the cause of your quarrel with your cousin. Oh, I do hope you are. But I fervently believe I will not be disappointed.”

“You, on the other hand, Duchess,” he said, “are very much an open book, are you not? You will have to think of other ways to hold my interest than unfolding all your nonexistent secrets.”

She half smiled up at him from beneath her lashes.

“The room is starting to fill,” she said. “I believe we can expect this concert to begin within the next fifteen minutes or so. Yet we have not talked about anything of any significance yet, Mr. Huxtable. What is your opinion of the weather we have been having lately? Too good too early, do you suppose? We will suffer for this later in the summer? That is the accepted wisdom among many, is it not? What do you think?”

“I think, Duchess,” he said, “that too hot too early is not something that alarms you. You are doubtless of an optimistic nature and expect that there will be more heat to come as the spring turns to summer.”

“I really must be an open book,” she said. “You read me so well. And you must not tell me, Mr. Huxtable, that you are the sort of man who prefers a cool spring in the hope that it will build to a moderate degree of heat during the summer. You are Greek.”

“Half Greek,” he said, “and half not. I will leave you to work out which half is which.”

The chairs in front of them and behind and beside them filled up, and conversation became general among the audience until Lord Heaton stepped up onto the dais and a hush fell in anticipation of the concert.

Hannah let her fan fall on her wrist and rested the fingers of one hand lightly on Mr. Huxtable’s sleeve.

That had all been very intriguing. Having made her point on Bond Street and at the Merriwether ball, she had intended to take one step forward this evening before taking it back the next time she saw him. She had been in no real hurry. The preliminaries could surely be as exciting as the game itself.

But he had refused to allow her to play the game her way. And instead of one small step, she felt as if they had dashed forward at least a mile tonight. She felt almost breathless.

And quite humming with anticipation.

She could not allow him the last word, though. Not this early in their connection. Not ever, in fact.

“I see that Mr. Minter arrived late,” she said when the intermission began an hour later and the audience rose to go in search of wine and conversation. “I must go along and scold him. He begged to sit by me this evening, and I took pity on him and agreed. I suppose I had better sit beside him for the rest of the concert. He is quite alone, poor man.”

“Yes,” Mr. Huxtable said, speaking low against her ear. “I suppose you had better go, Duchess. I might conclude that you were being too forward if you remained.”

She tapped his arm one more time with her fan and bore down upon the unsuspecting Mr. Minter, who probably had not even known she was coming here this evening.

CONSTANTINE’S SPRING MISTRESSES—Monty had once dubbed them that—were selected almost exclusively from the ranks of society’s widows. It was a personal rule of his never to visit a brothel and never to employ either a courtesan or an actress. Or, of course, to choose a married lady, though there was a surprising number of them who indicated their availability. Or an unmarried lady—he was after a mistress, not a wife.

Many widows, he had always found, were in no great hurry to marry again. Though most of them did remarry eventually, they were eager enough to spend a few years enjoying their freedom and the sensual pleasure of a casual amour.

He almost always took a lover for the Season. Rarely more than one, and never more than one at a time. His lovers were usually lovely women and younger than he, though he never thought of beauty or age as a necessary qualification. He favored women who were discreet and poised and elegant and intelligent enough to converse on a wide variety of interesting topics. He looked for a certain degree of companionship as well as sexual satisfaction in a lover.

And this year?

He was standing on the wide cobbled terrace behind the Fonteyn mansion in Richmond—though behind and before were relative terms in this case. The front of the house faced toward the road and any approaching carriages and was really quite unremarkable. The back of the house, on the other hand, overlooked the River Thames, and between it and the river there were the terrace, the wide, flower-bedecked steps, the sloping lawn below them, bordered on one side by a rose arbor and a small orchard and on the other by a row of greenhouses, and another terrace, this one paved, alongside the river. A small jetty stretched into the water for the convenience of anyone desirous of taking out one of the boats that bobbed on either side of it.

And at the moment the back of the house, which might easily claim to be the real front, was bathed in sunshine and a heat that was tempered by an underlying coolness, as one might expect this early in the year. It was all very picturesque and very pleasant indeed.

It had been a bold move on the part of the Fonteyns to host a garden party this early in the Season, long before anyone else was prepared to take such a chance with the weather. Of course, there was a spacious ballroom inside the house as well as a large drawing room and doubtless other rooms large enough to accommodate all the guests in the event of chill weather or rain.

This year there was a new widow in town, and she was quite blatantly and aggressively offering herself to him as this Season’s mistress. If one discounted her very obvious ruse of appearing hard to get, that was. He really had been amused by her behavior on Bond Street and at the Merriwether ball.