For dinner, with the future Mrs. Somerset in attendance, I need something more formal. I suggest one of your twelve-course dinners.
Your servant,
Stuart Somerset
Dear Sir,
Certainly. I will make sure that the future Mrs. Somerset is suitably impressed.
Many congratulations on your upcoming marriage.
Yours humbly,
Verity Durant
In accordance with the decision to delay the announcement of his engagement, Stuart had said nothing to Marsden as he dispatched his secretary to escort Lizzy and her father from London to Fairleigh Park. Nor anything to Mrs. Boyce or Mr. Prior.
He could have accomplished his objective with Madame Durant—a fancy dinner—without any mention of the future Mrs. Somerset either. And yet he’d wielded that name the way a Transylvanian caught abroad at night might brandish a braid of garlic.
Perhaps, in the end, it had only been a reminder to himself—that he was a betrothed man. That inexplicable surges of lust and curiosity where the cook was concerned were quite beneath him, however notorious and sexually rapacious the cook.
A reminder he shouldn’t have needed in the first place.
Lizzy knitted. She would miss this week’s meeting of the Ladies’ Charitable Knitting Circle, but she still hoped to finish the muffler she’d started the previous week, before she was to leave for Bertram Somerset’s funeral. It wasn’t to be. The doorbell rang, signaling the arrival of Mr. Somerset’s secretary. She grimaced, rolled up the muffler and the needles, and shoved everything into her knitting bag.
She’d turned on only the table lamp closest to her. In the drained light of a sunless November day, most of the drawing room was sunk in shadows. Before she could do something about it, the door opened, her butler announced Mr. William Marsden, and in came a man who could very well serve as the additional source of illumination the room needed.
Mr. Marsden was quite possibly the most gorgeous man alive—certainly Lizzy had met no one more beautiful. He had a thick head of gleaming golden curls, perfect eyebrows, long, expressive eyes, a strong nose, and lips that were really too sumptuous for a man, but somehow still managed to look chiseled and interesting on his face. And Lizzy loathed him with a passion that other women reserved for spiders that had crawled up their stockings.
She hated the showy and complicated knot of his necktie, the too fashionably snug cut of his coat, the sheen and luster of his hair that couldn’t have been achieved without regular applications of lemon juice and egg yolk. She deplored that her dear Stuart trusted and depended on this peacock to the extent that he did. And it made her grit her teeth that as Mr. Marsden was no mere plebeian, but a son of the seventh Earl of Wyden, she couldn’t very well ignore him and leave him waiting in the vestibule, but must receive him in her drawing room.
“Mr. Marsden, how good of you to come. Thank you for taking the trouble,” she said, her words a winter’s worth of ice under a thin gloss of politesse. She hadn’t wanted Mr. Somerset’s secretary to travel with them, but her father had been very much in favor of the idea.
“It’s my honor and my pleasure,” said Mr. Marsden, smiling slightly.
In her more lucid moments, she was somewhat alarmed at the intensity of her antipathy, given that Mr. Marsden had never done her any harm, nor even uttered an objectionable word in her presence. But then Mr. Marsden would smile, and her lucidity would find itself out in the back settlements of Australia.
Because it was a horrid smile, all filth and smut beneath a varnish of courtesy: a smile that said he knew something intolerable about her. And since it so happened that there was a wide swath of Lizzy’s recent past that could not be known without getting her banished from Society, her loathing was contaminated with fear—and an almost nauseous awareness that she never found him more handsome than when he had on one of those reviled smiles.
Then his smile went away, and he looked at her with something that would have passed for genuine concern on the part of any other man. But on him, it only made her even more wary.
“Are you well, Miss Bessler?” he asked.
The quiet intimacy of his tone disconcerted her entirely. Though they’d been introduced two years ago, it had been shortly before she’d shut herself off from the outside world for the next seventeen months. Their acquaintance was of the most incidental variety and she saw no reason for him to care whether she was well.
Her father came into the drawing room. Mr. Marsden turned and greeted him. The men proclaimed their mutual pleasure at seeing each other again, while Lizzy silently breathed a thanksgiving that she was no longer alone with Mr. Marsden.
“Shall we get going, then, Papa?” she said brightly.